Greatest Hits #3 - Selling a Blog For $9m with Ramon van Meer

Shaan (@ShaanVP) interviews Ramon Van Meer (@ramonvanmeer) on his journey to selling his blog. Ramon has never seen a soap opera. Yet somehow, he built the most popular soap opera blog on the planet - and was raking in millions per year! Today's conversation is about how he got the idea and flipped a $49 WordPress theme into a multi-million dollar payday. --------- * Want to be featured in a future episode? Drop your question/comment/criticism/love here: https://www.mfmpod.com/p/hotline/ * Support the pod by spreading the word, become a referrer here: https://refer.fm/million * Have you joined our private Facebook group yet? Go to https://www.facebook.com/groups/ourfirstmillion and join thousands of other entrepreneurs and founders scheming up ideas. --------- Show notes: * (7:32) Who is Ramon van Meer? * (10:50) Why Ramon decided to focus on soap operas * (16:25) Ramon's mindset while building his business * (21:31) How Ramon built a 350k mailing list with quizzes * (30:00) How Ramon comes up with ideas for businesses * (35:30) The moments Ramon thought he would fail * (39:55) Why did Ramon decide to sell?

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Shaan Puri?

  This episode is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network. What is the HubSpot Podcast Network? That's right, it's a new thing by HubSpot. They started with our podcast and now they're branching into more and more podcasts with experts in different business areas. So you might have a podcast about marketing, or sales, or operations, or customer service. And we're going to go over through the different podcasts on this network. Some are more entertaining, some are more informational, some are a good mix of both. That's what we try to do here. And HubSpot's goal here is to have on-demand mentors. So if you're an entrepreneur, you're a startup, or you're scaling up, you're going to be able to hear practical tips and inspirational stories by listening to the different podcasts on their network, which by the way, I think this is a smart idea. Too many brands just try to sell you their thing.

• 0:46Shaan Puri?

  HubSpot, I love their approach here. They're like, let's put out great valuable free content and help more companies succeed. And the more companies that we help succeed, the more will eventually come back to us, sort of like a good karma kind of thing. So listen, learn, and grow with HubSpot Podcast Network, hubspot.com/podcastnetwork.

• 1:05Sam Parr?

  All right, so I love huge companies, I love big visions, I love all that stuff. But a lot of people complain to me when they listen to the podcast. They go, Sam, I like these big, huge ideas, these hundred million, billion dollar ideas. These are fun to discuss, yada, yada, yada. But I wanted to know about something that I can just create a great living on, let alone, I mean, I don't care if it gets big, I just want to make a living. And today is a great episode that addresses that. So this is an old episode that Sean did a couple of years ago. And the guest is one of my best friends. His name's Ramon Van Meere. He created a content site that was making something like $400,000 a month in profit. And he eventually sold it for close to $10 million in cash.

• 1:48Sam Parr?

  I was a small shareholder and I got to see the behind the scenes on how he built it. And it was really cool. And Ramon inspires me for a couple of reasons. The first is that he's an immigrant, he's a single dad, and he came here without a lot of opportunity in front of him, and he kind of made it work. And Ramon's a bulldog, he just gets it done. So he's inspiring, but it's also exciting because I love content businesses a ton. And I know a lot of you love content businesses. And this story is about a content business, and not just any content business, it's about one that might shock you. It's about... Soap operas. Yes, soap operas. Ramon Van Mayer built this company called Soap Hub. That was the most popular soap opera website, kinda like TMZ or

• 2:31Sam Parr?

  or episode recaps, but for soap operas. It was the largest in the space. It was one of the largest soap operas blogs in the space. It only took him about 24-ish months to build this thing. And in this episode, he goes through a lot of detail on how he got traffic. So we got a lot of traffic from Facebook groups, which is something that you can still do, by the way. Facebook groups crush it. They crush it for my company and they're still great. And he goes step by step how he did that. He also talks about how he hired writers. He talks about how he monetized through advertising. It's just really fascinating and this is the type of company that if you're listening and you're willing to spend 40 hours a week doing it, I would bet everything that if you give it six months of 40 hour work weeks, you totally can start a company like this that makes a really good living.

• 3:15Sam Parr?

  And so this story is great because we're going to talk about a small business. So something that grew to like something like 5 million ish in sales in a very short amount of time. And 5 million seems like a lot, but it started small, like a couple grand a month and then like 10s of thousands of dollars a month and whatever. It's really good. So it starts small. Second, it's about content. A lot of people are interested in content businesses. Ramon didn't know anything about the content business. In fact, he's an English as a second language type of person. So he didn't, he's not that great of a writer, but he built a really cool content business and it's kinda like a puzzle to him and he'll talk step by step how he did that. And third, a lot of people say follow your passion. Some people say don't follow your passion. I err on the side of I tend to start stuff that I really care about, but not Ramon. I mean, he doesn't, he's a 40 year old dude, single dad.

• 4:00Sam Parr?

  He doesn't watch soap operas, but he built this really wonderful business on soap operas because he's not passionate about soap operas. He's passionate about building companies and I think most of you probably fall into that category. So you have to listen to how this guy builds his life. It's so fascinating because he has, there's no excuses to why he's not going to succeed. He just says, I don't care. I'm going to do it. I'm gonna get it done. I'm gonna run through a wall. I'm gonna, I'm gonna make it happen. And Ramon is one of my best friends and he's a huge inspiration to me. He's one of my mentors. He's a person I really look up to and I think you guys would like the story. He's gonna talk about how he built Soap Hub. You can find it now, soaphub.com. He sold it for something like nine ish million dollars. And he's gonna talk about that story about how he grew it and he sold it. And Sean does a really good job of asking questions. So give it a listen. See you.

• 4:48Shaan Puri?

  At this point, it's a money printer.

• 4:50Speaker 02

  I was very lucky that in content, you with a very small team, very low overhead.

• 4:56Shaan Puri?

  And we're talking monthly, you're pulling in.

• 4:58Speaker 02

  Between 400,000 and 500,000 in revenue.

• 5:05Shaan Puri?

  What's up, guys? Sean here. I'm doing a special little introduction to this episode from my phone. This week's conversation was with Ramon Van Mir. And Ramon is a really interesting dude, and this episode is going to be different than most episodes. I would say that majority of the guests, when I have them on, they are intimidatingly 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 to 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 I know."

• 5:48Shaan Puri?

  And he means it with love because what Ramon does is he doesn't overcomplicate things. And you're going to hear that in his story. For example, the essence of his story, and 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 $49 WordPress template because he doesn't know how to code. He outsourced the 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 Our Lives, Young and the Restless, that's like soap operas. And he's never even seen an episode of a soap opera.

• 6:32Shaan Puri?

  And so somehow, this guy who can't code, can't write, and never watched soap operas, built a blog filled with, you know, daily stories about soap operas. And, you know, the business started printing money, generating hundreds of thousands of dollars a month before selling it for about $9 million. And so Ramon is one of the most humble guys I've ever met in 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 can build a very simple business, and he's going to tell you about that. So, hope you enjoy the episode. If you do...

• 7:15Shaan Puri?

  Leave a review, shout me out on Twitter, do something so that I hear you guys. That's what gets me excited 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. All right, enjoy.

• 7:31Shaan Puri?

  Okay. Ready to go?

• 7:33Speaker 02

  Let's do this.

• 7:34Shaan Puri?

  All right.

• 7:35Speaker 02

  Sometimes I get asked 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. I don't like to talk too much about myself, it's just, I don't know why. So sometimes it gets awkward. A friend of mine asked me to do a TV segment for him. It was not a TV, like, national TV, nobody would really see it. But as soon as he hit the record on the camera, then I started mumbling and

• 7:59Shaan Puri?

  You froze.

• 8:00Speaker 02

  I froze, yeah, so.

• 8:02Shaan Puri?

  All right, well, we'll try to

• 8:02Speaker 02

  I'm gonna do my best.

• 8:03Shaan Puri?

  We'll try not to freeze. This one's informal, without even doing an intro, so I'm doing a podcast. The podcast is called My First Million. And the idea is, I want to talk to different founders, entrepreneurs like you, who have hit their first million, million dollars, million downloads, million subscribers, something, some huge milestone. And I want to find out how they did it. And so I wanted you to come on because you have a wild, wild story about how you hit your first million. Very unorthodox, very different than, you know, even most of the Silicon Valley success stories, yours is totally different. So let's start with the very simple question.

• 8:41Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 8:41Shaan Puri?

  How did you make your first million?

• 8:43Speaker 02

  All right, nobody will guess this and nobody believes it when I tell them. I started a blog about soap operas. It's a news, news blog that will write about the running soap operas and

• 8:55Shaan Puri?

  We're talking like Days of Our Lives, Young and the Restless.

• 8:59Speaker 02

  Exactly, and the first question people always ask, oh, are you a soap opera watcher? 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 built it and sold it in three years later.

• 9:15Shaan Puri?

  Wow, so, okay, so, so the story is gonna be, you decide to make a soap opera blog. God knows why.

• 9:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:23Shaan Puri?

  You somehow were able to make a soap opera blog successful despite never watching a soap opera.

• 9:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:28Shaan Puri?

  You sold it, how long ago?

• 9:29Speaker 02

  Ten, eleven months ago.

• 9:30Shaan Puri?

  Alright, so eleven months ago, you sell it for, say, nine and a half million?

• 9:34Speaker 02

  Little bit, uh, below nine million, eight point seven five.

• 9:38Shaan Puri?

  Eight point seven five million cash?

• 9:40Speaker 02

  Cash, yes.

• 9:41Shaan Puri?

  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.

• 9:49Speaker 02

  I had no investors, I bootstrapped it, I had some advisors, I think I owned like ninety-eight percent still.

• 9:55Shaan Puri?

  Wow.

• 9:55Speaker 02

  And then I gave, you know, some shares or some profit to employees, but yeah.

• 10:00Shaan Puri?

  Okay, love it. So, okay, so we're gonna go in, so how does this start? Why even create a soap opera blog to begin with?

• 10:06Speaker 02

  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 posted, a lot of your fans would see it.

• 10:28Shaan Puri?

  So are we talking like the BuzzFeed upworthy days when they were getting a ton of traffic off Facebook?

• 10:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I knew, okay, how to drive traffic from Facebook to a website. I just didn't know what the topic would be. So is it a, should I sell product or service or content? If a content, what kind of content? So I just.

• 10:49Shaan Puri?

  And take me back, are you just at home?

• 10:51Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 10:51Shaan Puri?

  Alone in a room thinking about this? You're just brainstorming on a whiteboard?

• 10:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, eight hundred and square feet apartment, me and my son together and just brainstorming ideas.

• 11:00Shaan Puri?

  And what was your son's ideas? What was he, what was he thinking?

• 11:02Speaker 02

  Actually, he has, actually has a 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. 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 would just drive some traffic to it or build some likes, hate, and then. Post some random pictures and then see the engagement. So some fan page is really bomb. I had ten thousand fans. I post a picture and I get two likes or whatever, right? Okay, horrible engagement. 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.

• 11:47Shaan Puri?

  Before Trump?

• 11:47Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 11:48Shaan Puri?

  VT.

• 11:49Speaker 02

  Way 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 posted pictures of of people that were not in the show and um things like that, but the engagement was crazy.

• 12:19Shaan Puri?

  The engagement was probably higher then. People got outraged.

• 12:22Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly. So I built a simple WordPress site. I bought a team from Team Forest, put it on WordPress.

• 12:29Shaan Puri?

  Are you a technical guy? I mean, what's your, because a lot of people get stuck, right? You know, hey, I want to build this website.

• 12:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:36Shaan Puri?

  I can't code. Do I go learn Python the hard way? Do I go buy this course and try to become a developer? Do I try to outsource it?

• 12:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:44Shaan Puri?

  Do I try, you know, WordPress theme?

• 12:46Speaker 02

  So I 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 is also. So I am technical, but I didn't code anything too. But like this website I built in a couple hours was a WordPress, a team, a very simple logo. Because I'm a I I I'm just a believer, like trying a lot of different things.

• 13:18Shaan Puri?

  Fast.

• 13:19Speaker 02

  Fast. And then see if something works, then you, you know, optimize or make it better or make it look better or faster, just things like that. But, you know, 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 then it 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, I have an accent. English is not my first language, so writing is also not my strong point.

• 14:02Speaker 02

  So went on Upwork, back then was called Odesk.

• 14:05Shaan Puri?

  So this breaks all the rules, by the way.

• 14:07Speaker 02

  It's yeah.

• 14:07Shaan Puri?

  You know, founder market fit, zero.

• 14:11Speaker 02

  Passionate.

• 14:11Shaan Puri?

  Passion.

• 14:12Speaker 02

  Zero.

• 14:13Shaan Puri?

  Exactly. Skill, skill set, zero. Can't write. I decided to start a blog.

• 14:17Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 14:18Shaan Puri?

  But you knew one thing. So for recapping the kind of what you had, what you didn't have. All 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.

• 14:33Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 14:33Shaan Puri?

  And then whatever that Facebook page is, and you tried 20 of them, WWE and pets and whatever. And then take that traffic on the, take the likes on the Facebook page, turn it into website traffic.

• 14:42Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 14:43Shaan Puri?

  And so you did their testing period. You decide soaps is the one I'm going to do because the engagement's high, using the data. It's all good. And now you got your blog up, but you don't have the content wheel going.

• 14:54Speaker 02

  Yeah. So went on a website called Odesk is where you can hire freelancers from writers to video editors to anything you can imagine. Put an ad out, hey, I'm starting a soap opera blog, looking for a writer. And very lucky, I found an editor, writer that used to write for a print soap opera magazine 20 years ago. She watched all the shows. She's in the industry for many, many years, so she knows.

• 15:19Shaan Puri?

  That's how people used to solve this problem. They would buy the magazine. They would say, it would talk about that week's drama in the soap. And then magazines just were too slow for the new world.

• 15:29Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly. So that was also a luck that there were competitors, but it's like the old school media competitors. It was like these magazines that have been around for 20, 40 years.

• 15:40Shaan Puri?

  What's like a big magazine that covers soaps?

• 15:42Speaker 02

  The biggest one is called Soap Opera Digest.

• 15:45Shaan Puri?

  Okay.

• 15:45Speaker 02

  It's been around, I think, 40, 50 years.

• 15:47Shaan Puri?

  Straight to the point.

• 15:48Speaker 02

  They have a website, but. Their main focus up to the last couple of years was always their magazine.

• 15:54Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 15:55Speaker 02

  So.

• 15:55Shaan Puri?

  You love that because you see this incumbent who's, you know, they're from the print world. They have a website. Website's like a PDF, basically.

• 16:02Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 16:02Shaan Puri?

  So you know, when you see that the website reminds you of a PDF, it's like this is a good market to go.

• 16:06Speaker 02

  It's a good market. So found her, started with one article a day and just test out and see how it works. Up to now, actually, she's still working with the new owners of.

• 16:17Shaan Puri?

  Unbelievable.

• 16:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:19Shaan Puri?

  And so she starts cranking out content and give me your mindset. I mean, are you, are you pretty certain that this is gonna work? How are you paying the bills at this point? Like, take me back to, because I know it works, right? The spoiler of this podcast, shit worked out, sold the company, you know, that worked. So, but I think it's important to go back when it wasn't clear that it was gonna work.

• 16:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:38Shaan Puri?

  You have some belief, but like, again, I want to know, how were you paying the bills? And then what was your certainty level on this? Or were you still hedging your bets with other things?

• 16:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's always easy to look backwards, like, you know, oh, of course it's, you know, it works. In my case, every person I told this idea to told me, you know, you're crazy, like, this is never gonna work. Soaps, like, who watches that?

• 16:58Shaan Puri?

  And why didn't you listen to them? You're just a stubborn guy or what?

• 17:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, and because, you know, I like to keep trying things until I see it doesn't work and then 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 content, you need a lot of traffic to really make money. You know, back then I was just using only Google Ads, so the banners on my website. Even after a couple of weeks, I made like two dollars a day and then four dollars, you know, I couldn't, you know, I paid more for the article than. Turn. But what kept me 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 to twenty or thirty thousand likes.

• 17:46Speaker 02

  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. It's content that is. Every day like soap operas are aired every single day for fifty two weeks straight. They have some blackout days, but basically it's

• 18:08Shaan Puri?

  These are new episodes.

• 18:09Speaker 02

  New episodes every

• 18:11Shaan Puri?

  How do they do this?

• 18:12Speaker 02

  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 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, set.

• 18:35Shaan Puri?

  It's not Game of Thrones we're talking about.

• 18:37Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly. So it's a lot of content. And when you write about the topic or you think about, you know, starting a content site, you also want to think, okay, is there going to be enough content to write about? So for example, if you do a Game of Thrones blog, you're kind of limited because it only airs two, three months. I don't know, actually a year.

• 18:57Shaan Puri?

  This season was six episodes and now it's done.

• 18:59Speaker 02

  And it's done, right?

• 19:00Shaan Puri?

  Six Sundays.

• 19:01Speaker 02

  Yeah. So that's not a lot of content.

• 19:05Shaan Puri?

  To be fair, are you, are you a Game of Thrones fan?

• 19:07Speaker 02

  No.

• 19:07Shaan Puri?

  Okay. So to be fair, you could write an infinite amount of content just complaining now about the ending and the last season.

• 19:13Speaker 02

  Start a petition.

• 19:14Shaan Puri?

  Right, start a petition, exactly. All right, let's talk about one of the most important parts of any business, your CRM, right? This is where you see who are my prospects, who are my customers, who are my hardcore customers? And you want to have conversations, you want to have information about them that goes throughout all stages of the customer journey. So HubSpot's CRM platform, it's easy to align your team using the features that they have like their messaging tools, live chat, email templates, and having a unified system of record. So how does it work? You can install live chat on your website and this will let sales and customer support talk to your prospects. You could send marketing emails on behalf of your sales reps to, to your, to your customers. You can have prospects book meetings with your reps without wasting time.

• 19:56Shaan Puri?

  And all of this is stored in one unified system of record so that teams can get access to all of your contact history. Why is it so important to have live chat and a unified system of record, you ask? Great question. It's because when you're all your systems are separate, you're just cobbling together data from one place and data from another. It's all disjointed. There's no single source of truth. What I like when I'm the CEO of a company is to be able to click one button and see who are our customers, where are they at in the journey? How do we quickly message them? How do we get them moving forward to success? So that's what it does. That's HubSpot CRM. And if you want to learn about how you can scale your company without scaling complexity, go to hubspot.com. So Soap Upers had this unique property, daily content, new content every day. I mean, what is your article about?

• 20:39Shaan Puri?

  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 quiz?

• 20:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, so because I didn't know anything about the audience, I had to learn like, what did they like? What did they read? So I tried everything, but it was very obvious people like to read what's gonna happen tomorrow or the next day or next week.

• 21:02Shaan Puri?

  Like a theory or a spoiler?

• 21:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, really spoilers.

• 21:07Shaan Puri?

  Just like the answer, this is what's gonna happen.

• 21:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, like, oh, Jake is gonna, you know, leave Mary tomorrow, you know? That kind of articles really

• 21:17Shaan Puri?

  Did well.

• 21:17Speaker 02

  Did well. Like, I think 80% of our traffic came from spoiler or spoiler-related articles.

• 21:23Shaan Puri?

  Unbelievable.

• 21:24Speaker 02

  Then, of course, we did, you know, to get more content out, because the more content you put out, the more traffic you get, you know, more traffic, more revenue. So we did, we wrote about recaps for the people that missed an episode. We did, you know, what days of our lives character are you? But it was more a quiz to capture emails. I really used that as a, as an email list building tool. That did really well. Like, we built over 300, I think, close to 350, 350,000 emails. We collected with these, you know, silly quizzes.

• 21:54Shaan Puri?

  Right. You said the first few months, you're trying to get traffic. First four or five months, not very much traffic. You know, two bucks a day in AdSense type of thing.

• 22:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:03Shaan Puri?

  But you keep going because you see the engagement.

• 22:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:06Shaan Puri?

  And did you have a day job at the time? I mean, how did you live? You know, it's you and your son at home. How are you paying the bills?

• 22:12Speaker 02

  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 bought my shares paid a year long every month. So that was exactly what I needed to pay my bills. So that was, you know, was was my luck that, you know, I could then, you know, just do other things.

• 22:38Shaan Puri?

  Are you the type where, you know, did your mind ever go, I should I should just get a job? Or were you just bullheaded of like, no, I need to create these websites and own them and and make a business out of that?

• 22:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, I've been an entrepreneur, like I've been so many different businesses. Like I had some jobs when I was eighteen, nineteen, but basically I always had my own companies. So it was never a thought of, okay, if the soap 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.

• 23:06Shaan Puri?

  Right, I'll try pets, I'll try politics, I'll try something else. Okay, and so, all right, so let's go back in. So you you you're building up the traffic. And what's the, what was the inflection point? Why did things go from a little bit of traffic, a little bit of ad revenue to? Give me a sense, where did the traffic get to over time? What was like the peak of it, of traffic?

• 23:25Speaker 02

  It was like very slow, 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, 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.

• 23:54Shaan Puri?

  Awesome. And you were you're buying traffic at this point still, or at some point, did you just stop buying and you just started making the content people shared?

• 24:01Speaker 02

  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 all organic.

• 24:12Shaan Puri?

  Wow.

• 24:12Speaker 02

  Yeah. And then I only started boosting posts on Facebook, like buying, you know, like paying for traffic a year after.

• 24:19Shaan Puri?

  So we're talking like you spent hundreds, in the hundreds of dollars. My math's not great, but I think that one penny, something like that, you spent under a thousand dollars total.

• 24:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:28Shaan Puri?

  Unpaid for this website.

• 24:29Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 24:29Shaan Puri?

  Built that asset up into something that you were able to sell for almost nine million bucks. So that's tremendous, tremendous type of return. Is that what you thought was possible? Or were you thinking this will make me ten K a month, then I'll figure something else out?

• 24:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, when I started, I thought, 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, 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 goal was a hundred dollars a day. And then very quickly was a thousand dollars a day. And then I thought, oh, man, this is a thousand dollars a day. This is amazing. And but it kept growing.

• 25:15Shaan Puri?

  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 in 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. 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 in. It's just that, that very singular laser focus. So when this is happening, my question is, how do you celebrate? How do you get ideas? So when you're hitting these milestones, is it just kind of you doing a fist pump in a room? Are you talking to somebody, you're just telling your son?

• 25:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:55Shaan Puri?

  How did you celebrate? And then I also want to know, how did you get your ideas of, hey, I should do push notifications, I should do these next things? So tell me a little bit about both those.

• 26:02Speaker 02

  So once we started making. Money, I, you know, one thing that I learned is that reinvesting 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 employee, I got some freelance remote people writing and helping out, some freelancers.

• 26:42Speaker 02

  The audience is so passionate that it was very easy for me to find, you know, people that just wanna work for free. Yeah, like, you know, help, post stuff on Facebook and things like that. But that's the journey of the entrepreneur, it is often, like, lonely, especially if you're still in the phase of working from home. Because, yeah, you have no people around to celebrate. Ideas I got from, you know, because I love doing this, like, it's a super cliche, but, you know, I don't see it as work, right? Like, it's my hobby. If I'm not, you know, I love reading, I love, you know, coming up with growth, like, hacks and, you know, ideas on how to drive more traffic and...

• 27:19Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, 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 in half a second. It's like, if these belong, you know, if any of these apply to you, please go see your doctor.

• 27:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:31Shaan Puri?

  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 nine to 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, all right, fantastic. Oh, no, Monday's, Monday is back. Now I have to go apply my brain to this thing that I don't necessarily want to be thinking about.

• 27:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:57Shaan Puri?

  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.

• 28:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:07Shaan Puri?

  And so that's the, you know, if those apply to you, please go see, you know, please go see your doctor. Please go see your investor and go get a check to start your business.

• 28:14Speaker 02

  It's, it's, it's true and it's a blessing and a curse at the same time because I cannot, I was 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.

• 28:28Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 28:29Speaker 02

  Like.

• 28:29Shaan Puri?

  You're not, you're not a great date.

• 28:30Speaker 02

  No, even on 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, so to speak. So it's, it's a blessing and, and a curse.

• 28:43Shaan Puri?

  So you were saying that's how you're getting ideas. You were just constantly thinking of different things to try. Were you looking at competitors? Were you talking to advisors? Or what, what was your method to get new ideas?

• 28:54Speaker 02

  So I like to reverse engineer shit, right? So I always look at first at direct competitors. So if you want to do something, look at the markets, 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 with push notifications. Oh, let me try that. Oh, I see here a quiz, you know, figure out what kind of dog you are. Hey, maybe we can, you know, change this into a soap opera actor quiz, right?

• 29:32Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 29:32Speaker 02

  Stuff like that. And then.

• 29:34Shaan Puri?

  You're not trying to be a genius. You're trying to get the result.

• 29:37Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 29:38Shaan Puri?

  If somebody else has an idea that's getting good results.

• 29:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:41Shaan Puri?

  You'll try it.

• 29:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, reverse engineer.

• 29:43Shaan Puri?

  And you told me, I think, uh, maybe the first time we went out to dinner.

• 29:46Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 29:47Shaan Puri?

  Cause I was like, it was something around why soaps? Why did 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?

• 30:08Speaker 02

  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.

• 30:18Shaan Puri?

  And then so you could. What's an example? Where would I go if I wanted to find websites that are for sale?

• 30:23Speaker 02

  Quiet Light Brokers is actually one of the biggest ones. It's like a, see it as a real estate broker where they have a couple of website listings and then you can buy or sell.

• 30:33Shaan Puri?

  Right. I was on there this morning, actually. I was looking at, yeah, I went to Quiet, because I hadn't heard of Quiet Light. I had seen some of the different Shopify.

• 30:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:41Shaan Puri?

  Buy, sell ones. And I went to Quiet Light and 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.

• 30:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:50Shaan Puri?

  Hey, that's kind of interesting. Let me see, you know, whether you want to buy it or you want to take inspiration and sort of come up with similar businesses.

• 30:56Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 30:56Shaan Puri?

  That's a strategy.

• 30:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a, 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, their P and L, and you say, wow. They're already doing two million, but their site is shitty and, you know, like.

• 31:13Shaan Puri?

  Opportunities to add value.

• 31:14Speaker 02

  Add value. And then you can either 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 operas. And read the summary and I thought, 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 or sell.

• 31:41Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 31:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 31:43Shaan Puri?

  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 a building.

• 31:51Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 31:52Shaan Puri?

  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 built your own building. Hey, I can't buy that one, but I can build my own.

• 32:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:02Shaan Puri?

  And so, so what, at what point did you realize this is going to work? This is going to be successful at a scale that's even bigger than I originally thought?

• 32:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:10Shaan Puri?

  What was that turning point?

• 32:11Speaker 02

  I still remember 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 calculated. Okay, we'll post on this time, this kind of article. And it all sort of fell into place.

• 32:29Shaan Puri?

  So you made a hundred bucks, but you knew you would make the hundred bucks.

• 32:32Speaker 02

  It was.

• 32:32Shaan Puri?

  Yes. It was, it was not luck.

• 32:34Speaker 02

  No.

• 32:34Shaan Puri?

  You had a system.

• 32:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, you got a, now I got finally, I was working on a system and it was kind of working now, kind of working, 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 fan pages, building, you know, find different ways to get traffic and, and, you know, more content. So now it was more a, a, a matter of scaling, so to speak.

• 33:04Shaan Puri?

  And what worked with scaling? What were some of the, what were some of the techniques that really worked?

• 33:08Speaker 02

  The biggest was building the email list. That was also a huge hedge for, because back then, this was before Facebook, you know, started screwing up the news feed, so to speak, the algorithm. So once Facebook was doing that, every publisher, including me, we saw a huge drop in reach. So less and less people would go to our site 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 is still really, really powerful.

• 33:44Shaan Puri?

  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?

• 33:52Speaker 02

  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 out. But the second time, the big update, by the time I had a couple advisors, one Sam Parr, who runs the hustle, and another advisor that used to work at Facebook. So, you know, he told me, you know, like in big lines, like, you know, okay, I don't know exactly how or what or when, but I know, you know, Mark Zuckerberg's vision is really, you know, not pro publisher, so to speak, you know, he really wants people, you know, so make sure you hedge, like, you know, focus on Facebook groups and focus

• 34:34Speaker 02

  on getting into, you know, as, you know, Google, Google News and things like that.

• 34:40Shaan Puri?

  A little birdie told you.

• 34:42Speaker 02

  A little, I had, yes.

• 34:43Shaan Puri?

  You should, you should look at this.

• 34:45Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 34:46Shaan Puri?

  I strongly emphasize that you should look at this.

• 34:49Speaker 02

  Don't put all your eggs in one basket and, and, and still to today, like when I buy or sell or, or buy, start a site, it's like I, I want the first.

• 35:01Shaan Puri?

  Traffic.

• 35:01Speaker 02

  Traffic, yeah. I don't want to be 100% depending on Google, 100% even email or 100% you know, push notification. From all these, the email is still the best bet, but you know, even Google can make any change tomorrow and then you know, you don't get the traffic you used to get.

• 35:18Shaan Puri?

  Right. And so you, you know, you're going down this path and in different businesses, there's a moment and there's this guy Ben Horowitz, who's a venture capitalist in the city for Andreessen Horowitz and he, he has this term that he likes to use WFIO, wefo. And what that stands for is we're effed, 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 you're a very calm, cool, collected guy. So I don't know, did you ever have that panic? Did you ever hit the panic button and say,

• 35:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:56Shaan Puri?

  This is it. We're effed. It might be over.

• 35:58Speaker 02

  I think you'd never lose that as an entrepreneur is 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 want to 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.

• 36:21Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 36:21Speaker 02

  Or I was also, because I was only writing about soap operas and soap operas are the only four airing, like only four in the United States. 10, 12 years ago, there were like 12 or 13, like you know, the soap opera get canceled. So I was also, you know, thinking, oh man, what happens if two soap operas get canceled? Then I don't have content to write about or less content.

• 36:46Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 36:46Speaker 02

  And then nobody will buy it. So I was, that was like, you know, when for example, the soap operas would re-sign the contracts with the networks, like those were the times, man, shit, should I sell it? Should I not? Like trying to get information, you know, trying to get inside information from the networks, you know?

• 37:05Shaan Puri?

  So did you talk to any of the soap opera folks? Do they know who you are?

• 37:08Speaker 02

  Hmm, yes.

• 37:09Shaan Puri?

  And did you have to pretend? Were you like, I'm a huge fan?

• 37:11Speaker 02

  Oh, so sorry. So not me personally. I didn't, I didn't talk to them, but our writers, our writer 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 publicists and the networks. And so we got also, you know, interviews, exclusive interviews with soap opera actors. We got spoilers for two weeks out, you know, so we tried more about like, what's gonna happen tomorrow?

• 37:41Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 37:42Speaker 02

  All that stuff. So we had some, but I, I didn't do it. And but even if.

• 37:45Shaan Puri?

  You didn't, you didn't have to pretend.

• 37:47Speaker 02

  And I would not do that either, like.

• 37:49Shaan Puri?

  You wouldn't have pretended. You wouldn't have told him, hey.

• 37:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, like.

• 37:51Shaan Puri?

  You never watched an episode.

• 37:53Speaker 02

  I don't watch it, you know, I'm sorry. It's, but you know, I, I love the, the audience. I love, you know.

• 37:59Shaan Puri?

  Love the traffic.

• 38:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, I love the traffic. So the fan base is amazing.

• 38:03Shaan Puri?

  And so when you advise people, if somebody came to you for advice,

• 38:07Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 38:07Shaan Puri?

  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 companies, kind of the customers I'm serving. I'm not one of, you know, I'm not scratching my own itch.

• 38:20Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 38:21Shaan Puri?

  I'm not super passionate about that space.

• 38:23Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 38:24Shaan Puri?

  But you do it anyways. 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?

• 38:30Speaker 02

  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-called gurus and then the six steps to this and the four steps to that.

• 38:42Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 38:42Speaker 02

  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 worked for me will not work for a 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 the 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, a service, a content, a soap opera. Content site, whatever it is, and then you have traffic that you need to drive there. So for me, like figuring out, okay, how can we get as much traffic for as cheap as possible

• 39:27Speaker 02

  from point A to point B?

• 39:28Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 39:28Speaker 02

  And that's for me, the game that I like to.

• 39:30Shaan Puri?

  If you were selling paper clips or cardboard cups, it doesn't matter.

• 39:34Speaker 02

  It doesn't matter.

• 39:35Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 39:35Speaker 02

  It's the game of driving traffic, customers, whoever you see it from point A to point B, as cheap as possible.

• 39:42Shaan Puri?

  Love it.

• 39:42Speaker 02

  So that's, that's a little bit my.

• 39:44Shaan Puri?

  You get to the, you get to the end, what, why'd you decide to sell? Why not keep going? Cause at this point, it's a money printer.

• 39:50Speaker 02

  Yes, I was very lucky that in content, you, with a very small team, very low overhead, you can make good revenue.

• 39:59Shaan Puri?

  And we're talking monthly, you're pulling in?

• 40:02Speaker 02

  Between four and five hundred thousand in revenue and overhead was, you know, a 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. 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.

• 40:25Shaan Puri?

  Love it. So you got, you have this cash cow. Why, why sell?

• 40:29Speaker 02

  Because you don't get often, you know, mill to million dollar offerings, you know, like, so I thought it's, it's a life-changing.

• 40:38Shaan Puri?

  So somebody just came, or did you?

• 40:39Speaker 02

  No.

• 40:40Shaan Puri?

  Did you go out and market it?

• 40:41Speaker 02

  So first I wanted to see, hey, can I, can I even sell it? So initially I went to ask one of the advisors, Dave Nemets, one of the founders of Bleacher Report, I asked him, hey, how much do you think I could sell this, right? Like, and he brought me in touch with an emerging acquisition person or a guy, however you say 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.

• 41:13Shaan Puri?

  One X revenue.

• 41:14Speaker 02

  One 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 I would get a little bit, you know?

• 41:23Shaan Puri?

  Ah, they're trying to drip you your money.

• 41:25Speaker 02

  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.

• 41:33Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 41:34Speaker 02

  So that was not worth it. Then I reached out to the broker. I used to work with quite light brokers. I bought and sold a couple other smaller sites through them. But I always thought, oh, this is too big of a website. I don't know a lot of people that can afford, you know, can buy. Did you go in with a number in mind? Yeah. That's hard for entrepreneurs, right? Yeah. Somebody says, well, what would you sell it for? Yeah. You're like, shit, if I know, you know, I, some days I wake up and this is worth a 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 did, how did you think about it? That's true. Like a lot of especially entrepreneurs that are married to their idea. Right. They think their, 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 kind of get to know like. There's a standard.

• 42:17Speaker 02

  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 in mind that was actually way lower than I actually sold it for. Right. And I went to the broker. Hope, hope that guy's not listening. Yeah. Well, it's an interesting, interesting story too. So the broker, how that works with, when you go to a broker, they just look at your last 12 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 two X and five X. Depending on the industry, the trend, you know. Right.

• 42:53Speaker 02

  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 profit. It came down to a five million dollar. Multiple. Yeah, multiple five million. So I was okay, yeah, I will take five million. Started the process, but the whole process takes months too. Right. So like, because you have to get all your paperwork, uh, you know, all your P and Ls and all your, your data rooms, so to speak. And then a summary and interviews, and then you start talking with potential buyers. So in those months that passed by, my revenue just skyrocketed. So I told the broker, I call him, I still remember, like, I felt so bad because I felt, you know, oh, man, this broker has worked so hard on my deal.

• 43:38Speaker 02

  And now I'm gonna call him saying, hey, you know, five million is not enough. Like, I, I wanna, I wanna delay, I wanna stop, you know, the, like, I don't wanna sell it at this moment. Just wait for a couple more months, then the value is much higher. I called him and I told him the story, I said, listen, you know, like, this happened and he totally understand it. So what happened by me pulling the listing, whoever was already interested in it now wanted

• 44:01Shaan Puri?

  More.

• 44:01Speaker 02

  Even more.

• 44:02Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 44:02Speaker 02

  Like, I wish this was a genius plan of mine.

• 44:05Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 44:05Speaker 02

  This was a pure, like, just happened. So a couple of days later, whoever first offered five million, they say, okay, I wanna, uh, I offer six million. And then another, so there was a bidding war.

• 44:17Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 44:18Speaker 02

  Between initially three bidders and then two, and eventually I had to choose one of them.

• 44:24Shaan Puri?

  Amazing.

• 44:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:25Shaan Puri?

  And so by then, you, you're like, hey, this is a good deal now. I'm happy with this deal. You take it, you sell the company, painful process or was, was, was, you know, standard transaction?

• 44:37Speaker 02

  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 through due diligence period. So first.

• 44:50Shaan Puri?

  It's not all about price. You also need the certainty that they're gonna deliver and they're gonna close.

• 44:55Speaker 02

  Yeah. So once they, you agree on a price, you sign an LOI, letter of 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 was supposed to. Like, I had other websites, I had just one LC, one bank account, you know, at very scrappy, basic.

• 45:21Shaan Puri?

  Ramon's, uh, lab of brain state of, of experiments were all on one, one books.

• 45:25Speaker 02

  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. Their lawyers, my lawyers, their CPA, my CPA. So it was a very painful, long process. And of course, there's now looking back for this is easy. But at that moment, I think, oh, man, maybe they're gonna change their minds. 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 the whole time, like, man, you know, let's hurry up. Yeah, it took two months. And the buyer had some issues too, that one

• 46:06Speaker 02

  of the investors pulled their their funding two weeks before closing. And yeah, stuff like that.

• 46:12Shaan Puri?

  All the adventures. Okay, so it ends up closing. Does your life change? I mean, this podcast's called My First Million.

• 46:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 46:18Shaan Puri?

  I think I remember, you know, thinking, hey, if 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 of that life for you?

• 46:37Speaker 02

  It's super, and I always screw up this word, it's anticlimaxal.

• 46:40Shaan Puri?

  Anticlimatic.

• 46:41Speaker 02

  Climatic?

• 46:42Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 46:43Speaker 02

  So anticlimatic, because I remember when the money came in the bank, and, you know.

• 46:52Shaan Puri?

  Were you just hitting refresh over and over again?

• 46:54Speaker 02

  That I did. I was looking for it. And and of course, I took a screenshot. But I, you know, I got some champagne for the office, we did a toast. And then literally like 15 minutes later, we all were back to work.

• 47:07Shaan Puri?

  Answering emails, yeah.

• 47:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, like, it was, and the next day, you know, at night, I just, I had to pick up my son, cook dinner, you know, it's just normal life. And then the next day, went back to the office and just work.

• 47:18Shaan Puri?

  What did, what did your son say? He's, he was eight years old at the time or something? So does it register in his brain, you know, what this means?

• 47:25Speaker 02

  No.

• 47:25Shaan Puri?

  Doesn't care?

• 47:25Speaker 02

  It doesn't, 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.

• 47:43Shaan Puri?

  Very profitable.

• 47:44Speaker 02

  So if I wanted to buy something, I most things I was would could already have bought, you know. So there 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. It was just, okay, now on to the next journey, so to speak.

• 47:59Shaan Puri?

  And so we got about ten minutes before they kick us out of here, but the the questions, you know, what happens then? So you, since then, you've bought a handful of other websites.

• 48:09Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 48:10Shaan Puri?

  Again, like a real estate guy, you sort of buy it, you try to build it up, you either run it or you sell it from there. Was that a good idea or bad idea? Are you happy with how you how you parlayed one thing into the next? Or would you do it differently now? I can see that look on your face.

• 48:24Speaker 02

  Yes, because you know the answer already. But yeah, no, I what I wanted to set up was sort of like a P E kind of setup, like a private equity where I could buy, you know, undervalued internet businesses, you know, make them better and then resell them. Mistake what I did was I bought from totally different, there was, there's no synergy for the properties I bought. So all the properties are profitable, but it 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, less headache.

• 49:04Shaan Puri?

  Or or one business model, right? Because you have a SaaS company.

• 49:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 49:07Shaan Puri?

  It's like a, that's a B two B company.

• 49:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 49:09Shaan Puri?

  And then you have a content site.

• 49:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 49:11Shaan Puri?

  You have an e-commerce, you know, a pet site.

• 49:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. And you you need different skill levels and different kind of people, different models, different ways how to drive traffic. So it's it's not that focused. When I started, so one thing was on my mind, how to drive more traffic, how to drive more traffic. And and now it's like, oh, we have a, you know, B two B, like, we need a sales team for this. Oh, we need, you know, a content site. We need, you know, different things. So we all live and learn.

• 49:38Shaan Puri?

  And now you have a new project, new idea that you're cooking up.

• 49:41Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 49:42Shaan Puri?

  Almost back to the roots a little bit in terms of what you're doing. So let's talk a little bit about what you're doing. I'm super excited.

• 49:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 49:48Shaan Puri?

  I'm come on as an investor because I think that this thing is going to be big. So tell us a little bit about it.

• 49:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, so very quickly, Novelie is actually 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, we were back and forth, we are really good friends, we always come up with weird and 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, oh, people that like soap operas probably also reads romantic novels. So same story, put a really ugly, simple WordPress site up, had somebody write a couple of short romantic stories and drove traffic to it,

• 50:36Speaker 02

  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, when is the next chapter, things like that. But then I started a process of selling the soap site. So I put this idea on hold, so to speak. Okay, we can figure it out this later.

• 50:54Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 50:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, a couple of months ago, we just revisited and now we're building an app and it's gonna go live in a couple of months. It's a same demographic, you know, like the the middle aged woman that that like to read romance novels. Think of these, these novels that you, growing up, saw at the supermarket or the gas station, you know, with this cheesy book cover.

• 51:15Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, my mom has read, I think, like fifty-five Danielle Steele books.

• 51:20Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly.

• 51:20Shaan Puri?

  She's, 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 bestseller list or something crazy with different books as, you know, she's a machine.

• 51:33Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 51:34Shaan Puri?

  And then there's, you know, obviously Fifty Shades of Grey, there's Twilight, there's all these kind of franchises that have been built in this same kind of, you know, romantic fiction.

• 51:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 51:44Shaan Puri?

  Um, genre. And so you see something there. You think that rom- that this romantic stories or romantic fiction is. Yeah, it's big.

• 51:51Speaker 02

  Well, A, the category is huge. There's 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 she read many books, right? So it's not a lot of people, but also they read a lot of these kind of. And there's a lot of subcategories. You know, you have like, you know, from vampire romantic, you know, stories to Fifty Shades of Grey, to the really cheesy ones, like it's, it's, you have a lot of subcategories as well.

• 52:30Shaan Puri?

  I remember as a kid, I used to read every sports fiction book I could get my hands on.

• 52:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 52:36Shaan Puri?

  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 home, reading it first 10 pages. I was like, what is this?

• 52:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 52:46Shaan Puri?

  By the 15th page, I was like, all right, I'm finishing this book. This is a great book.

• 52:49Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 52:50Shaan Puri?

  As an eighth grader, I remember that.

• 52:51Speaker 02

  That's so funny.

• 52:52Shaan Puri?

  So yeah, there are all these subgenres just within it. And so, you know, what, what does success look like? What do you think? Where do you want to be with this project with Novally, you know, six months from now?

• 53:02Speaker 02

  Six months? Well, six months is.

• 53:03Shaan Puri?

  Okay, maybe 12 months.

• 53:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, okay. Six months, we hopefully will be, you know, launched and, and have a good number of, of, of downloads. But in, in a year, we want to 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 writers are very undervalued nowadays. It, it gets more and more difficult for them to make money and for different reasons, you know, more competition, Amazon, probably things like that. So we want Novally to also be a really good platform for writers to make more money, have access to their audience, communicate with their audience, with their readers, and get also more exposure.

• 53:45Shaan Puri?

  I think this is a great idea. I think that the writers getting that opportunity.

• 53:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 53:49Shaan Puri?

  It's very hard to make a living writing now.

• 53:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 53:51Shaan Puri?

  So knowing that, hey, if I publish here, I'll 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 Your 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. It's like push a button, get an emotion.

• 54:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 54:13Shaan Puri?

  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.

• 54:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 54:22Shaan Puri?

  Go find what you want. This is saying, hey, you want to, you know, here's a great story. It's a romantic fiction story. And they'll be trained to say, hey, if I want that feeling, if I want that type of entertainment.

• 54:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 54:32Shaan Puri?

  This is the app to go to. I really think this has a lot of potential. I'm excited to see what you can do with it.

• 54:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, we're excited too.

• 54:38Shaan Puri?

  And all right, it's great. So we'll wrap it up there. Ramon, it'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.

• 54:47Speaker 02

  Self promotion.

• 54:48Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I don't think, I don't think you even have anything there.

• 54:52Speaker 02

  If, if somebody has, like, I always like to help and advise or, you know, if people have a specific question. They can find me on LinkedIn. If you look Ramon Venmier.

• 55:01Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 55:02Speaker 02

  Then you can shoot me a message.

• 55:04Shaan Puri?

  Awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming. It's been awesome hanging with you and I believe we have a Spartan race this Saturday to go to, so.

• 55:11Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 55:11Shaan Puri?

  I will, I will see you in the mud very soon.

• 55:14Speaker 02

  All right.

• 55:14Shaan Puri?

  Awesome.

• 55:15Speaker 02

  Thank you so much, buddy.