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

Ramon Van Meer (@ramonvanmeer) 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.

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  At this point, it's a money printer. I was very lucky that in content, you with a very small team, very low overhead. We're talking monthly, you're pulling in. Between 400,000 and 500,000 in revenue.

• 0:16Shaan Puri?

  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 10 on the Apple iTunes rankings, which is really crazy. And I thank everybody who downloaded the episode, subscribed, left a review, Venmo'd me a dollar. Everybody who supported the show, thank you very much. You know, the rankings, they 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 midway through the episode, but I just think it's cool. We're the Money Podcast.

• 0:58Shaan Puri?

  We talk to people about how they made their money. And it's only right that we 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.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.com to organize the podcast because there was so much stuff going on. I gotta book guests, I gotta send stuff to the editor, I gotta do this and that. Any project, it just starts getting super busy. And so, Monday.com was 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

• 1:43Shaan Puri?

  that the sponsor is something that I actually use and really like. So, shout out to them for coming on board. This week's conversation was with Ramon Van Meere. And Ramon is a really interesting dude. And this episode is gonna be different than most episodes. I would say that... Majority of the guests, when I have them on, they are intimidatingly smart. Um, 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."

• 2:27Shaan Puri?

  And he means it with love because what Ramon does is he doesn't overcomplicate things. And you're gonna hear that in his story. For example, the, 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, uh, 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.

• 3:11Shaan Puri?

  And so somehow, uh, this guy who can't code, can't write, and never watched soap operas, built a blog filled with, you know, daily, daily stories about soap operas and, uh, you know, the business started printing money, generating, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars a month, uh, before selling it for about nine million dollars. And so, uh, 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 gonna tell you about that. So, hope you enjoy the episode.

• 3:52Shaan Puri?

  If you do, leave a review, shout me out on Twitter, uh, do something so that I hear you guys. Uh, that's what gets me excited to, to keep making the show happen. Uh, I don't have to do the show, I do it because I love it and, um, I really appreciate everything that happened after the first episode. All right, enjoy.

• 4:09Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 4:11Shaan Puri?

  Ready to go.

• 4:11Speaker 00

  Let's do this.

• 4:12Shaan Puri?

  All right.

• 4:13Speaker 00

  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 to record on the camera, then I started mumbling and.

• 4:38Shaan Puri?

  You froze.

• 4:38Speaker 00

  I froze, yeah, so.

• 4:40Shaan Puri?

  All right, well, we'll try.

• 4:41Speaker 00

  I'm gonna do my best.

• 4:41Shaan 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. Uh, yours is totally different. So let's start with the very simple question.

• 5:19Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 5:19Shaan Puri?

  How did you make your first million?

• 5:21Speaker 00

  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.

• 5:33Shaan Puri?

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

• 5:37Speaker 00

  Exactly. And 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.

• 5:54Shaan Puri?

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

• 5:58Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 5:59Shaan Puri?

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

• 6:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 6:06Shaan Puri?

  You sold it, how long ago?

• 6:07Speaker 00

  Ten, eleven months ago.

• 6:08Shaan Puri?

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

• 6:13Speaker 00

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

• 6:16Shaan Puri?

  Eight point seven five million cash?

• 6:18Speaker 00

  Cash, yes.

• 6:19Shaan 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.

• 6:27Speaker 00

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

• 6:33Shaan Puri?

  Wow.

• 6:34Speaker 00

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

• 6:39Shaan 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?

• 6:45Speaker 00

  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 will see it.

• 7:07Shaan Puri?

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

• 7:13Speaker 00

  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.

• 7:27Shaan Puri?

  And take me back, are you just at home?

• 7:29Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 7:29Shaan Puri?

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

• 7:33Speaker 00

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

• 7:38Shaan Puri?

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

• 7:40Speaker 00

  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.

• 7:51Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 7:51Speaker 00

  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, paid, and then post some random pictures and then see the engagement. So some fan pages really bombed. 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, you know.

• 8:25Shaan Puri?

  Before Trump?

• 8:25Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 8:26Shaan Puri?

  VT.

• 8:27Speaker 00

  Way before Trump. Politics, I really didn't like because especially, you know, one site 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.

• 8:58Shaan Puri?

  The engagement was probably higher then. People got outraged.

• 9:00Speaker 00

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

• 9:08Shaan 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.

• 9:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 9:14Shaan 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?

• 9:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 9:22Shaan Puri?

  Do I try, you know, WordPress theme?

• 9:25Speaker 00

  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 to. Like, this website I built in a couple hours. It 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.

• 9:57Shaan Puri?

  Fast.

• 9:57Speaker 00

  Fast and then see if something works, then you, you know, optimize or make it better or make it look better or faster, 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.

• 10:40Speaker 00

  So went on Upwork, back then was called Odesk.

• 10:43Shaan Puri?

  So this breaks all the rules, by the way, it's.

• 10:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 10:46Shaan Puri?

  You know, founder market fit, zero.

• 10:49Speaker 00

  Passion.

• 10:50Shaan Puri?

  Passion, zero.

• 10:51Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 10:51Shaan Puri?

  Skill, skill set, zero, can't write, and I decided to start a blog.

• 10:56Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 10:57Shaan 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.

• 11:11Speaker 00

  Correct.

• 11:11Shaan Puri?

  And then whatever that Facebook page is, and you tried twenty 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.

• 11:20Speaker 00

  Correct.

• 11:21Shaan Puri?

  And so you did your testing period, you decide soaps is the one I'm gonna 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.

• 11:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, so went on a website called Odesk, it's 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, I'm looking for a writer. And very lucky, I found an editor, writer that used to write for.

• 11:51Speaker 00

  Print Soap Opera Magazine twenty years ago. She watched all the shows, she's in the industry for many, many years, so she knows.

• 11:58Shaan Puri?

  Right, and that's how people used to solve this problem. They would buy the magazine, it would say, it would talk about that week's drama.

• 12:04Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 12:04Shaan Puri?

  In the soap, and then magazines just were too slow for the new world.

• 12:07Speaker 00

  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 twenty, forty years.

• 12:18Shaan Puri?

  What's like a big magazine that covers soaps?

• 12:20Speaker 00

  The biggest one is called Soap Opera Digest.

• 12:23Shaan Puri?

  Okay.

• 12:23Speaker 00

  It's been around, I think, forty, fifty years.

• 12:26Shaan Puri?

  Straight to the point.

• 12:26Speaker 00

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

• 12:33Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 12:33Speaker 00

  So.

• 12:34Shaan 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.

• 12:40Speaker 00

  Yes, exactly.

• 12:40Shaan Puri?

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

• 12:45Speaker 00

  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 uh.

• 12:56Shaan Puri?

  Unbelievable.

• 12:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 12:57Shaan 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.

• 13:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 13:16Shaan Puri?

  You have some belief, but like, again, I wanna 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?

• 13:24Speaker 00

  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, it's never gonna work. Soaps, like, who watches that?

• 13:36Shaan Puri?

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

• 13:39Speaker 00

  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.

• 13:59Shaan Puri?

  Mm-hmm.

• 13:59Speaker 00

  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.

• 14:11Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 14:11Speaker 00

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

• 14:46Shaan Puri?

  These are new episodes.

• 14:47Speaker 00

  New episodes every.

• 14:49Shaan Puri?

  How do they, how do they do this?

• 14:51Speaker 00

  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.

• 15:14Shaan Puri?

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

• 15:15Speaker 00

  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 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 kind of limited because it only airs two, three months. I don't know, actually, a year.

• 15:35Shaan Puri?

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

• 15:37Speaker 00

  And it's done, right? So then.

• 15:39Shaan Puri?

  Six Sundays.

• 15:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, so that's not a lot of uh content.

• 15:43Shaan Puri?

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

• 15:45Speaker 00

  No.

• 15:45Shaan Puri?

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

• 15:52Speaker 00

  Start a petition.

• 15:53Shaan Puri?

  Right, start a petition, exactly. So soap operas 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?

• 16:11Speaker 00

  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. So.

• 16:23Shaan Puri?

  Like a theory or a spoiler?

• 16:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, really spoilers. And.

• 16:27Shaan Puri?

  Just like the answer. This is what's going to happen.

• 16:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, like, oh, Ja- Jake is gonna, you know, leave Mary tomorrow, you know, and that kind of articles really.

• 16:37Shaan Puri?

  Did well.

• 16:37Speaker 00

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

• 16:43Shaan Puri?

  Unbelievable.

• 16:43Speaker 00

  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, 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 three hundred, I think, close to three fifty, three hundred and fifty thousand emails. We collected with these, you know, silly quizzes.

• 17:14Shaan Puri?

  Right. You said the first few months, you're trying to get traffic, first four or five months, not very much traffic.

• 17:20Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 17:20Shaan Puri?

  You know, two bucks a day in AdSense type of thing.

• 17:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:23Shaan Puri?

  But you keep going because you see the engagement.

• 17:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:26Shaan 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, how are you paying the bills?

• 17:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I had an online travel agency company before with my, uh, 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. So that was exactly what I needed to pay my bills. So that was, you know, it was, was my luck that, you know, I could then, you know, just do other things.

• 17:58Shaan 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?

• 18:07Speaker 00

  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.

• 18:26Shaan Puri?

  Right, I'll try pets, I'll try politics, I'll try something else.

• 18:28Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 18:29Shaan Puri?

  Okay, and so, all right, so let's jump 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?

• 18:45Speaker 00

  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.

• 19:14Shaan 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 and people shared?

• 19:21Speaker 00

  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.

• 19:32Shaan Puri?

  Wow.

• 19:32Speaker 00

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

• 19:39Shaan Puri?

  So we're talking like you spent hundreds, in the hundreds of dollars.

• 19:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:42Shaan Puri?

  My math's not great, but I think that one penny, something like that, you spent under a thousand dollars total.

• 19:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:48Shaan Puri?

  Unpaid for this website.

• 19:49Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 19:49Shaan Puri?

  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 were you thinking this will make me ten K a month, then I'll figure something else out?

• 20:02Speaker 00

  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.

• 20:35Shaan Puri?

  Today's sponsor is Monday.com. Need help making your first million? Be direct. Our sponsor, Monday.com is here to help with a weekly dose of the Monday.com motivation. See, the thing is, you know what you want, so you gotta ditch the fluff and state your goals straight up. Send emails, make phone calls, network. Being able to communicate your goal directly makes achieving it that much easier. Check out Monday.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.com. All right. 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.

• 21:17Shaan Puri?

  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? 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.

• 21:53Speaker 00

  So, once we started making money, I, you know, one thing that I learned is that reinvesting right away back into 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 uh writing and and helping out some freelancers. The audience is so passionate that it was very easy for me to find, you know, uh people that just wanna

• 22:38Speaker 00

  work for free. Yeah, like, you know, help but post stuff on Facebook and things like that. But that's that's the journey of the entrepreneur. It is 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 this, like I it's it's it's 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 and.

• 23:10Shaan 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 at the end of a second. It's like if these belong, you know, if any of these apply to you, please go see your doctor.

• 23:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 23:22Shaan 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.

• 23:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 23:48Shaan Puri?

  Whereas it seems like for an entrepreneur, there's a certain level of curiosity and obsession that just makes it where you you can't turn that part of your brain off. You're always thinking of ideas.

• 23:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 23:58Shaan 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 and go get a check to to start your business.

• 24:05Speaker 00

  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.

• 24:19Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 24:20Speaker 00

  Like.

• 24:20Shaan Puri?

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

• 24:22Speaker 00

  No, I 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.

• 24:34Shaan 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?

• 24:45Speaker 00

  So I like to reverse engineer shit, right? So I always look at first at 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 with push notifications. Oh, let me try that. Oh, I see here in 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?

• 25:23Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 25:23Speaker 00

  Stuff like that. And then.

• 25:25Shaan Puri?

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

• 25:28Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 25:29Shaan Puri?

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

• 25:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 25:32Shaan Puri?

  You'll try it.

• 25:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, reverse engineer.

• 25:34Shaan Puri?

  And you told me, I think, uh, maybe the first time we went out to dinner. Cause I was like, it was something around why so, 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 that how it went down for that part?

• 25:59Speaker 00

  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.

• 26:10Shaan Puri?

  So what's an example? Where would I go if I wanted to find websites that are for sale?

• 26:14Speaker 00

  Quiet 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 of website listings and then you can buy or sell.

• 26:25Shaan Puri?

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

• 26:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 26:41Shaan Puri?

  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.

• 26:47Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 26:47Shaan Puri?

  Strategy.

• 26:48Speaker 00

  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, the, uh, P and L and he said, wow. They're already doing two million, but their site is shitty and, you know, like.

• 27:04Shaan Puri?

  Opportunities to.

• 27:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 27:05Shaan Puri?

  Add value.

• 27:05Speaker 00

  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 ourselves.

• 27:32Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 27:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 27:34Shaan 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 building 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.

• 27:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 27:53Shaan Puri?

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

• 28:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 28:01Shaan Puri?

  What was that turning point?

• 28:02Speaker 00

  I still remember it was December, I think, twenty seven. It was when I was testing different articles and different times to pose 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.

• 28:20Shaan Puri?

  So you made a hundred bucks, but you knew you would make the hundred bucks. It was like, it was, it was not luck.

• 28:25Speaker 00

  No.

• 28:25Shaan Puri?

  You had a system.

• 28:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, you got a, now I got finally, I was working on a system and it was kind of working now, it's 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.

• 28:55Shaan Puri?

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

• 28:59Speaker 00

  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 newsfeed, 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 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 is still uh really, really powerful.

• 29:35Shaan 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?

• 29:43Speaker 00

  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 that 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 on getting into, you know,

• 30:27Speaker 00

  as you know, Google, Google News and things like that.

• 30:31Shaan Puri?

  Ah, so a little birdie told you.

• 30:33Speaker 00

  A little, I had, yes.

• 30:34Shaan Puri?

  You should, you should look at this.

• 30:36Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 30:37Shaan Puri?

  I strongly emphasize that you should look at this.

• 30:40Speaker 00

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

• 30:52Shaan Puri?

  Traffic.

• 30:52Speaker 00

  Traffic, yeah. Not, 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 email is still the the 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.

• 31:09Shaan Puri?

  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 Horowitz, who's a venture capitalist uh in the city for Andreessen Horowitz, and he he has this term that he likes to use. W F I O, W F O. And what that stands for is.

• 31:28Speaker 00

  We're effed, it's over.

• 31:29Shaan Puri?

  Uh, 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 I don't know. Did you ever have that panic? Did you ever hit the panic button and say?

• 31:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:47Shaan Puri?

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

• 31:50Speaker 00

  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 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.

• 32:12Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 32:12Speaker 00

  Or I was also, because I was only writing about soap operas. And soap operas are, there're only four airing, like only four in the United States. Ten, twelve years ago, there were like twelve or thirteen, like, you know, they the the soap opera get cancelled. So I was also, you know, thinking, oh, man, what happens if two soap operas get cancelled? Then I don't have content to write about or less content.

• 32:37Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 32:37Speaker 00

  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?

• 32:56Shaan Puri?

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

• 32:59Speaker 00

  Hmm, yes.

• 33:00Shaan Puri?

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

• 33:02Speaker 00

  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 L A, he knows all the publicists and the networks. And so we got also, you know, interviews, uh, exclusive interviews with soap opera actors. We got spoilers for two weeks out, you know, so we write more about like what's gonna happen tomorrow.

• 33:33Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 33:33Speaker 00

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

• 33:36Shaan Puri?

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

• 33:38Speaker 00

  And I would not do it either, like.

• 33:40Shaan Puri?

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

• 33:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, like.

• 33:42Shaan Puri?

  Never watched an episode.

• 33:44Speaker 00

  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.

• 33:50Shaan Puri?

  Love the traffic.

• 33:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, love the traffic. So the fanbase is amazing.

• 33:54Shaan Puri?

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

• 33:58Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 33:58Shaan 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.

• 34:11Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 34:12Shaan Puri?

  I'm not super passionate about that space.

• 34:14Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 34:15Shaan 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?

• 34:22Speaker 00

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

• 34:33Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 34:33Speaker 00

  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 would 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.

• 35:12Speaker 00

  So for me, it's like figuring out, okay, how can we get as much traffic for as cheap as possible from point A to point B?

• 35:19Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 35:19Speaker 00

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

• 35:22Shaan Puri?

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

• 35:25Speaker 00

  It doesn't matter.

• 35:26Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 35:26Speaker 00

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

• 35:33Shaan Puri?

  Love it.

• 35:33Speaker 00

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

• 35:35Shaan 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.

• 35:42Speaker 00

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

• 35:50Shaan Puri?

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

• 35:53Speaker 00

  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.

• 36:17Shaan Puri?

  Love it. So you got.

• 36:18Speaker 00

  You have this cash cow, why, why sell? 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. So somebody just came to, or did you, did you go out and market it? 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 position, person or 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.

• 36:59Speaker 00

  I got horrible offers, like, you know, like one time my revenue, for example. One X revenue? 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. 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 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, you know. Did you go in with a number in mind? You think that's hard for entrepreneurs, right?

• 37:43Speaker 00

  Somebody says, well, what would you sell it for? Yeah. You're like, shit if I, no, 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. Uh, 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 their idea, 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. 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. And I went to the broker. Hope, hope that guy's not listening. Yeah, well, this is an interesting, interesting story too.

• 38:26Speaker 00

  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. 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.

• 38:57Shaan Puri?

  Multiple.

• 38:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, multiple, five million. So I was okay, yeah, I will take five million. Started the process, but the whole process takes months too. 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 called, I still remember, like, I felt so bad because I felt, you know, oh, 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 delay, I wanna stop, you know, the pro- like, I don't wanna sell it at this moment, just wait for a couple more months, then the value is much higher.

• 39:41Speaker 00

  I called him and I told him the stories, I listened, 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.

• 39:52Shaan Puri?

  More.

• 39:52Speaker 00

  Even more.

• 39:53Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 39:53Speaker 00

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

• 40:08Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 40:09Speaker 00

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

• 40:15Shaan Puri?

  Amazing.

• 40:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 40:16Shaan 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?

• 40:28Speaker 00

  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 due diligence period. So first.

• 40:42Shaan Puri?

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

• 40:46Speaker 00

  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, a very scrappy, basic.

• 41:12Shaan Puri?

  Ramones, uh, lab of brain, of experiments, we're all on one, one books.

• 41:16Speaker 00

  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 mind, maybe, you know. Maybe in between the due diligence period, my traffic, you know, Facebook makes another uh, uh, 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.

• 41:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, it took two months and the buyer had some issues too, that one of the investors pulled their, their funding two weeks before closing. And yeah, stuff like that.

• 42:03Shaan Puri?

  All, all the adventures, okay, so, so it ends up closing, does your life change? I mean, this podcast is called My First Million.

• 42:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 42:09Shaan 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?

• 42:28Speaker 00

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

• 42:31Shaan Puri?

  Anticlimatic.

• 42:32Speaker 00

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

• 42:43Shaan Puri?

  Were you just hitting refresh over and over again?

• 42:45Speaker 00

  Uh, that I did. I was looking for it and and of course I took a screenshot. But I, you know, I got uh some champagne for the office. We did a toast. And then literally like fifteen minutes later, we all were back to work. Yeah, like it was in 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.

• 43:09Shaan 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, what this means?

• 43:16Speaker 00

  No.

• 43:16Shaan Puri?

  Doesn't care.

• 43:17Speaker 00

  It doesn't, no, he didn't care. Uh, 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.

• 43:34Shaan Puri?

  Very profitable.

• 43:35Speaker 00

  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.

• 43:50Shaan 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?

• 44:00Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 44:01Shaan 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? Well, well, 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.

• 44:15Speaker 00

  Yes, because you know the answer already. But yeah, no, I, wha- 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 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 to, I could scale it easily. I need less people.

• 44:54Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 44:55Speaker 00

  Less headache.

• 44:55Shaan Puri?

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

• 44:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 44:58Shaan Puri?

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

• 45:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 45:00Shaan Puri?

  And then you have a content site.

• 45:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 45:02Shaan Puri?

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

• 45:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. And you all, you need different skill levels, different kind of people, different models, different ways how to drive traffic.

• 45:11Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 45:12Speaker 00

  So it's it's not that focus. 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, with 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.

• 45:28Shaan Puri?

  And.

• 45:29Speaker 00

  We all live and learn.

• 45:29Shaan Puri?

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

• 45:32Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 45:33Shaan 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.

• 45:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 45:39Shaan 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.

• 45:43Speaker 00

  Yeah. So very quickly, Novelie 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, we were back and forth, we were 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

• 46:25Speaker 00

  and drove traffic to it, see the engagement, see if 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 process of selling the soap site, so I put this idea on hold, so to speak. Okay, we can figure it out later.

• 46:45Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 46:46Speaker 00

  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.

• 47:07Shaan Puri?

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

• 47:11Speaker 00

  Yes, exactly.

• 47:12Shaan Puri?

  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 she, you know, she's a machine.

• 47:24Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 47:25Shaan 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.

• 47:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 47:35Shaan Puri?

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

• 47:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 47:42Shaan Puri?

  Is big.

• 47:42Speaker 00

  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.

• 48:05Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 48:05Speaker 00

  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. I 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.

• 48:21Shaan Puri?

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

• 48:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 48:27Shaan 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 ten pages. I was like, what is this?

• 48:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 48:37Shaan Puri?

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

• 48:40Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 48:41Shaan Puri?

  As an eighth grader, I remember that. Uh, 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 Novely, you know, six months from now?

• 48:53Speaker 00

  Six months? Well, six months is.

• 48:54Shaan Puri?

  Okay, maybe twelve months.

• 48:55Speaker 00

  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 under valued 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 Novely 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.

• 49:36Shaan Puri?

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

• 49:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 49:40Shaan Puri?

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

• 49:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 49:42Shaan 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 year of Friends. Or, you know, The Office is the number one show is 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.

• 50:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 50:04Shaan 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.

• 50:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 50:13Shaan 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.

• 50:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 50:23Shaan Puri?

  This is the app to go to. I really think this this has a lot of potential. I'm excited.

• 50:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 50:27Shaan Puri?

  See what you can do with it.

• 50:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, we're excited too.

• 50:29Shaan Puri?

  And all right, it's great. So we'll 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, wherever.

• 50:38Speaker 00

  Self promotion.

• 50:39Shaan Puri?

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

• 50:43Speaker 00

  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 on LinkedIn. If you look Ramon Van Meer.

• 50:52Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 50:53Speaker 00

  Then you can shoot me a message.

• 50:55Shaan 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.

• 51:02Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 51:02Shaan Puri?

  I will I will see you in the mud.

• 51:04Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 51:04Shaan Puri?

  Very soon.

• 51:05Speaker 00

  All right.

• 51:05Shaan Puri?

  Awesome.

• 51:06Speaker 00

  Thank you so much, buddy.