CVPark.com is for sale

Here’s the lowdown on this 4+ year old resume parking website called cvpark.com. Starting bid at $500, Buy it Now: $7500. Deal or no deal? This site has potential with a PR1, but asking $7500 is quite high for something that does NOT generate any or much monthly revenue. Maybe it will blow up to become a social networking ‘resume’, ‘career’, ‘job’ building portal. Who knows?

For sale is my resume building website CVPARK.COM

ABOUT THE WEBSITE

CVPARK is a resume publishing website, one of its kind, where users are able to create their detailed resumes, publish them online, or send the unique url of their resumes to the prospective employers during job or academic applications.

The the results of the poll ran among the members show that at least 65 % of the cvpark users are planning to use their cvpark urls in their job applications (See the image attached).
CVPARK eliminates the need for sending bulky .doc or .pdf files during each application. It also provides a standard format for all resumes thus enabling easy and time efficient evaluation of the applications.

CVPARK offers a very detailed list of job categories to choose from. However, users are also able to define their own categories if they can’t find one that fits their qualifications. A user can also suggest a new category thus providing us with the necessary feedback for improving of our services.

The key features of the website

1. Creating, editing and publishing resumes online
2. Automatic url assignment for every new member (e.g. yourname.cvpark.com)
3. Optional password protection
4. “Save as PDF” option
5. More (check the website)

The best way to learn about CVPARK is to visit the website and check it out for yourselves. You don’t need to sign up, almost all functionalities of the site can be accessed through the “Live Demo”. There might be minor issues when opening the site with the lastest version of Firefox (didn’t have a chance to look into it) but, other than that everything works perfectly.

CVPARK also has an approximately 2,000 member base.

The website is exactly 4 years old. You can check the history of cvpark.com with the Wayback machine. The basic principle and design has remained essentially unchanged throughout this period, only new features have been added.
Never mind the pagerank, it is only 1. The the site hasn’t been promoted for years and I haven’t performed any link exchanges/purchases. Yet, the number of members has been growing slowly but, steadily despite to a very low traffic – an indication of a high conversion rate.

Some technical details

The code is about 7000 lines long and uses many components from PEAR php library. MySQL5 is used for data storage. The code is very modular and easily manageable. Login and presentation are separated. All design definitions are in separate files. I didn’t write any real admin panel and unless you plan to make frequent modifications on the site, you don’t need any.

Reason for selling

The reason is simple. I need money, and I need them now. I don’t want to sell this website, I really don’t. But, I need the money to repay my debts and there is no time to waste.

UNIQUINESS OF THE CONCEPT AND THE OPPORTUNITY BEHIND IT

There are serveral points that I would like to specifically emphasize about this deal. I would like to make it very clear what exactly you are paying for.

Let me start of by telling you what the cvpark.com is NOT

- It is not another useless proxy, web directory, arcade, dating, celebrity, warez, ebooks, recipies website or a hosting “business” with no clients. The web is saturated with those websites and so is Sitepoint.
(I am not saying that those sites are completely worthless or don’t make money but, you can’t build a serious business based on any of these stuff and even if you do start a business (e.g. web hosting firm), it won’t be too profitable due to thousands of other available alternatives and raising above the average would even less likely).

- It is not another overhyped website with only 1-3 month profit report sold for five figures.

- It is not another website with presumably “automatic” content, websites with rss feed that display information from other websites and completely or partially rely on external sources with no actual control of the content.

CVPARK on the other hand is an automatic service. Everything is ready and working, new members signing up. You don’t need to update/create new content unless you wish to add new features to your service.

- It is not another website with thousands of copies on the web, that you can download or purchase from any source. The programming and design is completely unique, the code was hand written by us (me and my partner). I can’t estimate the exact market value of the code we wrote but, there’s at least $ 2,000 – 3000 worth of programming work in it, took months to finish.

Very high convertion rate

I thing this is the most important factor that makes CVPARK truely valuable. By “conversion rate” here I mean the ratio of visitors who sign up to CVPARK to the total number of visitors. Even with almost zero traffic we had 1-2 people signing up to cvpark. Like I mentioned before, I haven’t been advertising this website for years and traffic had been zero to 10 uniques in good days. Yet, we had a new member signing up every other day.
The conversion rate is at least % 25 if not higher. This means that even with average promotion the number of members can be increased dramatically. If you get a good traffic with actual, unique visitors, you can be sure that a good fraction of them will be converted into members.
I image it wouldn’t take too long to reach 50K or even 100K member base with reasonable advertising when ¼ of your visitors turn into members.
In fact, purchasing traffic or PPC advertising are not the only options as the members themselves will be advertising the website. Explained below:

Self advertising system

CVPARK will be actively advertised by its own members, because, each user gets his/her own unique cvpark url, a link to that member’s resume (yourname.cvpark.com) which he or she will be:
- Sending to other people by email during job or academic applications (the poll results show that at least 65% of cvpark memebers use their cvpark resumes during job applications)
- Posting on their websites, blogs or in various forums as their signature link

Facebook

It is a common knowledge that social networking websites are good places for advertising websites and products but, most of those advertising practices fall under the category of spamming.

Facebook and CVPARK combination however is an exception. The idea is to develop a CVPARK application for facebook. Using this application facebook users will be able to create their resumes and place the cvpark (resume) links under their “Contact information” or “Education and Work” section.
I started writing the application but, didn’t have time to finish it. It is half done though and I can provide the code to the winner of this auction unless of course you want to write your own application.

This is a 7 day auction, I don’t have much time. The auction will end on 25th December, on Christmas (unless BIN is reached before that date).

Payment through Escrow. The escrow fee (around $150) is paid by the buyer.

NOTE: The reason my Feedback Profile is 0% is because I haven’t exchanged feedbacks with other members yet and not because I had received negative feedbacks.

Actual listing fount at: http://marketplace.sitepoint.com/auctions/53703

Make note that this site sold 3 times in a span of 2 months during 2006. All sold for within $100-300. Now, is the site really worth $7500?

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