EventMB: An Italian Side-Project Blog Becomes the Industry’s Standard-Bearer — the Sale to Skift, After Two Collapsed Deals

A one-person side-project blog started in southern Italy in 2007 was, twelve years later, bought by a major industry media company as the event industry’s standard information source, the story of EventMB (now Skift Meetings) contains nearly every element of a personal blog transforming into a media business. Cross-border relocation, a spouse joining the business, a small preceding sale, two collapsed deals, and a pandemic immediately after the exit. The longer the time horizon on which you think about your own “exit,” the more this case has to offer.

Timeline

The Business’s Numbers

What Twelve Years Built

The start was 2007, at the intersection of event management and technology. A theme almost nobody was covering as a specialty at the time. He kept writing after moving from southern Italy to London, readers accumulated, and in 2011, four years after starting, advertisers finally appeared and monetization began. His readership was centered in the US. The currency disadvantage of earning in dollars while living in pounds became another motivation to make the business serious.

In 2016 he obtained an EB1 visa for “individuals of extraordinary ability” and moved to Las Vegas, a decision to plant himself in the event industry’s hub. By then, the blog had grown into an industry media outlet with 50,000 subscribers and 300,000 monthly visits. Not a personal blog in scale, but a “standard industry information source” that published reports and research and spoke at conferences.

The Shift from “Creator” to “Media Company”

The turning point was his wife, Boscolo, joining as “employee number two” and reorganizing the blog into a media company. Solaris’s reflection cuts deep: “Being a creator and growing a business, in many cases, don’t mix.” The division of labor between the person writing content and the person handling sales, organization, and numbers is what enabled a structure with 7 freelancers and the promotion to “standard industry information source.”

The other setup move was the 2017 sale of ShowThemes. He sold this side business, WordPress themes for the event industry, to Imagely for six figures, funding a Las Vegas house down payment. Bigger than the money was having gone through the procedure of a sale once, at small scale. He says this dry run gave him the confidence to face the main event, the EventMB sale.

Inside the Two Collapsed Deals, and “Know Your Worth”

Negotiations to sell EventMB itself collapsed twice. The article reports he was in a state of lost confidence right after the collapses, and it was in that state that he met the third negotiating partner: Skift. The bridge was Skift’s events reporter, an old acquaintance. September 2019: the sale closed (price undisclosed).

The lesson he left behind: “Know your worth.” The collapsed deals were not failures but opportunities to learn about price and terms. The worst pattern is losing heart after the first collapse and selling cheap. It shares roots with PsychCentral’s negotiation that “used the first offer as the floor and worked upward”: the experience of multiple negotiations is itself what builds a seller’s pricing ability.

Reading Behind the Numbers

A spouse moving to the business side is rational as the minimum viable form of team-building. Like the FeedbackPanda couple and BeQuick’s family operation, it complements skill sets at zero trust cost. For a creator-type solo business to become a “sellable company,” someone other than the creator has to hold the management function.

Luck in exit timing counts as skill, but only on top of preparation. Six months after the sale, the pandemic hit, and ironically the acquisition became a huge success on the back of the virtual-events surge. The former EventMB, renamed Skift Meetings, exceeded the revenue targets set before the pandemic. Twelve years of digging into “events × tech” held its greatest value at the moment the environment convulsed. Deep niche expertise is also insurance against a demand explosion that may arrive at any time.

A small sale is a rehearsal for a big one. The sequence ShowThemes (six figures) → EventMB (the main event) is Earlyname’s “sell small” wired in series within one person’s career. The experience points for negotiation, due diligence, and handover can be bought at low risk before you raise the stakes.

What Remained After the Sale, and What Didn’t

The sale doesn’t wear the face of a finish line. Solaris took the editor-in-chief role under Skift, but later left the company, partly from the exhaustion of pandemic response. The business caught the best tailwind imaginable, while the founder burned out inside it. That a post-sale earnout period or continued employment doesn’t guarantee happiness is an outcome that recurs throughout cases of this kind.

He then founded Boldpush, an event-marketing consultancy. Its newsletter reached 9,000 subscribers in its first year, with Fortune 500 companies’ event marketing among its clients. True to his own words, “getting acquired doesn’t kill the entrepreneurial spirit”, the twelve years of niche accumulation kept being monetized after the sale, in a different vessel. What was sold was the outlet. The expertise stayed with the person.

The Price of 50,000 Subscribers Was Never Disclosed

The least readable part of this case is what Skift paid. The scale is public (more than 50,000 subscribers, 300,000 monthly visits), yet the consideration is not, and the only figure disclosed as six digits belongs to the earlier ShowThemes sale. So what twelve years of building a publication were worth cannot be verified. What can be said is the sequence: the buyer was a major industry media company, and the deal closed on the third attempt.

Carrying the numbers over to the Japanese market also needs a discount. English-language trade media enjoy larger markets and higher ad rates than Japanese-language ones, so 50,000 subscribers would not be worth the same. On the other hand, Japanese B2B still has areas where few outlets specialize in an “industry × technology” intersection, such as construction × IT or logistics × IT. Our reading is that EventMB’s value came from choosing, in 2007, a theme nobody covered as a specialty, and the following twelve years were the time it took to collect on that choice.

Related Cases

• Microgrid Knowledge — the same pattern of B2B specialist journalism sold
• PsychCentral — another example of making the price through negotiation
• FeedbackPanda — a husband-and-wife two-person exit