Joe Magnotti

How does Joe make money online?

Joe is co-founder and CEO of Empire Flippers, a marketplace for people to buy and sell online businesses (mainly websites).

They basically help facilitate the transfer of ownership and collect a 2-15% commission for doing so.

They also charge sellers a $97-297 listing fee.

As an example, let’s say you have a website that you want to sell. You could go to Empire Flippers and they’d help you figure out the valuation.
Let’s say your site was valued at $500,000.
As a first-time seller you’d pay Empire Flippers $297 to list the site on their marketplace.
If someone agrees to buy the site via Empire Flippers, you’d receive 85% of the sale price – that’d be $425k if the site was sold for $500k – and Empire Flippers would keep $75,000 as their commission.

I have no idea how much Joe pays himself out of the company, but Empire Flippers share quarterly reports detailing their revenue and earnings.

As of this writing, their most recent quarterly report was for Q1 2020.

They reported:

Those numbers were down quite a bit from the previous quarter, due in large part to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Empire Flippers also notes in that report that they have 69 total team members.

Joe has a background in engineering and spent the 90’s at a startup in San Francisco before moving onto the mortgage business.

Gregory Elfrink, the director of marketing at Empire Flippers, details the company’s origins in a 2019 Starter Story interview.

In brief:

“We originally started out as an outsourcing company in the Philippines that helped businesses in the USA with various administrative tasks.”
They lost some clients and started building their own niche sites to keep the team busy.
They sold some of those sites and blogged about the whole process.
Other site owners started asking for help selling their own sites.
“Soon we rebranded completely to Empire Flippers and went into the brokering field full time.”

According to our framework Empire Flippers is a marketplace business and would be considered a Level 5 online business.