#2 with Ramon Van Meer - Blogging His Way To $9M in Cash

at this point it's a money printer i was very lucky that in content you with a very small team very low half we're talking monthly you're pulling in between four and five hundred thousand in revenue what's up guys sean here i'm doing a special little introduction to this episode from my phone because we got some good news we broke into the top ten on the apple itunes rankings which is really crazy but thank everybody who downloaded the episode subscribed left a review ben mode me a dollar everybody who supported the show thank you very much you know the rankings didn't don't really really mean much i'm gonna do the show anyways because i just like having conversations with smart people but damn it does feel good when something actually works and when people like listening to it and i really appreciate that so that's good news the other good news is that we're bringing on our first sponsor you'll hear me talk about them a little bit in midway through the episode but i just think it's cool we're the money podcast we talk to people about how they made their money and it's only right that would make a little money ourselves i think that helps keep the show going and makes it sustainable for everybody so big shout out to monday dot com who's coming on as our first sponsor i also like that it's actually a product that i use in fact like last week i started using monday dot com to organize the podcast because there was so much stuff going on i got a book guess i gotta send stuff to the editor i gotta do this and that any project it just starts getting super busy and so monday dot com was took a really good place to just organize everything have my list in a good spot and it's got really nice design and i'm a sucker for design and so this sounds like an ad now this is not the ad the ad comes later but i really do use the product and i'm glad that the sponsor is something that i actually use in herbal light so shout out to them for coming on board this week's conversation was with ramon van mere and ramon is a really interesting dude and at this episode is gonna be different than most episodes i would say that majority of the guests when i have them on they are intimidating smart when they're talking to me it's pretty obvious within five minutes that i'm the dumbest person in the room and i just try to ask questions so that let them talk and let them tell their story and i just do my best keep up but ramon is not a genius and that's what i'll say our buddy sam who introduced us he says it differently he calls ramon like he just tells him you're so dumb you're the dumbest smart guy and i know and he means it with love because what ramon does is he doesn't over complicate things and you're gonna hear that in his story for example the the essence of his story and he he'll tell you better than i will but it's he you know wanted to start a blog he just looked at what was already popular and then he started a blog in that little niche he bought a forty nine dollar wordpress template because he doesn't know how to code he outsourced writing to some freelancers because he doesn't know how to write and somehow some way just did those simple things and built the most popular blog about a subject that he doesn't even really know it's a soap opera blog like you know days of her lives young in the restless that's like soap opera and he's never even seen an episode of a soap opera so somehow this guy who can't code can't write and never watched soap opera has built a blog filled with you know daily daily stories about soap opera and you know the business started printing money generating you know hundreds of thousands dollars a month before selling it for about nine million dollars and so ramon is one of the most humble guys i i've ever met silicon valley very good at just keeping things simple and if you take nothing away from this it's to remember that you don't have to be a genius and you don't have to have some super complicated high tech business plan to make it work sometimes if you just find a niche that has a lot of passion around it you could build a very simple business and he's gonna tell you about that so hope you enjoy the episode if you do leave a review shout me out on twitter do something so that i hear you guys that's what gets me excited to to keep making the show happen i don't have to do the show i do it because i love it and i really appreciate everything that happened after the first episode alright enjoy okay here to go let's do this alright sometimes i could ask to do a podcast or an interview and i'm a shy person in groups so i don't really like to do tv or interviews and i i'd like to talk too much about myself it's just i don't know why so sometimes it gets awkward friend of mine asking me to do a tv segment for him was not a tv like national tv nobody would really see it but as soon as he he hit to record on the camera then i started mumbling and you froze i froze yeah so alright we'll i try to do my best we're try not to freeze this one informal without even doing an interest i'm a podcast the podcast is called my first million and the idea is i wanna talk to different founders entrepreneurs like you who have hit their first million million dollars million downloads millions sc something some huge milestone and i wanna find out how they did it and so i wanted you to come on because you have a wild a wild story about how you hit your first million yeah very unorthodox very different than you know even most of the silicon valley success stories yours is is totally different so let's start with the the very simple question yes how did you make your first million alright nobody will guess this and nobody believes it when i tell them i started a block about soap opera it's a news news block that will write about the running soap opera and we're talking like days of our lives yeah young in the restless exactly and first question people always ask oh the are you a soap opera watch it because especially when they see me you know then they cannot believe it up to now i've not watched one episode of any soap opera but yeah that was the website i build it and sold it in three years later wow so okay so so the story is gonna be you decide to make a soap opera blog mh god knows why yeah you somehow were able to make a soap opera blog successful despite never watching a soap opera and yeah you sold it how long ago ten eleven months ago alright so eleven months ago you sell it for say nine and a half million little bit below nine million eight point seven five eight seven five million cash cash yes and this isn't like a silicon valley like you own four percent of the company this was your company you owned there's no outside investors i i had no investors i boots bootstrap i had some advisers i think i owned like ninety eight percent to wow and then i gave you know some shares or some profit to employees but yeah okay love it so okay so we're gonna go in so how does this start why even create a soap opera blog to get begin with yeah i started this and i called the golden age of facebook where you can basically create a fan page about any topic and very cheap and fast could build a huge fan page and back then the news feed algorithm was still in favor for publishers so whatever you post a lot of your fans will see it so are we talking like the buzzfeed up where the days when they were getting a ton of traffic on facebook yeah so i knew okay how to drive traffic from facebook to a website i just didn't know what's the topic would be so is it a should should i sell product or a service or content if a content what kind of content so i just take me back are you just at home yeah alone in a room thinking about this you you're just brainstorming on in a whiteboard yeah eight and square feet apartment me and my son together and just brainstorming ideas and what was your son's ideas what was he what was he thinking actually he has actually has good ideas actually but it's more games but he always comes with these really interesting thoughts that i never think of and then hey he has a good point right but yeah going back to the facebook i started ten eleven twelve i forgot different fan pages about different topics so one was about pets marijuana soaps politics and i will just drive some traffic to it or build some likes paid and then post some random pictures and then see the engagement so some fan pages really bomb i had ten thousand fans i post a picture and i got two likes or whatever right okay horrible engaged but there were two topics that really stood out one was soaps the other one was politics and this was even before the craziness that's you know before trump yes exactly bt away before trump politics i really didn't like because especially you know one side was more engaged and everything against what i believe in so i dropped that actually after two weeks and then i saw the soap opera fan page doing you know a lot of people sharing and commenting and liking even though i made a lot of mistakes posting the wrong actors like i post of pictures of of people that were not in the show and things like that but the engagement was crazy of engagement was probably higher than people good outraged yes exactly so i built a simple wordpress sites i bought at the team from team forrest put it on wordpress use photo are you a technical guy i mean what's your because a lot of people get stuck right you know hey i wanna build this website yeah i can't code do i go learn python on the hard way do i go buy this course and try to become a developer do i try to outsource it yeah do i try that you know wordpress theme so i think that's why we live in such a great time right like you don't actually need to know a lot to get stuff you know built wordpress it's so or shopify if you want to start selling something shopify is very easy and if you want to build a content site wordpress also so i am technical but i didn't code anything to but like this website i build in a couple hours was a wordpress a team a very simple logo because i'm a i i'm just to believer about like trying a lot of different things fast fast and then see if something works then you optimize or make it better or make it look better or faster things like that but i try to prevent spending too much time in the pre launch phase where like i made those mistakes too when i was younger i had a business idea and then i you know i took weeks to design a business card and you know and and a website and and eventually after months of hard work and didn't the idea didn't work right so now i'm the opposite just quick so a couple hours very ugly site now i had the problem i don't know anything about soaps and as you can hear have an accent english is not my first language so writing is also not my strong point so went on up upwork back name was called o autodesk so this breaks all the rules by the way it's yeah you oh founder market fit zero zero passion passion zero exactly skill skill set zero can't right have decided to start a blog exactly but you knew one thing so for recap the kind of what you had what you did have right that's the stuff you didn't have but sounds like what you had was you knew that at least for this time period there was a cheap way to buy likes on a facebook page correct and then whatever that facebook page is and you tried twenty of wwe and pets and whatever and then take that traffic on the fit take the likes on the facebook page turned it into website traffic correct and so you do their testing period you decide soaps is with the one i'm gonna do because the engagement is high using the data it's all good and now you got your blog up like you don't have the content real going yeah so went on a website called o autodesk is where you can hire freelancers from writers to video editors to anything you can imagine put an add out hey i'm starting a soap opera blog i'm looking for a writer and very lucky i found an editor writer that used to write for print soap opera magazine twenty years ago so she watched all the shows she's in the industry for many many years so she knows the story that's how people used to solve this problem they would buy the magazine i would say it would talk about that week's drama mh in the cell and then magazines just were too slow for the new world yes exactly so that was also a lock that there were competitors but it's like the old school media competitors it was like these magazines that have been around twenty forty years what's like a big magazine that covers soaps the biggest one is called soap opera digest okay it's been around i think forty fifty years straight to the point they have a website but their main focus up to the last couple years was always their magazine yeah so do love that because you see this incumbent who's you know they're from the print world they have a website websites like a pdf basically exactly and so you know when you see that the website reminds you of pdf yeah it's like this is a good market it's a good market so found her started with one article day and just test out and see how it works up to now actually she's still working with the new owners of yeah and so she starts cranking out content and give me your mindset i mean are you you're pretty certain that this is gonna work how are you paying the bills at this year like take me back to because i know it works right the spoiler of this podcast yeah shit worked out yeah sold the company you know that worked so what i think it's important to go back when it wasn't clear that it was gonna you have some belief but like again i wanna know how are you paying the bills and then what was your certainty level on this or were you guys still hedging your bets with other things yeah it's always easy to look backwards like you know oh course it's you know it's works in my case every person i told his idea to told me you know you're crazy like this never kinda works soaps like who watches that and why didn't you listen to them you're just a stubborn guy or what yeah and because you know i like to keep trying things until i see it doesn't work and i go to the next idea i saw the engagement so going back it took four five months before i really started seeing good amount of traffic to the site because the problem with contents you need a lot of traffic to really make money mh you know at back then i was just using only google ads so the banners on my website even after couple weeks i made like two dollars a day and then four dollars you know i couldn't you know i paid more for article than return but what kept going was that the engagement on the fan page like the fan page i only had to pay the first couple of weeks you know i think the twenty or thirty thousand likes after that the fan pages grew organically whatever i posted got so many shares and i did see an opportunity okay there's not a lot of competition the fans is are super engaged its content that is every day like soap opera are aired every single day for fifty two weeks straight they have some blackout days but but basically it's every new episodes new episodes every monday monday friday so apparently they record a bunch of them on the same day like five six it's very very basic meaning like their sets it's just the actors like i think even the directors are in a in a booth of upstairs and then they just crank out you know you know with all the respect of the soap opera you know actors it it's not like a hollywood you know sad thrones we're talking about yes exactly so it's a lot of content and when you write about the topic or think about you know starting a content site you also wanna think okay is there gonna be enough content to write about so for example if you do a game of thrones blog you're kinda limited because it's only airs two three months i don't know actually year this season was six episodes and now it's done and it's done right so then six sundays yeah so that's not a lot of content to be fair i know you are you're your game with thrones fan no okay so to be fair you could write an infinite amount of content just complaining now about the ending and the last season stuff thought of petition competition exactly so soap peppers had this unique property daily content new content every day and i mean what is your article about is it here's the recap of what happened in case you missed it was it like speculation of what's gonna happen what was the content like or is it just pure clickbait on facebook of like see which character you are on this you know quiz yeah so because i didn't know anything about the audience i had to learn like what did they like what they did read so i tried everything but was very obvious people like to read what's gonna happen tomorrow or the next day or next week so like for theory or a spoiler yeah really spoilers okay and just like the answer this is what's going happen yeah like oh jake is gonna you know leave mary tomorrow you know that kind of articles really did well did well like i think eighty percent of our traffic came from spoiler or spoiler related articles unbelievable then of course we did you know to get more content out because the more contents you put out the more traffic you get you know more traffic more revenue so we we did we wrote about recap sort of people that missed an episode we did you know what days of lives character are you but it was more quiz to capture emails i really used that as a as an email list building tool and that did really well like we built over three hundred i think close to three fifty three hundred fifty thousand emails we collected with these you know silly quizzes right you said the first few months your trying to get traffic first four or five months not very much traffic mh you know two bucks a day in adsense type of thing yeah but you keep going because you see the engagement yeah and did you have a day job at the time i mean how did you live you know you and your son at home my how are you paying the bills yeah so i had an online travel agency company before with my previous business partner and i sold half of my shares and the new buyer that's bought my shares paid a year long every month but that was exactly what i needed to pay my bill so there was you know it was was my luck that you know i could then you know just do other things are you the type where you did you mind ever go i should i should just get a job or were you just bull headed of like no i need to create these websites and own them and and make a business out of that yeah i've been entrepreneur like i've been so many different businesses like i had some jobs when i was eighteen nineteen but basically always had my own companies so it was never a thought of okay if the soaps doesn't work i'm gonna go get a job it was actually if soap doesn't work i'm gonna figure out something else right i'll try pets i'll try politics i'll try something that else mh k and so alright so let's jump back in so you you you're building up the traffic and what's the what what was the inflection point why did things go from a little bit of traffic a little bit of add revenue to give me a sense where did the traffic get to over time what was like the peak of it of traffic it was like very like flat almost but very little bit uphill like and then suddenly yeah we we started growing much faster because i was starting to collect emails mh starting when a person came to my website i asked hey do you want to get a push notification so i started to diversify my traffic sources not just facebook and then yeah four or five months into it then it started doubling every day and then the growth went really fast actually awesome and you were you're buying traffic at this point still or at at some point did you just stop buying and you just start making the content and people shared yeah so i only bought thirty the first thirty forty thousand likes at below one cent per like so it was very cheap after that was organic wow yeah and then i only started boosting post on facebook like buying you know like paying for traffic a year after so we're talking like you spent hundreds in the hundreds of dollars yeah my math not great but but i think that one penny is something like that you spent under a thousand dollars total yeah unpaid for this website mh built that asset up into something that you were able to sell for almost nine million bucks so that's a tremendous tremendous type of return is that what you thought was possible or no were you thinking this will make me ten k a month and then i'll figure something else out yeah when i started i fog because i was in you know i sold my shares okay what i'm gonna do next i know i like internet marketing and i was always you know doing marketing stuff we're buying some small websites selling them or building them from scratch and so i thought okay this would could be a fun project that maybe makes me you know twenty k a month and you know there will be i i i didn't know like you know my first school was a hundred dollars a day and then very quickly was a thousand dollars a day and then i thought all man this is thousand dollars a day this is amazing and but it kept growing today's sponsor is monday dot com need help making your first million be direct our sponsor monday dot com is here to help with a weekly dose of the monday dot com motivation so the thing is you know what you want so you gotta ditch the fluff and state your goals straight up send to emails make phone calls network being able to communicate your goal directly makes achieving it that much easier check out monday dot com to see how their color coordinated dashboards improve communication for your team can increase your workflow manage workloads and get you one step closer to getting that money monday dot com alright and the thing i love about you is you're so different than all my other friends here where a lot of people you know you live silicon valley there's a lot of people who love self promotion i'm one of them started a podcast but a lot of people who love twitter they love talking to people they love meeting people they go to networking events they host dinners mh you don't do any of that shit you're like a you know solo guy who just make shit happen and that's really all you're interested and it's just that yeah that very singular laser focus so when this is happening my question is how do you celebrate how do get idea so when you're hitting these milestones or is it just kinda you doing a fist pump in a room or are you talking to somebody just telling your son what yeah how did you celebrate and then i also wanna know how did you get your ideas of hey i should do push off figure sides to the do these next thing so tell me a little bit about both those so once we started making money i you know one thing that i learned is that reinvest right away back in the business like i was only making maybe five grand a month and then i hired a full time person because i knew okay even though business wise is probably not smart like you don't make enough to afford that but i just did it because i knew i can then focus on growth and then that person can focus on the day to day things so after probably six to nine months you know i got a small office and then got first his employee i got some room freelance remote people writing and and helping out some freelancers the audience are so passionate that it was very easy for me to find you know people that just wanna work quite free yeah like you know a help but post stuff on facebook and things like that but that's that's the journey of the it's just often like lonely especially if you're still in the phase of of working from home because yeah you have no people around to celebrate ideas i got from you know because i love doing is like i it it's it's is a super cliche but you know i don't see this work right like it's my hobby if i'm not you know i i love reading i love you know coming up with growth like hacks and and you know ideas on how to drive more traffic in if this might be the entrepreneur test right if you're listening to this right now and you're like you know those like viagra commercials where it's like they describe fifty symptoms at the half a second yeah it's like if feasible you know if any of these plenty you please go see your doctor yeah the way i see what you're describing is the if any of these apply to you please become an entrepreneur which is like most people that you meet they work their sort of ninety five and the objective is to turn off their brain and turn off the work part of their brain so can't wait to you know go home get off that you know the weekend is here alright fantastic oh no mondays monday is back now i have to go apply my brain to this thing that i don't necessarily want to be thinking about yeah whereas it seems like for an entrepreneur there's a certain level of curiosity and obsession that just makes it where you can't turn that part of your brain off you're always thinking of ideas yeah and so that's the you know if those apply to you please go you know please go see your doctor please go see your investor and he'll get a check to to start your business it's it's it's true and it's a blessing and a curse at the same time because i cannot i was at this morning talking with somebody and i said even if i want to i cannot turn off the switch right so it's very hard for me and for my family actually for me to go on vacation right like even not a great date no even though the vacation i you know i work of course i will combine it with doing stuff you know i have to do that for my son it's always spinning sort of speak so it's it's a blessing and and curse so you were saying that's how you're getting ideas you were just constantly of different things to try were you looking at competitors were you talking to advisors or what was your method to get new ideas so i like to reverse engineer shift right so i always look at first at the direct competitors so if you wanna do something look at the market the competitors that are out there and then see what they're doing right and what are they you know not doing so well and just pick ideas from that then i looked at you know sites that were not competitors but are doing great in content in general and then just had you know oh they you know they're building a list would push notifications let me try that oh i see here in quiz you know figure out what kind of dog are maybe we can you know change this into a soap opera actor quiz right right stuff like that and then you're you're not trying to be a genius you're trying to get the result yes if somebody else has an idea that's getting good results yeah you'll try yeah reverse engineer and you told me i think maybe the first time we went out to dinner mh because i was like it was something around why soap why you even try soaps to begin with and you had said something like tell the story where you said you saw somebody selling a website like this and he you know the guy was asking for a hundred thousand dollars and you were like i mean i don't even have i don't even have a hundred dollars to give you for this but if you're selling it for a hundred thousand that means there must be some value here is is that how it went down for that part so still to now i always like to look at these marketplaces where people buy and sell websites i think you can learn a lot they write a whole summary and give access to the p and ls and then so you as an example where would i go if i wanted to find websites that are for sale quite light brokers is actually one of the biggest one it's a it's like a see it as a real estate broker where they have a couple website listings and then you can buy or so right i was on there this morning actually i was at yes went to quite because i hadn't heard of quiet light i had seen some of the different shopify yeah buy sell ones and i went to quiet line you're right i mean you just see hey i have a business i sell leather products and i'm doing two million a year in sales yeah hey that's kinda interesting let me see you know whether you wanna buy it or you wanna take inspiration and sort of come up with similar businesses exactly strategy yeah it's it's a really good way to get inspiration and then see so maybe you look at the summary you look at the website you look at the the numbers the p and l and he said wow they're already doing two million but the site is shitty and the you know like opportunities to yeah add value at value and then you can eat to decide okay maybe i you know see if i can buy it or you start from scratch i had no money so in that same period when i was building those fan pages i saw a listing on flipper about soap opera mh and rent the summary and hung god this is interesting and you know but the price was way too high it was a hundred thousand dollars so i said okay let's just you know see and just build it from scratch herself right yeah it's like real estate right you go you know you see these listings you say hey go raise the rents but sometimes if you have no money the beauty of the internet is it's like you can go build building yeah just like that you know in in the real world okay well i can't go build my own building but what you were able to do in maybe six to eight months was you've built your own building hey i can't buy that one but i can build my own yeah and so so what at what point did you realize this is gonna work this is gonna be successful at a scale that it's even bigger than i originally thought yeah what was that turning point i still remembered it was december i think twenty seven it was when i was testing different articles and different times to post and different things and but that day was the first day we made a hundred dollars but it was really calculate okay we post on this time this kind of article cool and it's all sort of fell the place so you made a hundred bucks but you knew you would make the hundred bucks it was yes it was it was not luck no you got a system yeah you got now i got finally i was working on a system and it was kinda of working out kinda of working at but now it was like it fell in place okay now the strategy the blueprint it's it's it's working and then now it's just a matter of scaling you know getting more fans to the defend pages building you know find different ways to get traffic and and you know more content so now was more a matter of scaling so to speak and what worked with scaling what were some of the were some of the techniques that really worked the biggest was building the email list that was also a huge hedge for because back then this was before facebook you know it started screwing up the news feed so to speak right the algorithm so once facebook was student that every publisher including me we saw a huge drop in reach so less or less people would go to our sites from facebook so i had to hedge that risk so to speak by building an email list and also facebook groups so up to today actually facebook groups still really really powerful and did you see that coming or was this a reaction oh shit facebook turned off the traffic we better do something or did you sort of anticipate that the first time around was on this like i nobody really knew and then you know the news came out and then suddenly the the traffic came email but the second time the big update by the time i had a couple advisers one sam who runs the hustle and another adviser that used to work at facebook so he told me you know like in big lines like you know okay i don't know exactly how or what to when but i know you know mark zuckerberg vision is really you know not pro publisher sort to speak you know he really wants people you know so make sure you hedge like you know focus on facebook groups focus on getting into you know as you know google google news and things like that so a little birdie told you a little i had yes you should you should look at this yes i don't strongly emphasize you should look at don't put all your eggs in one basket it and and and still to today like when i buy or sell or or buy start side it's like i i want a diverse traffic traffic yeah no i don't wanna be hundred percent depending on google hundred percent even email or hundred percent you know a push notification from all these the emails still the the the best bet but you know even google can make any change tomorrow and then you know you don't get traffic you used to go right and so you you know you you're going down this path and in different businesses there's a a moment and there's this guy ben h who's a venture capitalist in the city for h and he he has this term that he likes to use w f i wi and what that stands for is where f it's over meaning something goes so horribly wrong that you're unsure if you can really recover from it were there any of those moments it sounds like the facebook traffic thing could have been one of those moments but your very calm cool collected guy so i don't know did you ever have that panic did you ever hit the panic button say yeah this this is it where we're after it might be over i think he'd never lose that as an entrepreneur that you don't know what's gonna happen right like what is the right decision so several times i was thinking okay should i sell now or should i wait if i don't wanna wait too long because maybe things change and then my traffic goes down and then the value of my company is much less i cannot sell it anymore or nobody wants to buy it right or i was also because i was only writing about soap opera and soap opera are the only four airing like only four in the united states ten twelve years ago they were like twelve or thirteen like you know they did the soap fabric get canceled so i i was also you know thinking oh man what happens if two soap opera brothers get canceled then i don't have content to write about or less content right and then nobody will buy it so i was that was like you know when for example the soap opera would sign the contracts with the networks like those were the time match shit should i sell it should i not like trying to get information you know trying to get inside information from the network works you know so did you talk to any of the soap opera folks do they know who you are mh yes and did you have to pretend were you like oh a huge fan oh so sorry so not me personally i didn't i didn't talk to them but our riders are right a team yes so after i hired the first one she already had connections with networks and soap opera actors and then some of our other writers one that lived in la he knows all the publishers and the networks and so we got also you know interviews exclusive interviews with soap opera actors we got the spoilers for two weeks out you know so we tried more about like what's gonna happen tomorrow right all that stuff so we had some but i i didn't do it and but even if you didn't have to pretend and i will not do it either like you wouldn't pretend you were told to hey yeah like i i never watched an episode i don't watch it you know i'm sorry it's but you know i i love the the audience so i love you know yeah i like the traffic so the fan base is amazing and so when you advise people if somebody came to you for advice mh are you one of those people who says listen to what i say not what i do as in follow your passion hey i'm not i'm not doing that necessarily with the topics i'm writing about or the company's kinda customers i'm serving i'm not wanna you know i'm not scratching my own itch mh i'm not super passionate about that space but you do it anyways do you think that's a good strategy or it's just a strategy that works for you and maybe not advisable for others to follow yeah so that's also i think one thing why i don't really like because nowadays in the news in your facebook you see so many of these so claimed guru and then like the six steps to this and the four steps to that you know it makes me cringe because what works for me doesn't work for somebody else i think you really you know every person is different i think what work for me would will not work for lot of other people it's but in my case i think my passion is not so much the content doesn't really matter my passion is entrepreneurship the you know the journey of starting something not knowing what the outcome is and trying to find creative ways to to make it happen so for me i like you have a product service or content soap opera content side whatever it is and then you have traffic that you need to drive there so for me is like figuring out okay how can we get as much traffic for as cheap as possible from point a to point b right and that's for me the game that i like to if you were selling paper clips or or car cups exactly it doesn't matter it doesn't matter right it's the game of driving traffic customers or however you see it from point a to point b as cheap as possible it so that's that's a little bit my you get to the you get to the end what why'd did you decide to sell why not keep going because at this point it's a money printer yes i was very lucky at in content you with a very small team very low overheads you can make good revenue and we're talking monthly you're pulling in between four and five hundred thousand in revenue and the overheads was you know hundred something hundred you know depending on the month but we were a very small team in house were was me and three others and then a handful of writers right so it was a very small team where the person doing the ads a day to day person that runs everything and then a video host and editor love it so you got you have this cash count why why sell because you don't get often you know multi two million dollar offerings you know like so i thought it's it's a life changing so somebody just came to or did you you go out and market so first i wanted to say hey can i can i guys sell that so initially i went to ask one of the advisers dave ne one of the founders of bleach report i ask hey how much do you think i could sell this right like and he brought me in touch with an emma merchant acquisition person or a guy however you said it and i hired him and he shopped it around and you know i got some meetings with some companies that were interested in buying it i got horrible offers like you know like one time my revenue for example and one x revenue 1x x revenue and then maybe with a little bit of cash and then the rest of the money i had to wait like you know four years every month that will get a little bit you know they're trying to drip you your money yes it's like the the you know the the private equity play right where they try to repay or pay with the cash flow from the business right so that was not worth then i reach out to the broker i used to work with quite light brokers i bought and sold a couple all their smaller sites through them but i was thought oh this is too big of a website i don't know a lot of people that can afford you know can buy you know did you go in with a number in mind yeah i think that's hard for entrepreneurs right says well what would you sell it for yeah you're like shit a i you know i some days i wake up and this is worth the hundred million and some days i wake up and i said take this off my hands yeah you know so did you have a number in mind how how did you think about it that's true like a lot of especially entrepreneurs that are married to the idea right they think they're their companies were way more than than it actually is by that time i had you know friends that are in the same industry and then you kinda get to know like what standard yeah or like oh this site sold for x y z and so you can see at at different valuations so i had a number of mines that was actually way lower than actually sold it for right and i went to the broker said hey hope thank you guys now listening yeah well this isn't just interesting story too so the broker how that works with when you go to a broker they just look at your last twelve months of profit and then they put a multiple on it so if you did a million dollars in profit they can sell it either between 2x x and five depending on the industry the trends you know right traffic sources all kinds of stuff so when i started the process of selling through the broker you know at that time whatever i was doing in profits it came down to a five million dollar my yeah i'm multiple five million so says okay yeah i will take five million started to process but the whole process takes months too right so because you have to get all your paperwork you know all your p and ls and all your your data room so to speak and then a summary and the interviews and then you start talking with potential buyers so in those months that passed by my revenue just sky so i told the broke i call i still remember like i felt so bad because i felt you know a man this broker worked so hard on my deal and now i'm gonna call him saying hey you know five million is not enough like i i wanna i wanna deal it i wanna stop you know the product like i don't wanna sell it at this moment just wait for a couple of months then the value is much higher i called them and i told him the story as a i listen you know like this happened and he totally un understand so what happened by me pulling the listing whoever was already interested in it now wanted more even more right like i wish i this was a genius friend mine yeah this was pure like just happened so a couple days later whoever first offered five million to say okay i wanna i offer six million and then another so there was a bidding war right between initially three bidder and then two and eventually i had to choose one of them amazing yeah and so by then you you're like this is a good deal now i'm happy with this deal mh you take it you sell the company painful process or was was was you know standard transaction it's a it's an emotional roller coaster because it's a lot of money on on the line my biggest issue was like okay can this person really close like at the end of the day like because you go to to diligence period so first it's not all about price you also need the certainty that they're gonna deliver in their clothes yeah so once they you agree on a price you sign an lo light over intent and then they have x amount of weeks to dig into all your numbers one big mistake one of the many mistakes i made was my books were not as clean as i supposed to like i had other websites i had just one lc llc one bank account you know at very scrappy basic lab of brains of of experiments with on one one books so we had to go literally each item of of all bank statements each line item okay this is not for the soap side this is for that like we had to go through everything they're lawyers my lawyers their cpa my cpa so was a very painful long process and of course there's now looking backward to it is easy but at that moment i think man maybe they're gonna change their mind maybe you know maybe in between the due diligence period my traffic you know facebook makes another update and my traffic goes down and they they pulled a deal you know like that goes through your mind a whole time like man you know let's hurry up yeah it took two months and the the dubai had some issues too that one of the vest pools they're they're funding two weeks before closing and yeah and stuff like that all all the say so it ends up closing does your life change mean this podcast called my first million yeah i think i remember you know thinking hey i had a million bucks in the bank then my life would be so different then i would feel this way i would act this way i would spend this i would do this in reality from doing this podcast talking to people that doesn't seem to be the case what was the what was day one it's yeah that life for you it's super i now screw up this word it's anti cli cli cli yeah so anti cli because i remember when the money came in the bank and you know we was hitting refresh over and over again that i did i was looking for it and and of course i took a screenshot but i you know i got a assumption paying for the office we did a toast and then literally like fifty minutes later we all were about four mails yeah like it was in the next day you know at night i just i had to pick up my son cooked in her you know it's just normal life and then the next day he went back to the office and just work i what did your son say he's he was eight years old at the time or something so does it register brain what you know what what the names no doesn't care it doesn't you no he didn't care i i think it's different when you have really no money and then suddenly you hit a you win a lottery and then the next day you have a lot of money this even though it was relatively quick two to three years but the the website was already doing you know really well very profitable so if i wanted to buy something i most think i was would could already have bought you know so it was not not something oh if i sell this i'm gonna buy you know this and this and this like i didn't have that was just okay now onto the next journey last week and so we can have about ten minutes before the kick us out of here but the questions you know what happens then so you since then you've bought a handful of other websites yes again like a real estate guy you sort of buy it you try to build it up you either run it or sell it from there was that a good idea or bad idea are you happy with how you how you par one thing into the next or would you do it differently i could see that look on your face yes because you know the answer already but yeah no i what i wanted to set up was sort of like a pe kind of set up like a private equity where i could buy you know undervalued internet businesses you know make them better and then resell mh mistake what i did was i bought from totally different there was there's no synergy for the properties i bought it so all the properties are profitable but i would have been just make more sense now looking backwards if i had just around one topic or one like industry so it could be easily i could scale it easily i need less people right less headache or or one business model right because you have saas company yep it's like a that's a b company yep and then you have a content site yep you have a e commerce you know a pet site yeah exactly and you you need different skill levels in different kind of people different models different ways how to drive traffic right so it's it's not that focus when i started the so one thing was on my mind how to drive more traffic how to drive more traffic and and now it's like oh with a you know b2b like we need a sales team for this oh we need you know a content scientist we need you know different things so in we all live learn and now you have a new project new idea that you're cooking up yes almost back to the roots a little bit well in terms of what you doing so let's talk a little bit about what you're doing i'm super excited yeah i'm come on as an investor because i think that this thing is gonna be big so tell us a little bit about it yeah so very quickly novelty is actually an a platform where people can read short romantic stories short romantic novels books on their iphone or tablet either read it or listen to it so it's a book but also an audio version me and sam came up with the idea where we're back and forth we really good friends we always come up with weird than crazy ideas and i we came up with this idea when i still had the soap opera website and i still had access to all these readers so we thought out people that like soap opera probably also reads romantic novel so same story put a really ugly simple wordpress site had somebody write a couple short romantic stories and drove traffic to it see the engagement see people like it or not and the engagement was crazy people were literally like begging in the comments like oh we love this chapter whether when is the next chapter things like that but then i started process of selling the subside so i put this idea on hold to speak okay we can figure it out least later right yeah couple months ago we just revisited it and now we're building an app and it's gonna go live in a couple months it's a same demographic you know like the the middle aged woman that that like to read roman now novels think of these these novels that you growing up saw at the supermarket or the gas station right you know with this cheesy boot cover yeah my mom has read i think like fifty five danielle steele but yes exactly i think some article came out saying she's written more novels than anyone like she's got like three hundred days on the you know three hundred weeks straight on the best seller list there's something crazy with different books as she you know she's a machine yes and then there's you know obviously fifty shades of gray there's twilight there's all these kind of franchises that have been built in the same kind of you a romantic fiction yeah genre and so you see something there do you think that ramp that this romantic story a romantic fiction is yeah is big well a the category is huge does a huge amount of people reading this kind of books but it's also people that read romance novels are also very frequent readers meaning on average in america a person reads five books a year the average romantic novel reader reads every one book every two weeks like you said about your mother like see read many write books right so it's not a lot of people but also they reads a lot of these kind of and there's a lot of subcategories mean i know you have like you know from vampire romantic you know stories so fifty shades of grade to the really cheesy he ones like it's it's you have a lot of subcategories as well i remember as a kid i used to read every sports fiction book i can get my hands on yeah and i think one day i crossed over into that and one of the books in the sports fiction was like a sports romantic fiction or something i remember taking it at home reading at first ten page i was like what is this yeah by the fifteenth page i like alright i'm finishing this this is a great book yeah as an eighth grader i remember that that's so yeah there are all these self genres just within it and so you know what what does success look like what do you think where do you wanna be with this project with novelty you know six months from now six months well six months is okay maybe twelve months yeah right six months we hopefully will be you know launched then and have a good number of of of downloads but in in a year we wanna be at least at a hundred thousand active users and build a platform not just for readers but also for writers i think because i had a lot of writers in the soap hub time i think riders are very undervalued nowadays it it gets more and more difficult for them to make money and for different reasons you know more competition in amazon probably things like that so we want not to also be a really good platform for riders to make more money have access to their audience communicate with their audience with their readers and get also more exposure i think this is a great idea i think that the writers getting that opportunity yeah it's very hard to make a living writing now yeah so knowing that hey if i publish here i will get readers and i'll get money and then on the other side for readers you know there's a reason netflix paid like a hundred million bucks for one more year of friends or you know the office is the number one shows because people love this comfort and familiarity with content they love that if they can just push a button and then they will feel a certain way as i push a button and get an emotion yeah and that's really what comes of you know if you build a platform like this because somebody will be able to push a button they'll know what they're getting out of it it's not like opening up amazon and saying here's a bookstore yeah go find what you want this is saying hey you wanna you know here's a great story it's a our fiction story and they'll be trained to say hey if i want that feeling if i want that type of entertainment yeah this is the app to go to i really think this is this has a lot of potential and excited yeah see what you can do yeah we're excited to and alright it's great so we'll we'll wrap it up there everyone's been awesome having you here you know i would normally say hey where can people find you this is your chance to shout out your social media or wherever self promotion yeah i don't think i i don't think you even have anything there if if somebody has like i always like to help and advise or or you know if people have a specific question they can find me linkedin if you look ramon van me right then you can shoot me a message awesome well thank you so much for coming it's been awesome hanging with you and i believe we have a a spartan race this saturday to go to so yes i will we'll see you in the mud yeah very soon alright awesome thank you so much with