Flipped 7 sites in 18 months — every multiple I actually got, including the bad ones

Everyone quotes 38-45x monthly. Here is what I was actually paid, in order.

The seven
1. Home improvement, $420/mo → sold $14,700 (35x). Clean sale, 11 days.
2. Pet niche, $740/mo → sold $31,080 (42x). Best outcome, had 14 months of stable revenue.
3. Finance comparison, $1,100/mo → sold $22,000 (20x). Buyer discounted hard for single-affiliate concentration. Fair, in hindsight.
4. Recipes, $310/mo → sold $7,440 (24x). Traffic was 90% from one platform and everyone could see it.
5. Outdoor gear, $680/mo → did not sell. Delisted after 4 months, still own it.
6. B2B SaaS reviews, $1,480/mo → sold $62,160 (42x). Email list of 9,000 did most of the work.
7. Travel, $590/mo → sold $11,800 (20x). Revenue had dropped three months running and the buyer knew it.

Average realised multiple: 29x
Not 40x. And that is excluding the one that did not sell, which would drag it to about 25x if I valued it honestly.

What raised the multiple
Diversified revenue, an email list, 12+ months of stable numbers, and documentation a buyer can actually read.

What crushed it
One traffic source, one affiliate programme, a declining trend, and anything that needed me to explain it on a call.

29x realised against 40x quoted is the most useful number on this board for anyone building to sell. The listing multiple is an asking price, not a market price.

Number 6 at 42x with a 9,000 list versus number 4 at 24x with platform-dependent traffic is the entire lesson about what buyers pay for.

And I built number 6 last. It took me five flips to understand what I was selling.

What happened with number 5? Four months on the market and no sale usually means the price, not the asset.

It was the price for the first two months and then it was the trend, because by month three the numbers I was showing were stale and worse. Delisting and fixing it was the right call.

Do buyers really read documentation, or is that just something sellers say?

The good ones read it before the call. The one who paid 42x asked three questions, all of which were answered in the doc, and he was checking whether I had written it myself.

Please keep updating this instead of vanishing like every other thread in here.