How much does platform affect value?

[bribgrist]

Using my new-account lockdown to get all my noob questions out.

For anyone building on non-Wordpress platforms or rolling your own CMS's and the like: has your choice of platform directly raised or lowered your site's valuation?

I'm currently building a couple sites in Laravel with a simple, custom CMS built around Gutenberg. I chose this because I like the control it affords me in the long run - there's little overhead in adding custom features later on. However, I'd like to have a reasonable exit plan for these sites if I find I can't or won't build them to the moon. In this case, using Gutenberg does make migrating easy, but that's still extra work.

I guess the TLDR here is: Do buyers tend to immediately shy away from things that aren't Wordpress?

 

[Stones]

I asked a similar question to one of the chaps who made a 7 figure exit recently and the general response was that it doesn't matter and the investors are only looking at the numbers. But maybe others can row in.

 

[bribgrist]

Yeah, my gut feeling is that after a certain valuation threshold it doesn't matter, as the possible developer work can be justified. But I can't shake the feeling that ~10-20k USD sites will see this as a factor.

 

[Ryuzaki]

I think you're right. Most small time players and buyers have little clue about coding or development or migrations. They couldn't tell you what an HTML or a CSS is, let alone one of them there PHPs. They do one-click Wordpress installs in cPanel, you know.

I agree that buyers of big sites don't care that much and will hire or already have access to people that can manage something as common as Laravel.

At the same time, if a site can sell for $10k-20k, we're talking about a $300-600 profit stream. Selling it isn't a life changing amount of money and holding it is a much lower risk. So if they cap out around $500 a month, there's no real harm in just holding them and milking it for as long as possible.

I personally build on Wordpress simply for this reason of reducing friction during a sale. I do a whole bunch of organization at the start and bookkeeping and everything as it goes on so when it comes time to liquidate I just pass over a "master file", database, and files, and push the domain over. Definitely worth thinking about the liquidation event at the very beginning and planning everything towards improving the valuation and probability of a sale.

 

[wooTang]

Choice of platform/CMS (and by extension hosting/CDN) can impact your metrics in a few ways. One I can think of is how Wix sites generally suffer from bad load times among other issues, and some people have instant improvements switching to anything else.

edit: to answer your actual question, Wordpress is a huge player but far from the only accepted platform, thankfully!

 

[Cash Builder]

I sold my first site back in 2017 and I custom coded it myself with just HTML, CSS and PHP. Found a buyer pretty quickly, but the funny thing is he didn’t realise it wasn’t Wordpress until after the sale.

I sent all the files over and he was like “where’s the database?” It was only then he twigged that it wasn’t Wordpress.

It wasn’t a big problem, I just spent a couple of hours showing him the basics, how to upload a new article, how to add images etc and he was fine with it.

Your pool of buyers maybe smaller with a non-Wordpress site, but I’m pretty sure you will always find a buyer for a site that is making money, regardless of the platform.

 

[bribgrist]

I sold my first site back in 2017 and I custom coded it myself with just HTML, CSS and PHP. Found a buyer pretty quickly, but the funny thing is he didn’t realise it wasn’t Wordpress until after the sale.

I sent all the files over and he was like “where’s the database?” It was only then he twigged that it wasn’t Wordpress.

It wasn’t a big problem, I just spent a couple of hours showing him the basics, how to upload a new article, how to add images etc and he was fine with it.

Your pool of buyers maybe smaller with a non-Wordpress site, but I’m pretty sure you will always find a buyer for a site that is making money, regardless of the platform.

I've run this scenario through my head - nice to know it went better for you than my pretend scenarios went, lol. Did you have an admin interface built in? Or anything "extra" that you think helped smooth things over?

 

[secretagentdad]

I don't think cms effects value in any super measurable way.
That said if you're dumping organic traffic sites for cashflow multipliers I could see it helping your liquidity options a small amount. Outside of quick flipping seo info sites as a business model I don't see any real value. Most buyers outside of that subniche are savy enough to handle anything thats not obtuse for its own sake.

If you want to get into strategic valuations home cooking is an important differentiation point. But, only when its done in a value enhancing way. If you do real research and development to improve something for a strategic reason. It can be the difference between a tech valuation and some borker low baller cashflow offer. Don't be different for the sake of being different with out doing your home work. That's just brain dead. If you're not going to be able to explain how your customization was an enhancement that gave you a real advantage to someone savvy in the industry you're probably better off with a popular solution.

Also - Word of warning on laravel. Its brilliant until it falls apart and nobody can work on it because of some weird limitations inherant to its architecture that arnt super obvious. Laravel projects eventually end up with nasty onboarding barriers making developer hand offs and recodes harder than they should be.

I've got a kinda popular saas thats needed to be rebuilt for years but it keeps causing existential crises in developers. The technical debt is totally our fault but laravel absolutely compounded the problem.
Been watching it slowly burn down from lack of updates. Hopefully the next attempt moving to something new is successful.

All that said, the project got launched faster because of laravel. There are real benefits and the frame work is contextually brilliant. If you're looking to get something out fast that doesnt need to do anything tricky or get extended later it can be a really good choice both for initial set up and maintenance.

 

[Cash Builder]

I've run this scenario through my head - nice to know it went better for you than my pretend scenarios went, lol. Did you have an admin interface built in? Or anything "extra" that you think helped smooth things over?

Not at all, it was purely HTML/CSS files uploaded to the server through FTP. I tried to explain everything the best I could, but then a week after the sale the site was converted to Wordpress anyway.

I always remember that site was blazing fast. It was back in the days before I used to worry about page speed, but it would have scored 100's across the board. When I have time I might build another one like that to see just how much page speed affects rankings.

 

[bribgrist]

I don't think cms effects value in any super measurable way.
That said if you're dumping organic traffic sites for cashflow multipliers I could see it helping your liquidity options a small amount. Outside of quick flipping seo info sites as a business model I don't see any real value. Most buyers outside of that subniche are savy enough to handle anything thats not obtuse for its own sake.

If you want to get into strategic valuations home cooking is an important differentiation point. But, only when its done in a value enhancing way. If you do real research and development to improve something for a strategic reason. It can be the difference between a tech valuation and some borker low baller cashflow offer. Don't be different for the sake of being different with out doing your home work. That's just brain dead. If you're not going to be able to explain how your customization was an enhancement that gave you a real advantage to someone savvy in the industry you're probably better off with a popular solution.


Also - Word of warning on laravel. Its brilliant until it falls apart and nobody can work on it because of some weird limitations inherant to its architecture that arnt super obvious. Laravel projects eventually end up with nasty onboarding barriers making developer hand offs and recodes harder than they should be.

I've got a kinda popular saas thats needed to be rebuilt for years but it keeps causing existential crises in developers. The technical debt is totally our fault but laravel absolutely compounded the problem.
Been watching it slowly burn down from lack of updates. Hopefully the next attempt moving to something new is successful.

All that said, the project got launched faster because of laravel. There are real benefits and the frame work is contextually brilliant. If you're looking to get something out fast that doesnt need to do anything tricky or get extended later it can be a really good choice both for initial set up and maintenance.

I chose Laravel so I could fine-tune the balance between flexibility and component reuse in my projects. If adding more complex functionality makes sense, I'd like to be well-poised to do so.

Quick flipping was an attractive first thought though, and definitely played into my decision for Laravel. With common functionality and UI elements split out into blade components and composer packages, I can generate a small custom site in about an hour. It may not be my main goal now, but giving that option up would be difficult.

Your experience with your saas sounds really interesting, though. I've often advocated for no-framework apps I've worked on to switch to a framework to fix that very problem. Do you mean onboarding devs with no prior Laravel experience?

 

[secretagentdad]

I chose Laravel so I could fine-tune the balance between flexibility and component reuse in my projects. If adding more complex functionality makes sense, I'd like to be well-poised to do so.

Quick flipping was an attractive first thought though, and definitely played into my decision for Laravel. With common functionality and UI elements split out into blade components and composer packages, I can generate a small custom site in about an hour. It may not be my main goal now, but giving that option up would be difficult.

Your experience with your saas sounds really interesting, though. I've often advocated for no-framework apps I've worked on to switch to a framework to fix that very problem. Do you mean onboarding devs with no prior Laravel experience?

A lot of its we were noobs with big heads. It wasn't so much laravel itself that was the problem as architectural decisions driven by its ui elements and common functionality. Probably wouldn't have been an issue if we were a little more experienced.

It was for sure helpful for getting a product shipped while not really having much of a clue or a real front end team. Just turned out to not be as extendable as you would expect in theory. It might be a bit of personal failings projection but we've stopped using it in products that are expected to be team based.

Another thing to note is our more complex functionality consists of sorting / filtering extremely large lists in browsers so its a bit of an edge case.

I think its great for quick flipping or one man army projects. Vastly superior to wordpress especially if you like adding creative functionality to your sites. You can always make a basic admin panel if you have a less then savy buyer you want to flip to.

 

[bribgrist]

A lot of its we were noobs with big heads. It wasn't so much laravel itself that was the problem as architectural decisions driven by its ui elements and common functionality. Probably wouldn't have been an issue if we were a little more experienced. Frameworks have trade offs and they incentives decisions.

It was for sure helpful for getting a product shipped while not really having much of a clue or a real front end team. Just turned out to not be as extendable as you would expect in theory. It might be a bit of personal failings projection but we've stopped using it in products that are expected to be team based.

Another thing to note is our more complex functionality consists of sorting / filtering extremely large lists in browsers so its a bit of an edge case.

I think its great for quick flipping or one man army projects. Vastly superior to wordpress especially if you like adding creative functionality to your sites.

That's what I figured. I've personally written that hacky bullshit UI code in template engines as a junior dev. Veeeery quick way to run into trouble lol. There are some really great Collections libraries out there (loophp/collection comes to mind) that can help with that list filtering if you're doing it on the backend.

 

[Vault/Scale]

CMS affects value based on the complexity of your website. Your custom build might have unforeseen scaling issues a potential acquirer might be wary of. Everyone has seen at least one dumpster fire of outsourced coding.

You also might turn off "lifestyle buyers" who are looking for something turn key built on a platform that is widely supported. Id think twice about buying a custom coded blog...but I probably also wouldn't buy a SaaS built on WordPress. I'd expect that to all be custom.