Review on DropDav.com

Today, we will review Dropdav.com from Flippa. We strongly prefer EmpireFlippers for its buyer protection but Flippa has more low hanging fruits. 

SWOT Overview of Opportunity in Flippa - Dropdav.com $40,000

Strength 

• SAAS business which is a barrier to non-IT investor
• 2-word domain (but branded)
• Backlink from some authority websites

Weakness

• Dying usage (iPad WebDAV)
• Almost no organic traffic opportunity unless you develop with guides on other applications?

Opportunities

• For IT investor with cash to burn, you can develop it further with more products support
• Wait for a company like SME to buy it (think we saw one competitor did)
• Seller claimed an opportunity in IoT devices with Dropbox (not sure ourselves)

Threat

• Alternatives like Google Drive, Photos, maybe iCloud?, Raidrive or just do it the email way

Details

https://business.flippa.com/businesses/386/dropdav-saas-internet

Dropdav is a SAAS site that allows Apple users to access their Pages, Numbers, Keynotes files across their iPhone, iPad, iMac, and MacBook using DropBox as the storage medium. 

Based on the website, it had switched to paid mode only at $5/month since 2011.

Story of DropDav

The iWork Apps for iPad had very clunky file import/export methods. Emailing the file back and forth to yourself, or connecting your iPad to iTunes were originally the only options. We longed for Dropbox integration. When WebDAV server support was added, we knew we could shoehorn in Dropbox access.

Setting up a WebDAV server using Apache on Linux was straightforward enough for our developers. But the Linux Dropbox client at the time wasn't very robust, and maintaining a whole copy of our Dropbox just for WebDAV access was not very elegant. The death knell to the Apache WebDAV + Dropbox client solution was the difficulty of supporting multiple users / multiple Dropbox accounts. It just wasn't workable.

Our Assessment on DropDav

We did our assessments without clarifications from the seller (as we didn't quite like it after some initial search)

Trends for Income

Based on the monthly cost of $5/user and $1,220 reported monthly revenue, it can be assumed there are 244 paid users. We look at the provided sales/P&L figures and it states

2016: $20,917.62

2017: $14,432.54

2018: $9,561.75

In summary, income dropped a staggering 55% in 2 years. We won't be surprised it was worse in 2019. The reported $1,220 seem much higher than expected as it would indicate $14,640/year which is even higher than its 2017 number. Nevertheless, we know the income is dropping for sure.

We used to like Dropbox in the past, until Google Drive, Photos came and didn't need it. (Hopefully, Google Photos don't die as Google Inbox and FB Moments are stop) 

As we like content marketing, we wish to see whether their organic traffic is evergreen. In blue is Dropbox WebDav and in red is iPad WebDav which we believed is the main target. The peak was in 2011 and it slides downwards really fast. 

SEMRush did report 2.7K monthly traffic from 70 keywords. That is pitiful but then again there wasn't any content marketing effort.

Many Alternatives

We tried to find competitors that are still surviving. Raidrive.com seem like a free alternative with 40x more organic traffic (80.4k vs 2.7k). 

Overall, I think it is a good starter site for a developer who has time to play around while having a small income. When we started, the first $1 dollar was the hardest thing and it might be useful for a developer to know it is possible to make money online. Other than that, I think it takes work to find more paying customers and why it was probably on sales. We don't have a plan for it and decided to forgo it too. Love the product though as it is really minimal work (but no opportunity to get ads too as WebDAV is transparent to users)

We decided to blog about our considerations in potential acquisitions while we are still coming up with some kind of guidelines. Although it is mainly for us and these are sites we won't buy, We hope this is useful for those who are doing the same.