I built this website in 2020. Six years later it sold, and the buyer kept me on.
I built this website in 2020. Six years later it sold, and the buyer kept me on.
Every other project in my portfolio is a website somebody hired me to build. This one I built from nothing, ran for six years, and then sold on behalf of the company that owned it. The person who bought it hired me to keep running it. That last part is the only result in here worth anything, and it is the one I would check if I were you.
In 2020, Kapyderm USA had no website at all. I built the first one, then spent six years building on it and running it — the public store, the condition pages, the product catalog and a private portal for certified practitioners.
In 2026 the website sold for $10,000. The company that bought it hired me to keep managing it.
There is no traffic chart in this case study, and I will explain further down exactly why I am not putting one in.
| The client | The situation |
|---|---|
| Who | Kapyderm USA — a clinical scalp and skin company that sells to certified practitioners first and to the public second |
| Already had | Nothing. No website, in 2020. |
| The problem | Two audiences who need opposite things from the same website, and a product catalog too large and too technical for an off-the-shelf template |
| What was done | Six years of building it and running it: the storefront, a page for every scalp and skin condition, the treatment lines, and a private hub for professionals |
| How it ended | Sold for $10,000 in 2026, and the buyer retained me to keep managing the site |
Kapyderm USA is a company I worked for. I was its operations manager, and its CEO is my mother. You would find that out eventually, so you should know it going in, and you should weigh this case study differently because of it. I had six years and no invoice to send. Nobody else in my portfolio got that.
What the relationship does not change: the website is real, it is live, and you can open kapydermusa.com on your own phone right now and check every claim on this page against it.
- One website, two audiences that want opposite things
- What got built, and in what order
- What is on it today, counted instead of remembered
- Why it sold: what a buyer actually looks at
- What happened after the sale
- The part nobody wants to pay for
- What this does and does not prove
- Questions people ask about this
One website, two audiences that want opposite things
Kapyderm sells clinical scalp and skin products, and it sells them two ways. Certified practitioners buy the treatment lines and use them in their clinics. Members of the public buy the take-home products for themselves. Those two people arrive at the same website wanting completely different things.
A practitioner wants the technical detail: what is in it, what it treats, how it is applied, how to order it, and how to be listed so patients in her city can find her. Somebody with a flaking scalp wants to know what is wrong with them and whether anything on this website is going to help.
Most companies pick one audience and lose the other
Build it for the professionals and the public bounces, because the site reads like a supplier catalog. Build it for the public and the professionals cannot find the ordering or the technical information, so they call instead, which does not scale.
The answer was structure, not compromise
One public route organized by condition, one professional route behind a login, and a shared product catalog underneath both. Neither audience has to read the other one’s pages to get where they are going.
The public route is the part I would point at. Instead of one page called Hair Loss, the site has a page for pattern hair loss, a page for alopecia areata, a page for diffuse thinning, a page for seborrheic dermatitis, a page for scalp psoriasis, and so on. That is the same one-page-per-condition structure I used later on a clinic redesign, and it is the single change that did the most work there too — the trichology clinic case study covers what that structure did for her bookings.
People do not search for your method. They search for their problem.
Nobody types the name of a treatment line at one in the morning. They type what is happening to their scalp. A page has to exist for the thing they typed, or the website is invisible to them no matter how good it looks.
Being that specific is also what makes a business quotable to a machine. A page that names one condition and answers one question is the kind of page that gets pulled into an answer when somebody asks an assistant for a recommendation, which is how a local business ends up getting cited by AI in the first place.
What got built, and in what order
Six years is a long time to compress, and I am not going to pretend there was a master plan in 2020. There was a first version, and then there was everything that got added, fixed and replaced because the business needed it. The site that sold in 2026 has very little of the original left in it.
The storefront
A working online store with a real product catalog, organized into the treatment lines rather than dumped into one list. This is the part that existed first and the part that got rebuilt the most.
A page for every condition
Pattern hair loss, alopecia areata, diffuse thinning, hair thinning in women, seborrheic dermatitis, scalp psoriasis, dermatitis, acne, dry skin, sensitive skin. Each one named the way somebody would actually describe it to a doctor.
The professionals portal
A private hub for certified practitioners, plus a public directory so a patient can find a center near her. The directory is the piece that makes the professional side worth joining, and it only works if somebody maintains it.
The redesign, and then the upkeep
The whole thing was redesigned once the catalog had outgrown the original layout. After that it was maintenance: new products, discontinued products, updated content, fixed links, and the unglamorous work of keeping a site that size from going stale.
If you are trying to work out what that kind of build costs before you commit to one, I publish real numbers rather than making you ask — the article on what a website redesign actually costs has the ranges, the one on what local SEO costs covers the ongoing search side, and my prices are published on the site instead of hidden behind a discovery call.
What is on it today, counted instead of remembered
I counted these off the live sitemap on September 29, 2026, rather than repeating a number I had in my head from two years ago.
The professionals portal sits behind a login and is not counted in any of those numbers.
Here is a number I could have used instead: 515.
That is what the raw sitemap reports. It is also nearly useless, because most of those entries are blog category and tag archives the platform generates on its own. About 166 are real pages, products and articles. I am telling you the smaller number because the big one would look better and would not be true.
That distinction matters beyond bragging rights. Automatically generated archive pages are the most common way a Squarespace site quietly bloats its own sitemap, and it is worth knowing whether yours is doing it. If you want the same kind of audit run on your site, there is a sample audit on the site showing what I look at and what I report back.
Why it sold: what a buyer actually looks at
A website that sells is not a website somebody admired. It is a website somebody was willing to take responsibility for. Those are different tests, and the second one is much harder.
Here is what a buyer is really checking, in roughly the order it matters:
| What the buyer checks | Why it decides the deal |
|---|---|
| Can ownership be proved? | The domain, the registrar, the DNS, the platform account, the email, the analytics. If any of it is in somebody else’s name, the sale stalls right there. |
| Is the content still true? | A catalog full of discontinued products and a blog that stopped three years ago is a liability, not an asset. Somebody has to fix all of that before it earns anything. |
| Does it run without heroics? | If keeping the site alive requires one specific person and a folder of undocumented workarounds, the buyer is buying a problem. |
| Is there something here that cannot be rebuilt cheaply? | The practitioner relationships and the directory behind the portal. Anyone can copy a layout. Nobody can copy a list of people who already trust you. |
The ownership question is the one that kills most small website sales, and almost nobody sees it coming. The business thinks it owns the site. Then it turns out the domain is registered to a designer who moved away, or the platform account is on an old employee’s email. I wrote about this before any of this happened, because it is the single most common trap I find: who actually owns your website, your domain and your logins walks through how to check yours in about ten minutes.
This sale went through cleanly on that point. Everything was where it was supposed to be, in the company’s name, with the logins accounted for. That is not luck. It is what happens when whoever set it up did not use ownership as a retention strategy.
What happened after the sale
The buyer was Kimra Parry-Ali, a certified trichologist, and she did something that I think says more about the website than the price did: she bought the asset and then kept the person who had been running it.
I still manage the site. New products go up, discontinued ones come down, the practitioner directory stays current, the content gets corrected when the clinical side changes something.
I had also redesigned her own clinic website, which is a separate project with a separate write-up — the redesign that produced bookings for a service she already offered is the one with actual figures in it, because in that case the figures exist and she published them herself.
A buyer doing due diligence looked at six years of my work and decided the safest thing to do was keep me.
I cannot think of a reference that is worth more than that, and it is not one I could have written for myself.
The part nobody wants to pay for
Most of what made this website worth buying was not design.
It was that somebody kept it current for six years. That is the part nobody wants to pay for, and it is the part that turned a website into something another company wanted to own.
I am aware of how self-serving that sounds coming from somebody who sells maintenance. So here is the version that costs me something: if your site is five pages and your phone number is right, you do not need a monthly plan. Check it twice a year and spend the money on something else. I said exactly that to a client in the painting company case study, on a project where the most valuable thing I did was fix three wrong phone numbers.
Where upkeep earns its money is a site with a catalog, a blog, a directory, or anything that goes out of date on its own. That is what my monthly care plan for websites that need upkeep is for, and the reason it exists at all is that I watched what six years of it did to one website’s value.
And no, this is not a business model. Do not build a website planning to flip it. The six years is the story, not the sale.
What this does and does not prove
One sale is not a trend. It is one website, in one industry, sold once. If somebody shows you a portfolio and calls a single outcome a pattern, they are selling you something.
There are no before-and-after traffic numbers in this case study, on purpose. The business changed hands. Comparing traffic across that line would be comparing two different companies with two different owners and two different priorities, and presenting it as one clean rising line would be dishonest. I would rather publish nothing than publish a number that flatters me.
I also had an inside position here that no client of mine gets: six years, full access, and no invoice to send. Judge the work accordingly.
If you want to see how I handle a project where the numbers did exist, read the trichology clinic redesign. If you want one where they did not exist yet and I said so instead of estimating, read the lawn and landscape build. Everything I have shipped is listed on the case studies page, including the projects with no write-up yet, linked straight to the live sites so you can judge them yourself.
Questions people ask about this
Can a small business website actually be worth money?
Sometimes, and far less often than the people selling website-flipping courses suggest. A website is worth money when it carries something a buyer cannot cheaply rebuild: an accurate catalog, a list of relationships, content that still ranks, and clean ownership. A five-page brochure site is worth roughly what it costs to rebuild it, which is not much. This one was worth something because of what had accumulated in it over six years, not because of how it looked.
What makes a website sellable instead of just live?
Four things, in order. Provable ownership of the domain, the platform account and the logins. Content that is still true. The ability to run without one irreplaceable person. And something in it that cannot be copied over a weekend. Most small business sites fail the first test, and it is the cheapest one to pass — checking who owns your website and domain takes about ten minutes.
Did you build this for a client, or for yourself?
Neither, exactly, and that is why the disclosure is at the top of this page. Kapyderm USA is a company I worked for as operations manager, and its CEO is my mother. I built and ran the website as part of that role. It was sold on the company’s behalf, not mine, and the buyer then retained me independently. You should weigh the case study with all of that in view.
Why should I trust a case study about a company you worked for?
Trust the parts you can verify and discount the rest. The site is live and public. The page counts came off its own sitemap on a stated date and you can recount them. The buyer is a real person who is still paying me to manage it. What you cannot verify from outside is how much of the six years was my judgment versus the company’s, so treat that part as my account of it and weigh it against the other case studies, where the clients are not related to me.
Do you still run the site?
Yes. The company that bought it kept me on to manage it, and that arrangement is ongoing as of September 2026. It is the same kind of work described in the care plan: keeping the catalog accurate, the directory current and the content from going stale.
Would you do a six-year build for a normal client?
Nobody buys six years up front, and I would not sell it that way. What you buy is a build, and then you decide every month whether the upkeep is worth it. The prices are published so you can work that out before you talk to me, and the article on whether a redesign is worth it is the honest version of that math, including the cases where the answer is no.
Is your website an asset, or just an expense?
If you could not sell it tomorrow, you probably do not own it the way you think you do. That is a fixable problem, and finding out costs nothing.
