Friday, April 15th, 2022
I bought back one of my original tiny projects One Item Store.
One Item Store is a tiny online store builder that I created way back in June 2020.
A few months later in December 2020, I sold it for $5300.
Since then, the previous owner has been busy with other endeavours, and One Item Store never really got much love.
One year later, In December 2021, I was approached asking if I wanted to buy it back. But, I declined because I was very busy with Paper Website and other projects.
In April 2022 I was asked again, as it was about to be listed on MicroAcquire or Flippa. After some negotiation, and the promise of a speedy sale, we agreed on a sale price of $1,500, and I bought it back.
There's a few reasons why I decided to buy it back, despite being pretty busy with new and existing projects.
Firstly, for the nostalgia.
I really like One Item Store, so sending it to it's doom on Flippa felt like abandoning a child, I couldn't let it happen!
I also get a lot of emails about One Item Store, both because people liked the project, and because it's been broken for the past year, so people were contacting me for technical support despite not being the owner.
The second reason is that I actually think there's some potential for this super simple store builder.
I built it in two weeks right at the start of my tiny projects journey, when I had no idea what I was doing. Despite this, One Item Store actually generated revenue and gained several thousand users.
I've created 4 projects since then, all very different, but each one has made me realise just how hard it is to make money on the internet; it's insanely hard. One Item Store somehow made a tiny amount of dollar with minimal effort.
Selling One Item Store was really exciting at the time, but afterwards I always wondered what if. Now, with a lot more experience in SaaS, I can find out.
One Item Store was completely broken when I got it back, so I've spent the past week bringing it back to life by rewriting a lot of the old code under the hood.
My next steps are to improve the design of the website and the stores. There's still only 2 themes: Minimal, and the stylish Minimal dark.
Then, who knows? I might explore adding payments via crypto, just to try and learn how the tech works - but we'll see.
I'll be posting updates regularly to this daily blog, so make sure to subscribe and check back.
It's good to have you back, One Item Store!
