DigitalOcean acquires CSS-tricks
“DigitalOcean acquires CSS-Tricks: Chris Coyier built a niche publication into a multimillion-dollar bootstrapped acquisition over 15 years.”
In this 2022 acquisition retrospective, @nilsandrey reflects on the journey of bootstrapping and successfully selling their business. Core insight: DigitalOcean acquires CSS-Tricks: Chris Coyier built a niche publication into a multimillion-dollar bootstrapped acquisition over 15 years.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Unsolicited buyer inquiries versus running a deliberate auction process require very different negotiation leverage.
Bootstrapping for years without external capital provides extreme freedom, but exits are often triggered by energy depletion as much as financial gain.
Retaining ownership of code and operations creates pride, but transitioning to an acquirer requires letting go of absolute autonomy.
Community Debate Themes:
Hacker News peers debated transaction structures (cash vs earnout), founder tax strategies, and life after liquidating a long-term indie asset.
CATEGORY Startup Exits →
HISTORICAL ERA Pandemic Bubble (2020–2022)
COMMUNITY SCORE 825 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 213 comments
For your start up, a good blog could be a serious lead vehicle.
To generate a ton of traffic or be worth something, I find you need to balance three things (personal opinion):
- Normal longer Blog type articles / announcements
- Quick blog / library / resource / how-tos
- Engagement / community
Each are unique for everyone.
For example, Cloudflare I would argue leans heavy to the longer blog rolls and is a lead gen for enterprise reads, investors, and also new hire folks.
For SEO though, Digital Ocean cares more about the library of resources style (I would wager). It’s why they are buying CSS-Tricks to get all that “smooth scroll css” traffic. This is very much a traffic is traffic mentality to boost their own blog traffic metrics. There are probably other factors here like community / clout. Why build all this when you can just buy it?
Then finally the last one is engagement. This is what converts and is having an active community. This is why influencers can make serious buck. This is the hardest to build and I would argue the most important. A “real following”.
Would love to hear your thoughts on this too and how you use your blog for your start up or business.
It's already been mentioned in a few comments, but I imagine a big part of this purchase was influenced by the SEO power of the domain. CSS-Trick is a crazy powerful domain [1]
Google loves old domains with authority, and still, to this day, it's a lot easier to rank a site built on an aged/expired domain than it is on a fresh domain.
Buying powerful domains on auction sites has shot through the roof in the last couple of years. Here's a couple of example on Godaddy (Godaddy auctions tend to have the most powerful domains SEO-wise) https://www.godaddy.com/domain-auctions/gutenberg-net-414405463 ↗ https://uk.godaddy.com/domain-auctions/freewebtemplates-com-414369081 ↗
I imagine they will eventually 301 the domain to the main DigitalOcean domain.
[1] - https://imgur.com/a/8XHWry9 ↗
This is part of a broader trend. Last year, Balaji Srinivasan tweeted about the idea of SaaS companies buying media companies – https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1374363031417753609 ↗ – and as an observer/operator in this space, I've heard about a lot of conversations going on behind the scenes with larger companies expressing an interest in smaller media companies (including my own - I value autonomy too much but for the right multiple.. :-D).
Consider Hubspot buying The Hustle, Robinhood buying MarketSnacks, Stripe's various acquisitions (like IndieHackers), Insight Partners bought The New Stack.. and this is all happening in the developer space too. Subscription based companies with high cashflow but high customer acquisition costs will continue to buy attention-based companies with relatively low acquisition costs because, frankly, the owners of the latter are generally quite happy with "modest" (<$40m, say) exits that the former can easily cover.
Wow, pretty big sale! Big congrats to Chris.
Interestingly, DigitalOcean has a knack for acquiring these technical dev sites, in 2019 it acquired Scotch.io[0] which was one of the better technical web development sites out there.
Fun fact about Scotch, the founder (Chris Sev[1]) sold the site to DO, joined their team, and later managed to broker a deal to 301 redirect a lot of the pages to his new project Better.dev[2].
Absolute genius.
[0]: https://www.digitalocean.com/blog/scotch-io-is-joining-digitalocean ↗
[1]: https://twitter.com/chris__sev ↗
[2]: https://www.better.dev/ ↗
Hope they keep the site as it is, css-tricks.com has been consistently one of the best, if not the best CSS site around, to the point that I search there for a particular topic before going to general purpose search engines, and you'll frequently find Chris' original articles copypasta'd by "content marketers" anyway. I guess the big time push for CSS3 with ever-changing responsive requirements and new UI idioms of the 2000's and 2010's is behind us, as witnessed by css-tricks's forum with contributions from other world-class experts having closed down last year or so. Could be worse than DO for sure.