Flippa.com

As if one market-leading spin-off from a business isn’t enough, Mark Harbottle, Matt Mickiewicz and Dave Slutzkin are well on their way to creating a memorable double with Flippa.com.

Harbottle and Mickiewicz are vaunted within the tech start-up scene for 99designs, the crowdsourced design venture that they launched from their existing business, SitePoint.

Understandably, Flippa.com, a marketplace for buying and selling websites, has been a little overshadowed in comparison, but the achievements of this fellow SitePoint spawn shouldn’t be looked down upon.

“SitePoint users were buying and selling websites on the SitePoint forums in an unstructured way,” explains Slutzkin. “We solved that problem by creating a structured marketplace around it, which gives a much safer and more professional experience for buyers and sellers.”

“It’s the web’s biggest marketplace for buying and selling websites because it’s by far the best. This is no mean feat in a competitive space, but we’ve managed it by having a laser focus on what our users want and what’s best for them.”

A few months after launching, Flippa started to grow rapidly, providing plenty of challenges for the founders, requiring them to take on staff in various areas, such as development and customer support.

Slutzkin says this process provided a great lesson on how to interview and hire quickly and effectively.

“Hiring is still hard work, let’s make no bones about it, but we’re a lot better at it than we ever have been,” he says. “It takes time to calibrate your judgement, but once you’ve done it then you can find great people in the least obvious of places – I’ve hired people I met at meet-ups, for instance.”