#14: SafariPetShop.com

One of my friends owns a pet shop.  I offered to find a way to partner with him on a website, and this was a neat opportunity.  I created SafariPetShop.com.  At first I created safaripetSTORE.com, forgetting to check google trends, which yelled that “Pet Shop” is way more popular than “Pet Store.” I know, if you drill it down to the US, the leap isn’t so great; but it justifies buying both domains and redirecting one.  This business really is exciting for many reasons.  First off, I have a partner.  We haven’t formalized an equation yet, but basically I pitched the following simple formula: I get 1) 100% of the profit from 2) the first visit of 3) any walk-in traffic who comes from the site; PLUS 100% of the profit directly from the site itself.  So it requires no investment on his part, it just gives me a piece of the value I create and nothing else.  So if nothing ever happens, no one is out anything, and if someone comes in to buy a dog, I get $100-ish, and John gets all the dog food and supplies revenue ad infinitum.  Yes, this measurement is both subjective and requires that I trust him to know where his foot traffic comes from and to hunt me down and pay me; which is why it may not be extensively duplicable.  But I trust him.

Really, designing any business a website in exchange for our owning the website seems really win/win, and itself a business.  The site is another Wordpress install, this time with a plugin called GetWIKI that will scrape open-sourced articles about pets into categories, and an aStore syndicating a catalog of pet related products.  So the next exciting part of this business: it has a storefront!  I used an Amazon aStore, and you have to click onto the site to see it.  It’s not elegant and I didn’t take the time to embed it correctly–it’s just there, but I eyeball matched the colors, and it has hundreds of products.  So if someone finds my site and buys a $5 bottle of shampoo, I get $0.25.  Probably John’s wife will keep the site updated, with new articles, new products to the aStore, etc.

So there are two forms of revenue driving this site, an auto-evolving eCommerce store, a partnership with a walk-in store, a simple and non-Colin-centric content base on the website–it should go beautifully and definitely evolves my formula–I mean, I at this point assume every website I do from now on will involve an aStore or something similar.

I also spent some time valuating RAMPrint this week for multiple buyers (not just for the website, but for the parent company), which is the real reason I put up PrintShopForSale.net.