Exclusive: Bankaholic sells to Bankrate for 15 million and no one noticed;/
All day on Techcrunch, Techmeme and other tech sites there is a good coverage and some not so good about start-ups that are doomed for failure. Surprisingly, they all missed the story of my resident in the dorms from Berkeley, Johns Wu, who by himself created bankaholic.com and sold it to bankrate.com (a public company) for $15,000,000. That’s a lot of 0′s!
What’s the moral of the story?
Focus. Johns started out just doing cd rates and became the #1 term for it on google. Then he expanded to other banking categories.
Relevance. There are 1,000s of personal finance sites. Most of the people just consume some information. You go to his site to find deals and sign up for them. That’s the point.
Monetize. Just like what my old company Mint.com is doing, Johns picked a lucrative category where clicks will pay out $50+.
Bottom line: Next time we go out for burritos, Johns is going to treat;)
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Noah Kagan wrote Exclusive: Bankaholic sells to Bankrate for 15 million and no one noticed;/ on September 26th, 2008 and there are 25 comments. There will be one more after you add yours, though. Read more posts by Noah Kagan.
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25 Responses to “Exclusive: Bankaholic sells to Bankrate for 15 million and no one noticed;/”
September 26th, 2008
1:48 pm
I totally didn’t know Johns did that – crazy! good for him!
September 26th, 2008
2:55 pm
That seems like a lot to pay for the #1 result on Google.
September 26th, 2008
4:10 pm
Go Bears
September 26th, 2008
4:35 pm
johns is a bad ass. he is the #1 result for many key terms in google.
September 26th, 2008
6:16 pm
wow, that’s an interesting idea. I never came across the site until now.
September 26th, 2008
6:22 pm
And his first name is plural!
September 26th, 2008
9:31 pm
Congrats to him! It’s great news for my team.
We run a site in a similar space. http://www.mybanktracker.com
Hopefully we’ll give bankaholic a run for the top keywords!
September 27th, 2008
12:08 pm
WUut! – we should change the term in his honor. Congrats to him!
September 27th, 2008
4:27 pm
Congrats to him. Would love to hear more about his story.
I feel like there is a hole in tech blogs that cover smaller acquisitions such as this. I would love to read about them because those stories are sometimes better then the huge hit stories. My bet is that the information is harder to get to.
September 28th, 2008
3:11 pm
Congrats to the founder of Bankaholic.com. In short period of time, he was able to carve out a niche and build a successful company that delivered value to the consumer and utlimately helped bankrate expand its presence on the online, mortgage media space.
As the Founder of ARG Interactive, (www.arginteractive.com) a leading provider of on demand, mortgage crm and marketing automation solutions I enjoy reading about other success stories in this space.
September 29th, 2008
8:04 am
I don’t know about that jjfresh…..
September 29th, 2008
10:46 am
[...] Noah Kagan [...]
October 2nd, 2008
2:02 pm
Impressive! I wonder why Johns sold so early.
October 3rd, 2008
11:23 am
[...] so it doesn’t really add up, but what’s behind Mr. Wu’s success? OkDork.com makes some very interesting points. Apparently, the blog started out doing only cd rates, quickly gaining the top spot in Google [...]
October 3rd, 2008
8:02 pm
Mashable seems it noticed. Also http://www.thenextweb.org will notice very soon! (I gave you credit, Noah).
October 3rd, 2008
9:37 pm
silly sites sell for big money all the time, this sold for 8 figures in a few months
http://www.yournobody.com/
and its rival the diirty sold for a few million as well for just bashing people on the internet, who says the dotcome boom isnt back
October 4th, 2008
6:49 am
[...] Noah Kagan, lives in the same Berkeley dorm as Johns, gives us the moral of this story in a post titled “Bankaholic sells to Bankrate for 15 million and no one noticed”. Focus. Johns started out just doing Credit Card rates and became the #1 term for it on Google. Then he expanded to other banking categories. Relevance. There are 1,000s of personal finance sites. Most of the people just consume some information. You go to his site to find deals and sign up for them. That’s the point. Monetize. Johns picked a lucrative category where clicks will pay out $50+. [...]
October 6th, 2008
10:28 am
Wow! Great sale.
October 7th, 2008
5:13 pm
This is nothing more than viral marketing, gang.
Where’s Johns Wu?
His financial blog just sold for $15 Million!
Story:
http://bankaholic.blogspot.com/
October 7th, 2008
7:42 pm
That’s one good niche to be in. Kudos to him for finding it.
October 11th, 2008
8:14 pm
Bankaholic is a great site, provides constant strong content, with great site architecture, nice history, strong partners. Kudos…it is not just smart, it is a lot of tedious, hard freaking work.
October 11th, 2008
9:55 pm
wow, there sure are a lot of 0′s in there.
I never thought that such unheard of sites would have this much of a selling potential. Anyways, congrats to John!
October 12th, 2008
7:46 am
rates,
totally agree. it always seems much easier when it’s over…
November 19th, 2008
10:50 am
Congratulations Bankaholic. You deserve it for all the hardwork you have put on your site.
March 25th, 2009
9:42 pm
I agree with you 100%. Johns FOCUSED and achieved a lot of result for it. Most people don’t focus; instead they work on a gazillion things and don’t put enough efforts into all of them. I am scratching my head and wondering when and how I too will be as focused as Johns. I know if I do, I can achieve something like this too, especially we all CAN, if we will but focus and channel our energies into one or just a few things. Imagine working all day and night for 2 years on JUST ONE BLOG. It surely will get top rankings!
Say something witty