The Domain Magnate Show

Michael is back and shares where he's been and how his life has changed since selling his business.

Learn more about Michael at https://www.michaelbereslavsky.com/

Today, Michael welcomes Jason Malone from WeOutreach.

The two talk about backlinks and making complicated SEO simple. They also talk about what's important to know when buying backlinks, the things you should be paying attention to and how to achieve the best trade off between quantity and quality.

Learn more about Jason and WeOutreach at http://weoutreach.com

Connect with Jason on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/jason-malone-a88b3333/

To learn more about Michael and Domain Magnate, visit http://domainmagnate.com

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Today, Michael welcomes Marks Mars from Niche Website Builders and the co-founder of Make Lemonade on the podcast. The two of them talk about case studies from reviewing 5,000 websites and what do you need to get to the revenue goals you want. They also discuss how to build profitable websites using expired and aged domains as well as the most important factor in SEO today. Plus they touch on other topics around content, building sites at scale and buying sites.

Learn more about Make Lemonade at https://makelemonade.agency/

To learn more about Michael and his team, visit http://domainmagnate.com/

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This week, Michael is joined by Ben Dankiw, the Co-Founder and CEO of SEO and paid media agency NAV43. Join us for a fascinating conversation on running a SEO agency, paid media and the new, evolving world of AI content. Ben also shares his current journey to purchase a website.

Ben shares some great insights and actionable takeaways that you can start using on your websites today.

Learn more about Ben and his agency NAV43 at https://nav43.com/

Connect with Ben at https://www.linkedin.com/in/brdankiw/

Learn more about Michael and Domain Magnate at http://domainmagnate.com

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This week it's all SEO with SEO expert Kyle Roof. Kyle is the founder of the recently acquired SEO agency, High Voltage, as well as PageOptimizer Pro and Internet Marketing Gold.

Kyle and Michael discuss SEO experiments, what it takes to build and grow an agency, how to prepare your agency to sell and his SEO community.

Learn more about Kyle at http://kyleroof.com

To learn more about Domain Magnate and find additional resources to buy or sell an online business, visit https://domainmagnate.com

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Today, Michael speaks with Zach Zorn. Zach is a website investor, entrepreneur and yacht broker with Kusler Yachts and website investor with moneynomad.com

Michael and Zach talk about what it's like being a yacht broker and how that world works, how Zach buys and sells websites in the content space, some things he's been testing with SEO and opportunities they see in TikTok right now.

Learn more about Zach at http://moneynomad.com

To learn more about Domain Magnate and find additional resources to buy or sell an online business, visit https://domainmagnate.com

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In this episode of the Domain Magnate Show, join Micheal Bereslavsky welcomes back the Founder and CEO of Blackbook Investments, Mohit Tater. They discuss SEO updates and the drop in multiples they've been seeing so far this year.

Mohit Tater is a serial entrepreneur, investor and consultant with business experience from around the world. He is the Founder and CEO of a successful investment firm, Blackbook Investments, and an expert in alternative asset classes, having generated phenomenal ROI for his clients over the past few years.

To learn more about Domain Magnate and find additional resources to buy or sell an online business, visit https://domainmagnate.com

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This week, Michael speaks with Matt Raad, the co-founder of eBusiness Institute. Matt has acquired over 100 content websites and he now teaches people how to buy and grow online businesses and content websites.

Visit eBusiness Institute’s website at https://www.ebusinessinstitute.com.au/

To learn more about Domain Magnate and find additional resources to buy or sell an online business, visit https://domainmagnate.com

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This week, Michael speaks with Shane Dutka of Three Ships on how he went from being an accountant to building an affiliate website from scratch and then selling it for over $1 million in just 18 months! Learn more about Shane at https://shanedutka.com/

Follow Shane on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/c/ShaneDutka/

Find Shane on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/shane-dutka/

To learn more about Domain Magnate and find additional resources to buy or sell an online business, visit https://domainmagnate.com

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This week, Michael speaks with email marketing and paid ad expert Daniel Peleg from EmailComposed. Daniel shares some great insight into email marketing, whether you have a large list you email regularly or even if you've been slacking on using your current list.

Get Daniel's email marketing online assessment at https://www.emailcomposed.com/ecom-email-revenue-report/

Get Daniel's abandoned cart free workshop at https://www.emailcomposed.com/abandoned-cart-masterclass-reg/

Learn more about Daniel at https://www.emailcomposed.com/

To learn more about Domain Magnate and find additional resources to buy or sell an online business, visit https://domainmagnate.com

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This week, Michael speaks with Mads Singers.

Mads is a People Management Consultant, Outsourcing Expert & SEO Nerd. He also runs The SEO Master Summit as well as buys and sells many websites.

Learn more about Mads at https://www.madssingers.com

To learn more about Domain Magnate and find additional resources to buy or sell an online business, visit https://domainmagnate.com

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This week, Michael speaks with Andy Mai. At 22 years old, Andy is the CEO & Founder of Studying.com, where he teaches people how to create an online business. He's also a YouTuber.

Andy and Michael talk about starting with paid traffic, managing people, podcasting and ecommerce.

Check out Andy's YouTube channel at http://Youtube.com/AndyMaiYT

Find Andy on LinkedIn at https://au.linkedin.com/in/andyqmai

Learn more about his business at http://Studying.com

To learn more about Domain Magnate and find additional resources to buy or sell an online business, visit https://domainmagnate.com

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Before we start the new year, Michael looks back at the year that was! This week, he shares his unique insight into the market and trends in the past year. He'll also share where he sees opportunities in the coming year.

Plus, Domain Magnate has made some major changes to their business model. Michael gives you a peek into what they have done and why they've done it. You might learn a bit about how to operate your own portfolio from the changes they've made this year.

To learn more about Domain Magnate and find additional resources to buy or sell an online business, visit https://domainmagnate.com

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This week, Michael is joined by Ian Reynolds.

Ian is the Head of Venture Partners at Golden Section. After a friend told him how he was buying and growing businesses, Ian was hooked.

Ian tells his story as well as shares some great insight on what he looks for with a deal and what he looks for when growing a business.

Find Ian on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/ianjhreynolds/

Read Ian's insights and learn about his mentorship at https://thesiscapital.com/

To learn more about Domain Magnate and find additional resources to buy or sell an online business, visit https://domainmagnate.com

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Today, we have a great conversation with Ian Bond!

Ian has been in wealth and asset management for decades. Over the last few years, he’s been buying eCommerce businesses.

Ian and Michael talk about drop shipping stores and what Ian has been seeing over the last few years.

Learn more about Ian at http://www.professionalwebsiteinvestors.com/

To learn more about Domain Magnate and find additional resources to buy or sell an online business, visit https://domainmagnate.com

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This week on the show, we have one of the first people in the online business brokerage space, David Fairley!

David is the Founder and President of Website Properties. David established Website Properties as the first online business brokerage, specializing in selling established and profitable internet-based businesses. From 2002 – present, he continues to enjoy and draws great satisfaction from bringing buyers and sellers together to complete a transaction that is a win, win for both parties.

With his industry knowledge, years of experience and successes, David Fairley is considered an expert in online business marketing, appraisal, and sales.

Learn more about Website Properties at websiteproperties.com

Connect with David on LinkedIn

To learn more about Domain Magnate and find additional resources to buy or sell an online business, visit https://domainmagnatecapital.com/

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This week, Michael speaks with Ricky Kesler of Income School!

Ricky is an internet entrepreneur, influencer, and co-founder of Income School. He has helped numerous others become financially independent by helping them create online businesses.

Income School is an internet marketing company that teaches people how to create an internet business through blogging and creating Youtube Channels. Income School is best known for its popular internet marketing and SEO channel on Youtube.

To learn more about Project 24, visit http://incomeschool.com/project24/

Learn more about IncomeSchool at https://incomeschool.com/

Check out the IncomeSchool YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/c/incomeschool

To learn more about Domain Magnate and find additional resources to buy or sell an online business, visit https://domainmagnatecapital.com/

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This week's guest is Chelsea Clark!

Chelsea Content Monetization Strategist and website investor. She's the founder of blogsforsale.co and HerPaperRoute.com, where she helps creative business owners increase the value of their niche site, so that they can sell it for profit.

Learn more about Chelsea's business at blogsforsale.co

To learn about her coaching groups, visit herpaperroute.com

To learn more about Domain Magnate and find additional resources to buy or sell an online business, visit https://domainmagnatecapital.com/

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This week, Michael speaks with Barcelona-based entrepreneur Andrew Swiler who just acquired a $2.5M private SaaS business. They discuss how Andrew was able to finance the American-based business while living in Spain.

Also, the two discuss numerous other opportunities in the online business space, including content sites in other languages.

Learn more about Andrew and his frim at https://firstprinciples.io/

To learn more about Domain Magnate and find additional resources to buy or sell an online business, visit https://domainmagnatecapital.com/

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In this episode, Michael speaks with Kévin Jourdan, Co-Founder of Dotmarket.eu. Kévin has spent close to ten years building, selling, and flipping sites in the French language. He then branched out to brokering French Sites under his brand DotMarket, where he's established himself as an authority in an underserved market.

GUEST BIO:

Long expatriated in South-East Asia, Kévin has led a nomadic lifestyle for several years, financed by his various activities all linked to web marketing. Website editor, blogger (on Kjourdan.com), SEO consultant, speaker & co-founder of the PR Agency Digitale & Netlinking Flashs, Kévin developed DotMarket to bring together investors and sellers of quality online business. A meeting place created up to his standards and in the image of the way he likes to work: efficient, reliable and human!

SKIP TO THE GOOD PARTS:

0:59 — How did Kévin start in Online Business?
8:52 — What are the typical multiples on French Sites?
22:31 — Are there any competing French Brokers?
36:04 — What are the typical costs of French SEOs & Writers?
45:17 — Are French Sites recommended for non-speakers?

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: [[VIEW ON OUR WEBSITE]]

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In this episode, Michael speaks with Sam Bass, the Founder of Chief Operators. Sam is a Serial Entrepreneur who found it difficult to find website operators to manage his portfolio of sites. This led to the creation of Chief Operators: A platform where website operators and website investors can get connected and decide if they want to do a deal together. Enjoy this interview, as the two discuss the operations landscape for website investing.

GUEST BIO:

Sam's mission with Chief Operators is to build the community for connecting investors and operators to buy websites together. The main pain point everyone experiences when investing in websites is finding good quality operators. Operators often have great experience but don't know where to get investment to do bigger deals. At Chief Operators, operators can build relationships and post opportunities for investors to joint venture with them. The community is invite only for Operators that have run or sold sites in the 6-8 figure range.

SKIP TO THE GOOD PARTS:

0:42 — What is Sam's Background?
12:40 — What has Sam learned so far from operating sites?
27:50 — How can you find a good operator?
40:27 — What are some trends among investors?
47:36 — What's the typical profile of an operator?

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: [[VIEW ON OUR WEBSITE]]

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In this episode, Michael speaks with Matt Remuzzi, the Founder of CapForge. Matt specializes in bookkeeping and tax savings for online businesses, specifically Ecommerce and Saas businesses. Throughout the conversation, Michael and Matt discuss when you'll need a bookkeeper, how to cut taxes, and how to maximize the value of your business when exiting.

GUEST BIO:

Matt Remuzzi is the founder and CEO of CapForge, a virtual bookkeeping firm headquartered in California. With over 20 years of expertise in general bookkeeping, CapForge started with a single employee—Himself—which has now grown to over 40 bookkeepers and advisors for online businesses.

SKIP TO THE GOOD PARTS:

4:25 — What is Capforge?
13:26 — What's one of the best US tax jurisdictions?
22:24 — Difference between Cash and Accrual Basis
31:19 — What are Add-Backs, and why are they important?
46:44 — What's the K9 form for investors?

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: [[VIEW ON OUR WEBSITE]]

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In this episode, Michael speaks with Hall Martin, the Founder of TEN Capital. Hall specializes in Angel Investing, and helping early-stage startups raise Seed and Series A funding. Throughout the conversation, Michael and Hall discuss why you should seek funding, how to do it, and the ins-and-outs of startup investing.

GUEST BIO:

Hall launched TEN Capital as the Texas Entrepreneur Networks in 2009. Today, the firm has over 12,000 investors in its network, and has helped startups raise over $700M and counting. Hall serves as the Vice-Chair of the Baylor Angel Network. He previously led the Central Texas Angel Network (CTAN) as its first Executive Director, where he achieved over a 40X return for the investors. He is the founder and director of the Texas Open Angel Network, which is a 501(c)(3) non-profit dedicated to the education of angel investors. As a part of that program, he hosts the Investor Connect podcast series. He is also a Founder and initial Managing Director of SKU (Incubation Station), a consumer product goods accelerator based in Austin, Texas, and the former Managing Director of AccelerateNFC, an accelerator based in Dallas, Texas, focusing on Near Field Communication. Hall serves as an Adjunct Professor for the University of Texas, leading the Idea to IP program, which fosters startups from the engineering program.

SKIP TO THE GOOD PARTS:

05:00 - What is TEN Capital?
14:00 - What does Hall look for when investing in startups?
17:00 - How is Fundraising different for Established Companies vs. Startups?
24:40 - Why would you consider fundraising?
34:55 - What should you have before fundraising? What’s TEN’s process?

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: [[VIEW ON OUR WEBSITE]]

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In this episode, Michael speaks with Eric Borgos, who has been in domaining business for more than 25 years. Together they talk about the ups and downs of the sector. Along with providing valuable advice that can be used by anyone in the business.

HOST BIO:

Eric graduated with a finance degree from Babson College in 1991 and ran several different businesses until he found his calling on the Internet in 1995. Since that time, Eric’s websites have been featured in publications such as the Wall Street Journal, Entrepreneur Magazine, Readers Digest, USA Today, Popular Science, and Inc. Magazine, talked about on radio stations such as National Public Radio (NPR), and mentioned on TV shows such as Extra and TechTV.

SKIP TO THE GOOD PARTS:

01:49 – Eric speaks about getting started in the business
05:53 – His first sale of a domain name
14:33 – Michael recalls how he got started in the business
26:21 – Eric recalls how he entered the florist game and eventually ended up buying the domain for yacht.com

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: [[VIEW ON OUR WEBSITE]]

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In this episode our host sits down with Kate Ahl founder of Simple Pin Media. She speaks about getting started in driving Pinterest traffic, managing her clients accounts.

HOST BIO:

Visionary, leader, team cheerleader, teacher, podcaster, and lover of all things Pinterest. Using her gift of leadership, she develops, champions, and supports the women of her team at Simple Pin Media to be better every day.

SKIP TO THE GOOD PARTS:

00:44 – Kate speaks on how her company was started
03:37 – Who is a typical client
04:26 – Typical cost and what is provided to the clients
07:35 – How does Pinterest traffic work

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: [[VIEW ON OUR WEBSITE]]

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In this episode of the Domain Magnate Show, host Michael Bereslavsky sits down to chat with Liam Martin, co-founder and CMO of Time Doctor and Running Remote. Tune in to hear his thoughts on working efficiently, managing one’s time and how to succeed in your company.

HOST BIO:

Liam Martin is the co-founder and CMO of Time Doctor and Staff.com — one of the most popular time tracking and productivity software platforms in use by top brands today. He is also a co-organizer of the Running Remote Conference.

SKIP TO THE GOOD PARTS:

0:37 - Liam gives us a quick insight into his companies, Time Doctor and Running Remote.
16:49 - Liam shares his thoughts on asynchronous vs an asynchronous company. 20:41- 23:40 Liam talks about turning off notifications and cutting down interruptions during the workday.
42:57 - Liam shares a story on how Time Doctor really helped one of his employees.
46:23 - Liam sums up his key tips to getting work done successfully.

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: [[VIEW ON OUR WEBSITE]]

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In this episode, our host Michael Bereslavsky speaks with author John Warrillow. Together they delve into John’s experience as a business owner, selling and developing businesses. He also shares summaries of his books and interviews with his podcast guests.

HOST BIO:

John Warrillow is the founder of The Value Builder System™, host of Built To Sell Radio, and author of the bestselling books, Built to Sell: Creating a Business That Can Thrive Without You, The Automatic Customer: Creating a Subscription Business in Any Industry, and The Art of Selling Your Business: Winning Strategies & Secret Hacks for Exiting on Top.

SKIP TO THE GOOD PARTS:

01:52 - Summary on Built to Sell
07:26 - Freedom Point
45: 21 - Summary on Automated Customer
48:22 - Summary on The Art of Selling your Business

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: [[VIEW ON OUR WEBSITE]]

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In this episode, host Michael Bereslavsky speaks with serial entrepreneur Richard Lau, who has amassed over 20 years of experience in the domain name industry. He speaks of his successes and also his losses in the domain industry.

HOST BIO:

Named 2004 “Domainer of the Year”, Richard has generated millions of dollars in revenue in the domain industry. NamesCon began as an idea in the fall of 2012 and is now part of the Godaddy family. Another recent exit (to Indeed.com), Resume.com aids millions of job seekers to build their resumes online and provides a home for their online CV for life. His newest project is Logo.com.

SKIP TO THE GOOD PARTS:

00:40 – Richard’s Background
07:24 – Discussing Namecon
10:59 - Buying and developing domain names
18:02 - Opportunities for new domainers

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: [[VIEW ON OUR WEBSITE]]

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In this episode of Domain Magnate, Michael Bereslavsky speaks with Jesse Lakes (CEO of Geniuslink) about Amazon affiliate marketing, how to optimize affiliate links for conversions in as many countries as possible, and how to avoid getting in trouble with Amazon Associates.

HOST BIO:

As the former Global Product Manager for the iTunes Affiliate Program at Apple, and consultant to the Microsoft Store Affiliate Program, Geniuslink CEO Jesse Lakes has focused the last few years on helping Amazon affiliates monetize their global audience. He’s also seen, and learned first hand, the hard lessons about staying in compliance of Amazon's stringent operating agreement.

SKIP TO THE GOOD PARTS:

0:52-1:59 What Geniuslink is and what it does
3:00 - 4:20 Genuislink's funding situation and profitability
5:32 - 8:32 Other Genuislink use cases aside from Amazon
11:11 - 15:09 Areas where Jesse is seeing Amazon cutting commissions
15:09 - 19:14 How Geniuslink differs from OneLink
23:06 - 33:25 Some of the main reasons that people get in trouble with Amazon Associates
33:35 - 35:21 How to get out of trouble with Amazon Associates

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: [[VIEW ON OUR WEBSITE]]

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In the 38th Episode of the Domain Magnate show deals with understanding P&Ls (profit and loss statements). Michael Bereslavsky shows you how to read a profit & loss statement. In this episode, we'll look at an example of a small business and see how you can learn more about it. This episode is intended for beginners mostly, new buyers and investors, and it's aimed at online business owners and investors.

HOST BIO:

Michael Bereslavsky is the founder and CEO of Domain Magnate. He’s been involved in various internet-based businesses since 2004 and quickly graduated from building, promoting, and monetizing websites to buying and selling them. With over a decade of experience, Michael and Domain Magnate has managed 300+ successful deals.

SKIP TO THE GOOD PARTS:

00:57 - 04:12 Numbers
04:14 - 5:26 Monetization risks
05:29 - 06:42 Traffic Risks
06:49 – 08:02 Nature/Industry of the Business and legal risks
08:27 – 9:37 Operational risk
10:19 – 14:42 Opportunities

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: [[VIEW ON OUR WEBSITE]]

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HOST BIO:

SKIP TO THE GOOD PARTS:

00:12 - 03:21 What is a P&Ls (Profit and Loss statement) and review of simple P&L sheet
04:42 – 08:04 Revenues sources
08:08 – 09:34 Inconsistencies
10:17 – 11:38 Reviewing expenses across the domain
11:43 – 14:00 Development and support

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: [[VIEW ON OUR WEBSITE]]

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In this episode of the Domain Magnate Show, Michael Bereslavsky talks about the Google algorithm updates and everything you need to know about it as a buyer or investor in content websites.

HOST BIO:

SKIP TO THE GOOD PARTS:

00:14 - 01:27 What is Google's main objective and assessing risk for different websites
01:27 - 02:31 A change in December that caused some sites to loose 80-90% of revenue
03:50 - 04:53 Understand this principle to assess a website's risk
06:01 - 07:30 How Domain Magnate evaluates websites

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: [[VIEW ON OUR WEBSITE]]

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On this episode of the Domain Magnate Show, host Michael Bereslasvky chats with Ewen Fencer, CEO of Venture 4th Media. This episode is packed with great advice, how to find great content writers, and advice on starting up.

GUEST BIO:

Ewen Finser is the CEO of Venture 4th Media. Ewen is a digital media operator, strategically developing branded web properties bridging the divide between targeted niche audiences and late stage eCommerce adoption.

SKIP TO THE GOOD PARTS:

23:46 - 25:57 How to find great content writers.
42:48 - 47:24 What separates mediocre content from quality content.
52:25 - 57:38 Ewen gives some advice to anyone who is wanting to build a site.
58:38 - 1:00:14 Starting up with video.

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: [[VIEW ON OUR WEBSITE]]

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On this episode of the Domain Magnate show, host Michael Bereslasvky sits down to chat with Kelcey Lehrich, General Partner and CEO at 365 Holdings. Join them as they talk about how this e commerce business began, their unique hiring strategy, and the specific niche they look for.

GUEST BIO:

Kelcey Lehrich is the Co-Founder and CEO of 365 Holdings. 365 Holdings is a permanent capital vertically integrated holding company for eCommerce Brands

SKIP TO THE GOOD PARTS:

0:36 - 1:35 Kelcey shares a bit about 365 Holdings.
4:03 - 5:26 Kelcey talks about 365 Holdings’ specific niche.
11:38 - 12:48 Kelcey talks about the company’s office centric approach.
14:52 - 15:59 Kelcey shares some advice on running an e commerce business.
19:33 - 20:45 Team and Culture first, EQ over IQ.

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: [[VIEW ON OUR WEBSITE]]

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On this episode of the Domain Magnate Show, join host Michael Bereslavsky and Jim Mann, the Director of acquisitions at Thrasio, as they chat about how Jim joined the team, the company’s rapid growth, and the secret to its success.

GUEST BIO:

After 10 years supporting Fortune 500 & FTSE 100 leaders executing transformation in their organizations, Jim had his first child and decided to move to Europe's wind sports capital, Tarifa in Southern Spain. Here he met the 10x world champion kitesurfer where they decided to build a world first kitesurf academy in a 6,000 square foot unit Jim had built just 100m from the beach.
In 2013 he learnt about the Amazon FBA model and launched a brand which quickly reached 7 figures. Fast forward to 2021 and Jim is currently working with Thrasio as Director of Acquisitions, the leading acquirer and investor in Amazon and eComm brands.

Digital consumer goods company Thrasio is the largest global acquirer of Amazon FBA brands. By acquiring nearly 100 top-rated brands and managing the scale of nearly 15,000 category-leading products, Thrasio’s brands are more profitable, grow faster, and outperform almost every other seller on Amazon.

SKIP TO THE GOOD PARTS:

0:47 - 1:34 Jim Mann gives a quick overview of Thrasio.
8:12- 8:47 Jim and Michael discuss Thrasio raising 1.2 billion dollars.
11:49 - 13:22 Figuring out a relationship with Amazon.
31:32 - 33:11 Jim walks us through his unique hire process with Thrasio.
41:32 - Jim gives some advice on how to acquire an FBA business.

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: [[VIEW ON OUR WEBSITE]]

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Tune into this week’s episode of the Domain Magnate Show, as the host Michael Bereslavsky chats with Mushfiq Sarker from The Website Flip, a newsletter on website growth, case studies, guides and dealflow. Mushfiq shares some advice for new investors and gives us an insight to his business.

GUEST BIO:

Mushfiq S received the B.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) from Oregon State University (OSU) in 2012. He obtained the PhD degree in Electrical Engineering at University of Washington with the MOVES Lab in 2016, with a focus in power system economics and operations. Currently, Mushfiq is running WebsiteFlip, a thrice-weekly newsletter on website growth case studies, guides, and dealflow.

SKIP TO THE GOOD PARTS:

0:55 - 2:24 We learn a little bit about Mushfiq and what the company is up to.
10:50 - 11:31 Mushfiq recalls the first high profiting site he flipped.
19:16 - 19:44 Mushfiq chats a bit about his day job and the impact that has on his lifestyle.
26:10 - 28:06 Mushfiq thoughts on what the market will look like 5 to 10 years from now.
32:45 - 36:29 Mushfiq shares some tricks that help grow and monetize a newsletter well.
41:13 - 41:50 Mushfiq’s advice to new investors.

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: [[VIEW ON OUR WEBSITE]]

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Tune into this episode of the Domain Magnate show as Micheal Bereslavsky and John Ainsworth, CEO of Data Driven Marketing, chat about the value of creating purposeful and powerful funnels for your business.

GUEST BIO:

John is an intelligent, talented and thoughtful campaigns manager. He brings to the table a wide range of marketing, campaigning and sales skills and insights. John is the CEO of Data Driven Marketing.

SKIP TO THE GOOD PARTS:

0:45 - 1:25 John talks about Data Driven Marketing.
2:01 - 4:29 John explains the difference between a good and bad funnel.
16:16 - 18:49 Creating a powerful funnel to increase revenue.
33:40 - 36:13 John chats best way of sending out email promotions.
46:01 - 47:35 John recaps the value of a good funnel.

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: [[VIEW ON OUR WEBSITE]]

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In this episode of the Domain Magnate Show, join Micheal Bereslavsky as he chats with the Founder and CEO of Blackbook Investments, Mohit Tater. Listen to them chat about how Mohit got his start, some memorable deals and what is next for Blackbook Investments.

GUEST BIO:

SKIP TO THE GOOD PARTS:

1:10 - 6:41 Mohit Tater talks about how Blackbook got started.
10:39 - 12:25 Mohit talks about the Blackbook team and hiring locally.
13:14 14:15 Mohit reflects on Blackbook’s most memorable deal.
18:01 - 20:05 Mohit talks about where Blackbook finds its deals.
30:47 - 32:33 Mohit shares Blackbook and Empire Flippers news.
40:06 - 42:01 Mohit chats about what’s next for Blackbook.

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: [[VIEW ON OUR WEBSITE]]

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In the 30th episode of The Domain Magnate Show, Michael goes over the questions our sellers have when it comes to buying their website. He explains the importance of transparency in the negotiation and why we ask the questions that we do in order to provide fair offers and deals.

GUEST BIO: Michael Bereslavsky is the founder and CEO of Domain Magnate. He’s been involved in various internet-based businesses since 2004 and quickly graduated from building, promoting, and monetizing websites to buying and selling them. With over a decade of experience, Michael and Domain Magnate has managed 300+ successful deals.

SKIP TO THE GOOD PARTS:

1:02 – 2:08 Michael shares about his background and what the company does
2:09 – 5:48 How Domain Magnate evaluates a business
5:49 - 8:53 How to check your website’s potential
8:54 - 9:27 Taking a closer look at your business
9:28 - 11:02 Signing deals and how to contact us

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: [[VIEW ON OUR WEBSITE]]

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In this episode of the Domain Magnate show, Michael speaks with website investor Richard Patey. Richard gives advice on selling sites and discusses with Michael how to fix the common mistakes a first-time seller can make.

GUEST BIO:

Richard Patey is an online entrepreneur. He started his first business in 2009 after quitting his job and made a living off selling his SEO and WordPress website services. He went from niche to niche until he realized how investing in these websites had their own bright world and from then on offered his services under Flipping Websites which he also sold later on. He currently owns and runs Website Investing Publication that helps provide much-needed information and keeps investors up to date on relevant digital news while continuing to build his portfolio of sites he continues to operate.

SKIP TO THE GOOD PARTS:

0:09-1:20 Michael welcomes Richard and gives a quick introduction
1:21-3:39 They talk about acquiring sites for consultants
3:40-10:05 Diving deeper into the deals process
10:06-13:28 Tying together podcasting and specialty
13:29-41:37 Common mistakes for first-time buyers
41:38-46:41 Selling starter sites
46:42-51:03 Richard shares about his growing newsletter
51:04-52:32 How to reach out to Richard

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In this episode of the Domain Magnate show, Michael speaks with Mark Doust, the CEO, and founder of Quiet Light Brokerage. They speak about Mark's journey into Quiet Light Brokerage, how it grew, and is thriving to this day. Plus tips and perspectives for buyers and sellers in the acquisition business.

GUEST BIO:

Mark Daoust is a business owner, guest author for numerous publications, and frequent presenter at top conferences. He is the CEO and founder of Quiet Light Brokerage. Mark started an online publication before Quiet Light Brokerage and has experience in growing a six-figure subscriber base. Since 2007 he continues to help multiple small business owners achieve their goals and is currently still expanding his own team today.

SKIP TO THE GOOD PARTS:

0:09 - 8:05 The beginnings of QuietlightBrokerage
8:06 - 14:12 Mark recounts the biggest deals he's made
14:13 -21:23 Potential pricing and Commission structures
21:24 - 23:12 Mark shares his main source of clients
23:13 - 30:55 Michael & Mark on entrepreneurial burnout
30:56 - 41:44 Referrals and changes in the industry
41:45 - 47:16 Advice for new investors and buyers

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In this episode of the Domain Magnate show, Michael chats with Ronnie Teja, the Founder of Branzio.com They discuss the current state of eCommerce in the digital world and how to manage an 8-figure business.

GUEST BIO:

Ronnie Teja is the Founder and CEO of Branzio. He currently owns and operates this flourishing eCommerce business that focuses on selling watches among other niches that are still moving for expansion today. He has been doing business from the time he moved to Canada in 2008 and has been trusted in the field ever since. With over 15 businesses on hand and a remote team of 30 people, Ronnie has his hands full on managing the company and continues to grow businesses to this day.

SKIP TO THE GOOD PARTS:

0:10 - 1:02 Michael and Ronnie talk about his role in business
1:03 - 2:37 Ronnie shares how he manages his goals
2:38 - 4:44 Where did these companies come from?
4:45 - 6:Ronnie recalls the best deals he's made
6:57 - 9:40 They discuss the approach to buying eCommerce businesses
9:46 - 23:21 Onboarding new business
23:22 - 29:44 How business is growing currently in this time
29:45- 44:39 Strategies on managing Ronnie's eCommerce business
44:40- 47:02 Ronnie recounts his favorite travels
47:03- 48:18 advice on eCommerce due diligence

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In this episode of the Domain Magnate Show, we tune in to meet the team behind Dealflow Brokerage and are also provided with some advice for buyers and sellers and a quick view of the industry.

SKIP TO THE GOOD PARTS:

0:10 - 5:28 Meeting the Domain Magnate team.
8:13 - 9:40 Considering Dealflow Brokerage over other M&A Advisors.
9:46 - 11.59 Advice from the team for planning your company's exit plan.

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In this episode of the Domain Magnate show, Michael chats with Eric Ownes, the Founder of AppBusinessBrokers.com. They discuss current trends in the mobile app market, when it is a good time to sell a mobile app, and more.

GUEST BIO:

Eric is the founder and CEO of AppBusinessBrokers.com and has been successfully brokering Internet businesses since 2004 and doing online business since 1997. His engineering background and attention to detail, combined with his systems thinking and ability to understand key aspects of each business, puts him at the top of the elite when putting deals together. Having started, grown, and sold numerous businesses, Eric has an impeccable reputation for efficiency, speed, and integrity making him one of the most trusted and sought after business brokers in the world.

SKIP TO THE GOOD PARTS:

1:09 - 1:36 - Michael and Eric chat about the kinds of sales APP Business Broker has brought in.
4:00 - 6:07 - Eric brings in a $10 million dollar deal.
6:50 - 8:43 - Eric shares about his most memorable sale yet.
25:09 - 26:20 - Seeing more buyers than sellers after COVID.
27:48 - 29:40 - Eric gives advice to those buying and selling businesses.
39:31 - 41:29 - Thoughts on an evolving industry.

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In this episode of the Domain Magnate show, Michael chats with Blake Hutchinson, the CEO of Flippa. The #1 platform to buy and sell sites, stores apps and digital properties. Tune in as they talk about the effects they’ve seen due to COVID, changes they predict in the marketplace and the new exciting features at Flippa.

GUEST BIO:

Blake Hutchison is the current CEO of Flippa. Under his direction, Flippa has undergone great strides in improving the processes, experience, and security measures of the marketplace. Before joining Flippa, Blake developed an impressive executive track record at global brands like Xero, Good44, Luxury Escapes, and Lonely Planet.

SKIP TO THE GOOD PARTS:

1:29 - 2:46 Blake elaborates a bit more on Flippa’s new Mantra.
7:00 - 11:18 Michael and Blake chat about changes they’ve seen in prices due to COVID-19.
11:37 - 16:19 Blake talks about new features and changes at Flippa
21:46 -23:03 Blake gives advice to new buyers coming into the marketplace.

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In this episode of the Domain Magnate show. Michael talks with Dom Wells, founder of Onfolio, about his experience managing content site portfolios. They also discuss the effects that COVID-19 has had on the industry and predict some of the trends we might see in the months to come.

GUEST BIO:

Dom is the founder of Onfolio. He has been building, buying, and operating profitable websites since 2012. He’s an industry thought-leader, international speaker, and owns a 7 figure content site portfolio. Additionally, he has strong skills in operations and building systems.

SKIP TO THE GOOD PARTS:

1:03 - 0:02:08 Dom shares a bit about OnFolio.
0:10:57 - 0:14:56 Discussing possible changes that may arise due to COVID.
0:31:21 - 0:34:28 Dom talks about his interest in buying display advertising sites.
0:49:13 - 0:50:04 Dom talks about his plans for selling.
1:01:05 - 1:01:52 Dom mentions his blog post about learning from past mistakes in business.
1:04:11 - 1:06:52 Dom shares his advice to those looking to buy their first site.

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In this special episode of the Domain Magnate Show, Michael Bereslavsky and Jamie Toyne announce the exciting new partnership between Dealflow Brokerage with Domain Magnate and what it means for customers.

GUEST BIO:

Michael Bereslavsky is the founder and CEO of Domain Magnate. He’s been involved in various internet-based businesses since 2004 and quickly graduated from building, promoting, and monetizing websites to buying and selling them. With over a decade of experience, Michael and Domain Magnate has managed 300+ successful deals.

Jamie Toyne is a serial entrepreneur and a former Director at Flippa.com. During the completion of his double-degree in finance and entrepreneurship at RMIT, Jamie consulted large retail brands on their eCommerce strategy. He then shifted his focus toward internet companies where he bought and sold websites and helped hundreds of entrepreneurs do the same.

SKIP TO THE GOOD PARTS:

0:30 - 0:40 Brittany Bond announces a partnership between Domain Magnate and Dealflow Brokerage.
1:21 - 3:00 Micheal Bereslavsky and Jamie Toyne talk about why they’ve chosen to partner companies.
3:11 - 4:04 The founders share some insight to the exciting new things that will be available for their customers.

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In this episode, Michael speaks with Mike Michalowicz about how to write and launch successful books, how to hire your replacement, and why your clients actually want your business to be profitable.

GUEST BIO:

Mike is the author of Fix This Next, Profit First, Clockwork, and others. He has keynoted at the world’s biggest business events. He has built four multi-million-dollar companies and sold two of them: one to private equity and another to a Fortune 500. Mike is a business author with a clear mission: Eradicate entrepreneurial poverty.

SKIP TO THE GOOD PARTS:

0:42 – 1:54 Mike Michalowicz talks about his new book, Fix This Next, and shares some of the difficult parts about launching a book.
2:11 – 3:25 Mike gives us some advice on how to write a great good.
3:37 – 3:50 Mike talks about how his books are a blend of experience and entrepreneurship.
8:56 – 11:46 Mike shares his thoughts on getting over exhausting beliefs in business in order to really grow.
12:35 – 14:08 Mike shares his thoughts on how self-awareness of one’s strengths and weaknesses is key in running a business.
17:10 – 19:13 Mike shares his perspective on what criteria makes for a strong, healthy business.
20:44 – 22:31 Mike talks about who would benefit most from reading his new book, Fix This Next.

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In this episode, Colton speaks with yellowHEAD’s Head of Mergers and Acquisitions, Doron Wolffberg. They talk about how yellowHEAD began purchasing websites, the types of websites they look for, mistakes they've made in past acquisitions, and how you can avoid making the same ones yourself.

GUEST BIO:

When he’s not practicing Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, Doron leads yellowHEAD’s Digital Acquisitions team with 5 years of experience in SEO, Content Marketing, and Lead Generation. He has a B.A. in Economics from Hebrew University.

SKIP TO THE GOOD PARTS:

  * 0:34 - 2:50 Doron Wolffberg shares how he got started and what he is up to now.

3:17 - 4:53 Doron compares the process between acquiring an already operating site over starting one from scratch.
5:25 - 7:04 Doron shares his thoughts on the logistics of finding a business model that fits with your own skill set.
7:56 - 10:27 Doron shares what his team currently looks like and what it takes to keep up profitably.
12:24 - 14:15 Doron discusses some strategies for increasing cash flow and traffic in your company.
14:31- 16:09 Doron shares what strategy has been most effective for him when it comes to selling businesses.
16:32 - 20:04 Doron shares an experience where an acquisition didn’t successfully pan out.
21:02 - 22:43 Doron shares about one of his successful experiences with an acquisition.
23:53 - 24:11 Doron shares what his plans for himself and Yellow Head are for 2020.
24:30 - 26:40 Doron gives advice to anyone just starting out or to those who already have a portfolio.
27:43 - 27:53 Doron gives information on the best way to reach him.

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In this episode Colton talks to Larry Ludwig about growing and selling InvestorJunkie, things that he learned along the way, mistakes that he made, as well as where he feels blogging is going in the years to come.

GUEST BIO:

With over twenty years of experience, Larry has been there himself. He has overcome many obstacles and can tell you how you can too! Larry has assisted solo-entrepreneurs to Fortune 500 companies with their digital marketing.

SKIP TO THE GOOD PARTS:

0:35 - 1:55 Larry Ludwig shares about when he got started and how he eventually sold his company, Investor Junkie, for 6 million dollars.
5:01 - 5:24 Larry shares how an unfortunate incident helped him see how beneficial optimizing one's search and diversifying traffic was for his business.
5:37 - 6:11 Larry shares what ultimately led him to sell Investor Junkie in 2018.
9:34 - 10:14 Larry talks about the struggles of an entrepreneur's mind never really shutting off.
10:54 - 13:13 Quality versus Quantity and properly tracking one's site's traffic.
15:14 - 15:40 Larry shares his thoughts on the importance of keeping up and staying to date with with one's blogging content.
17:45 - 18:29 How not properly tracking one's traffic is a recipe for failure.
19:07 - 20:07 The importance of having a close relationship with your affiliate managers.
21:18 - 21:23 Creating a brand that can sustain longevity in your company.
28:47 - 30:19 Larry has yet to find the right business to acquire.
38:31 - 41:52 Larry shares what he thinks will be the next 9 big trends in blogging.

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In this episode Michael chats with founder/investor/podcaster Michael Michelini about building and selling an Amazon FBA business, joining the acquirer company, as well as advice for those who are thinking of selling an online business. Michelini is currently the Director of Business Development at Alpha Rock Capital.

GUEST BIO:

American social media & e-commerce specialist in China since late 2007, Michael Michelini is passionate to help companies do business in China leveraging the power of social media and e-commerce. He hosts a weekly podcast GlobalFromAsia.com to help businesses understand how to grow their business in China and other parts of Asia.

SKIP TO THE GOOD PARTS:

0:38 - 0:49 Michael M. tells how he describes to others what he does
0:58 - 1:18 Michael M. describes how he started, grew and sold his business Sissetonel
1:26 - 1:43 An explanation of the deal to buy Sissetonel and the how Michael M. was compensated
1:52 - 2:15 Michael M. talks about his first job and how he eventually ended up going out on his own
2:19 - 3:46 Why Michael M. decided to sell his business
4:12 - 5:31 Michael M. describes the process of negotiating when he sold his business
5:42 - 6:32 Michael M. explains his role at Alpha Rock Capital and he also describes Alpha Rock and what they do there
7:14 - 8:36 Michael M. talks about Alpha Rock's fund, it's minimum contribution amount, and how investors are paid
9:02 - 9:24 Michael M. talks about why they focus on Amazon FBA acquisitions only
9:24 - 9:47 Michael B. explains the advantages of focusing on one type of acquisitions
9:47 - 10:33 Michael M. talks about the type of Amazon FBA niches they look for when making acquisitions
10:33 - 10:41 Why Michael B. and Domain Magnate like the "boring stuff"
10:41 - 11:04 Where Alpha Rock finds deals and what their general price range is
11:11 - 11:52 Private deals vs. going through brokers and why Michael M. finds private to be trickier/riskier
12:01 - 13:50 Michael M. gives his advice for first time sellers
14:07 - 15:07 Michael M. talks about the advantages that Alpha Rock Capital and the team bring to the table when buying and managing FBA brands
15:16 - 15:41 Michael M. explains their growth goals for acquired businesses
15:41 - 16:42 Michael B. on Domain Magnate's goals for newly acquired businesses and their consistent track record for the past 15 years
16:42 - 17:32 Michael M. about the important of deal flow
17:32 - 18:27 Michael B. talks about how they've had to reject investors recently because of capacity
18:27 - 19:58 Michael M. on combining multiple acquired businesses to build bigger brands
19:58 - 20:35 Michael M. explains the type of risk that Domain Magnate needs to mitigate for with it's content sites
20:35 - 22:11 Michael B. talks about potential risk in their business and how they utilize separate seller accounts toe mitigate those risks

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In this episode Michael answers 6 common questions that he is often asked by buyers, sellers, and clients, including "Why would anyone sell a profitable business?", "What type of business should I buy?" and more...

GUEST BIO:

SKIP TO THE GOOD PARTS:

1:02 - 3:26 Michael shares some reasons revolving around why someone might sell a profitable business.
3:32 - 5:50 Michael gives some insight as to finding a good operator or website manager.
5:57 - 8:27 Michael talks about how one might find a deal when wanting to purchase an online business.
8:28 - 9:20 Michael gives advice on where to go, or who talk too in order to find good deals.
9:24 - 11:35 Michael shows us how to figure out how much one's website might be worth.
12:15 - 13:40 Michael shares about the quickest deal he's ever made.
13:55 -16:00 Michael talks about what type of business one should think about buying.

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In this episode Colton speaks with Dan Fries of Next Ventures (https://nextventures.group) and BlueTree.ai (https://bluetree.ai) about his journey from "serious science" to buying and selling businesses. The also discuss how Dan scales his team vertically instead of horizontally, and some lessons he's learned along the way.

GUEST BIO:
Dan co-founded Next Ventures in 2016. Previously, Dan built a publishing business in the cognitive health space. He oversaw dealflow for Wired Investors, a PE firm for internet-based businesses. Dan has experience as an entrepreneur, operator, and investor (https://nextventures.group), and specializes in buy-side PE business brokerage. Prior to founding Next Ventures, Dan worked at the Dana Farber Institute at Harvard Medical School, co-authoring several publications in the field of translational oncology and bioinformatics.

SKIP TO THE GOOD PARTS:

1:04 - 3:54 Dan describes his journey from being a scientist to getting into digital marketing.
7:26 - 10:13 Dan shares a bit about what Next Ventures is and how it got started.
14:17 - 15:07 Dan shares how he applies his skill set of content marketing to increase revenue with different sites.
18:31 - 21:08 Dan talks about the culture they’ve established at Next Venture.
22:52 - 27:28 Dan shares about the parallels between finding success and having quality content.
33:31 - 34:54 Dan talks about the changes and opportunities now with the new way affiliate marketing works.
37:22 - 38:18 Dan talks about looking for sites that have upside potentials when in search of new revenue.
42:33 - 43:32 Dan shares a bit about his new agency, Blue Tree.
44:00 - 44:42 Dan shares his information on how to connect with him.

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In this episode, Colton speaks with Frederick Lansky of Points Panda (https://pointspanda.com) about Frederick's recent partnership breakup and buyout from his first company. They also chat about the differences between ecommerce and productized services, how making one person the face of the company can make it harder to sell, Frederick's advice for people wanting to leave the corporate world, staying healthy as an entrepreneur, and much more...

GUEST BIO:
Frederick Lansky is an entrepreneur and digital nomad. Frederick started iChess (https://www.ichess.net/) - an ecommerce site that sells instructional videos for chess players - and grew it to $1M in annual revenue. He has since left iChess and gone on to start Points Panda (https://pointspanda.com), a productized service business that provides credit card consulting and airline miles reward booking for one flat rate.

SKIP TO THE GOOD PARTS:

0:58 - Frederick shares his story on how he got started.
4:47 - The story of Frederick's recent business iChess.
6:24 - Growing iChess to $1M ARR.
8:07 - Chris Reynolds and the importance of having a coach.
11:13 - Respectfully parting ways.
14:19 - Rethinking ways of handling a business partnership.
19:25 - A different business model.
24:42 - Sustainable ways of growing a business.
27:55 - Some things to consider when looking at ecommerce, digital product ecommerce or productized services.
32:38 - Frederick suggests ways to reduce expenses in order to start a business.
35:17 - Spending a year abroad to get your business off the ground.
38:04 - Getting systems in place in order to sell your business.
40:07 - Leveraging your image for your business.
43:56 - Selling an ecommerce business vs selling a productized service business.
46:26 - What Colton is up too now, and how to connect with him.

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In this episode, Michael talks to Nate Ginsburg about his experiences selling and buying businesses, yoga and staying healthy as an entrepreneur, and what Nate looks for when investing in or buying a company.

GUEST BIO:
Nate Ginsburg (https://www.nateginsburg.com) is a successful entrepreneur, investor and a passionate yogi. After successfully building seven-figure businesses on two different continents, he now teaches people at SellerPlex (https://sellerplex.com) how to use the best online techniques and marketing methods to build a successful business, make money online and save themselves a lot of time and effort.

SKIP TO THE GOOD PARTS:

0:58 - Nate shares how he got started in 2014.
11:00 - Nate shares about the importance of clarity when entering into a partnership.
18:50 - Nate speaks on having a foundation of trust when making deals.
21:22 - Nate remembers when he was thinking of becoming an investor.
23:17 - Nate on selling a business for a million dollars.
32:02 - When things lead to a lower sale.
33:39 - Health and Yoga.
38:28 - Michael shares the importance of staying on top of one’s health. Especially as an entrepreneur.
38:46 - Differences in entrepreneurs between North American and Asian cultures, when it comes to health, balance and work.
44:46 - Nate recalls realizing that if he wanted an opportunity he had to go and find it.
54:23 - Getting a business from zero to a million in profit.
58:38 - Nates talks about cash flow, salary and profit.
1:09:26 - Micheal shares his thoughts on structure, strategy, and the relationship between one and their seller.
1:10:39 - Nate on deals, one day at a time.
1:13:14 - Nate share advice to anyone who wants to start a business.
1:15:52 - Nate on avoiding mistakes in business.
1:21:11 - One’s gut feeling and intuition.
1:21:22 - Services and products Sellerplex.com offers.
1:22:27 - How to connect and contact Nate Ginsburg.

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In this episode Michael talks to Jaryd Krause of BuyingOnlineBusinesses.com about Jaryd's journey from being a plumber to buying businesses online and traveling the world. They discuss how Jaryd is now helping other people achieve their dream lifestyles buying and selling online businesses.

GUEST BIO:

Jaryd Krause has gained knowledge, experiences and great success through purchasing online businesses and teaching people how they can do the same. Jaryd's mission is to teach 1,000 people how to replace their current income, quit their job and live a lifestyle they absolutely love.

To show people an alternate lifestyle is more than possible.

QUICK LINKS:

Buying Online Business

Buying Online Business - Free Resourses

SKIP TO THE GOOD PARTS:

0:34 - 2:24 Jaryd talks about how he explains what he does to others. He also talks about his journey from plumbing to buying and selling websites and traveling the world
2:43 - 3:43 Michael describes how he explains what he does to people.
5:06 - 5:53 Jaryd talks about how is bought his first business
7:57 - 8:46 The story of how Jaryd got into teaching people how to buy businesses
9:16 - 10:45 Jaryd explains how customers find him and how he structures his services
10:56 - 11:20 Jaryd talks about the average amount his customers will spend on a business and how it’s gone from from $30K to $50K-$250K
11:20 - 12:11 Michael explains a service offered by Domain Magnate where the help the client purchase a business and then manage it for them
12:11 - 12:59 Jaryd talks about the increase leverage larger businesses have in comparison to smaller ones
13:42 - 15:23 Jaryd talks about two important things he teaches is clients; two goals they should have
16:57 - 18:06 Jaryd talks about how he finds business on FE International and Empire Flippers and how helpful these companies are for first time buyers
18:50 - 21:07 Michael explains where Domain Magnet’s deals come from and how he is looking for a different sort of deal so FE and EF are not idea for DM’s purposes
23:11 - 24:29 Jaryd talks about how he makes money. He describes the membership and community that he is running and how much it costs
26:19 - 27:28 How Jaryd teaches due diligence to his clients and how important it is to become an “Attractive Buyer”
31:03 - 32:05 Jaryd talks about some things to keep in mind when buying your first business
32:37 - 35:48 Jaryd and Michael discuss group buying and where they feel the online investing industry is headed. Jaryd also talks about how he is preparing his team for group buying and larger investments.
37:47 - 40:43 Michael and Jaryd discuss how, right now, brand new, high-risk businesses are being sold for the same amount as some decade-old, low-risk businesses
42:41 - 43:42 Jaryd talks about finding virtual assistants to help first time buyers run their new company
43:42 - 45:01 Michael talks about how VAs and contractors can be utilized to run a business
45:47 - 46:31 Jaryd cautions people not to get overwhelmed with the amount of information out there on starting a business. He recommends finding a mentor and people that will help you learn the right things and know what to listen to and what to ignore
46:56 - 51:46 Michael and Jaryd talk about some of the places they’ve traveled including Bocas del Toro, India, Egypt, Montenegro, and many others
51:51 - 54:54 Jaryd tells a story of his first time in India when he experienced extreme culture shock at a local tradition surrounding cremating the dead
54:54 - 56:25 Michael tells a story about Thailand where he left money in a cab and was surprised when his driver actually chased him down to return it

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Today we're joined by Stacy Caprio, founder of Her CEO (https://her.ceo). In this episode we talk about what she's doing with Her CEO, how she got involved with investing in profitable websites, as well as her background that led her to this point.

SKIP TO THE GOOD PARTS:

0:14 - 0:38 Colton introduces Stacy Caprio and Her CEO
0:46 - 1:30 How Stacy got into website investing while reading Niche Pursuits
1:48 - 2:13 Stacy's corporate background
2:25 - 3:08 Why organic traffic is much more important than paid traffic
3:40 - 4:45 The types of websites you should keep an eye for
5:00 - 6:42 Identifying opportunities for increasing site revenue quickly
6:54 - 7:27 Stacy describes some quick wins she’s had investing in the past
7:51 - 8:24 Recommended private ad networks (Monumetric and AdThrive)
8:41 - 9:54 Why you should consider guest posts + Stacey's direct email, hear it here!
10:16 - 11:25 The only conditions you should consider when using paid acquisition and why.
12:05 - 13:30 When is it appropriate to use paid advertising
13:55 - 16:17 Learning from experience: website investing hiccups.
17:09 - 17:54 Protecting yourself from sellers who are falsifying website performance data.
18:33 - 20:18 Advice to people starting out
20:43 - 22:37 Kinds of websites you should stay away
23:17 - 25:32 Hiring a firm that specializes in acquiring and managing sites vs doing it yourself
26:15 - 27:28 Website investing vs traditional investing
27:48 - 29:19 Her.ceo: Building a brand

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This episode highlights Domain Magnate's Founder and CEO's portion in Invest Like a Boss Summit in Los Angeles last September 28 2019. He, alongside Stacey Caprio from Her.ceo and host Johnny FD have a discussion with a live audience with focus on the topic "How To Get 100% Returns Through Buying Online Businesses."

GUEST BIO:

SKIP TO THE GOOD PARTS:

0:14- 0:49 - Brief overview of segment
1:25- 2:04 - Introduction of Speakers
2:05-8:02 - Introduction of Domain Magnate and how it works. A buyer's perspective.
8:03-10:06 - Addition and example on buying a business
10:07-13:55 - Stacey relaying her first experience with buying sites
13:56-16:46 - Reasons for buying and selling a business
16:47-18:43 - Increasing the value of the business you bought.
18:44-20:35 - Increasing profits
20:36-21:35 - Getting started. Know your budget.
21:36-22:19 - Aligning your interest with a purchase.
22:20-23:14 - Know your strategy and management plans.
23:15-23:31 - The work allocation with purchase and increase.
23:32-24:43 - Guiding a buyer to running independent business.
24:44-27:38 - Income flow generation

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This episode marks the 10th episode of The Domain Magnate Show. Today our founder and CEO, Michael Bereslavsky shares his tips on how to stay calm during negotiations based on his over a decade of experience in buying and selling online businesses.

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Michael sits down with Ryan Kaufman on a discussion about brokering, having your focused niches, marketing strategies, misconceptions on buying websites, and what’s coming ahead for Digital Acquisitions.

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Ryan Kaufman is a partner in Digital Acquisitions. The company has a collectively 50 years digital marketing experience. They are working with entrepreneurs and investors who are either looking to buy a new business or grow through acquisition.

SKIP TO THE GOOD PARTS:

02:13 - 03:31 - Ryan’s Transitioning from Buying and Selling to Brokering
03:31 - 09:43 - Ryan’s start in the industry.

09:43 - 11:43 - Is brokering better?

11:43 - 14:10 - Challenges in brokering that many never thought of.

14:14 - 17:05 - Knowing more about SBA loan

17:33 - 19:26 - Thoughts about ‘Inspection Period’.

20:00 - 21:51 - Acquiring expertise by focusing on the niches you do best

22:18 - 24:23 - Focusing on SaaS and Digital Agency niches

24:51 - 28:41 - Growing Digital Acquisitions + an overview on the company operations

28:53 - 31:53 - Deals at Digital Acquisition: Numbers and values

32:43 - 36:25 - Growing from low six figure deals to seven figure deals

36:25 - 39:53 - Misconceptions in buying websites and why brokers can be your best friend?

42:25 - 46:26 - Commission structure at Digital Acquisitions and in the industry

47:09 - 51:26 - Marketing Strategies

53:18 - 01:03:54 - Vision in the next 5 years

01:05:52 - 01:12:36 - Best kind of deals that are undervalued or underappreciated

01:12:56 - 01:13:20 -Last piece of advice

01:13:20 - 01:13:34 - Reach out to Ryan directly. Hear it here.

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Michael talks about Domain Magnate’s strategy for acquiring online businesses, different kinds of deals, getting discounted deals, the framework for reviewing deals and how to find great deals.

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Michael Bereslavsky is the founder and CEO of Domain Magnate. He’s been involved in various internet based businesses since 2004 and quickly graduated from building, promoting, and monetizing websites to buying and selling them. With over a decade of experience, Michael and Domain Magnate has managed 300+ successful deals.

SKIP TO THE GOOD PARTs:

00:14 - 04:00 - Avoiding bad deals: How is our strategy different from the others?

04:45 - 09:16 - What is a bad deal?

09:16 - 11:55 - What does an average deal look like?

11:55 - 15:58 - What does a good deal look like? + Signs of a good deal

15:58 - 24:14 - The exceptionally good deals and how you find them

28:06 - 35:16 - Due diligence, numbers, opportunities, and risks.

35:16 - 38:20 - negotiating a discount

38:20 - 43:45 - quick deals

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On our seventh episode, we sit down with Freelancer, Escrow, and Freightlancer CEO, Matt Barrie. Matt shares the numbers on revenues, freelancers, jobs available, and turnover in his group of companies . He also shared his thoughts on cryptocurrency, what made him start Freelancer.com, and how acquiring competition made him a leader within his niche.

GUEST BIO:
Matt Barrie is an award winning tech entrepreneur and CEO of Freelancer.com, the world’s largest freelancing marketplace with 35 million professionals globally. Matt completed over 20 acquisitions to grow his portfolio of companies, and he’s also the CEO of Escrow.com, a leader in secure online payments with over US $4.0b in transactions secured.

Connect with Matt: Linkedin

Visit Freelancer’s Website
Visit Escrow’s Website
Visit Freightlancer’s Website

SKIP TO THE GOOD PARTS:

00:53 - 03:48 - Freelancer, Escrow, Freightlancer and StartCon in numbers

04:08 - 06:40 - Acquiring Escrow

06:54 - 07:21 - Using Escrow in almost every transaction possible, including shipping Zebras!

08:01 - 08:50 - Recent changes in Escrow

09:45 - 18:02 - Cryptocurrency on Escrow? + Other monetary & currency issues

18:55 - 21:42 - Working with VCs is a soul-crushing experience

21:42 - 29:17 - Stating Freelancer.com

29:22 - 30:30 - acquiring the competition

30:30 - 33:38 - Freelancer in the future ** check again

33:47 - 35:10 - Tips for running a business

35:10 - 37:06 - Thoughts on reviewing deals

37:06 - 38:29 - Fast50: Escrow’s quarterly domain name report

38:41 - 39:32 - Starting a business with Freelancer and Escrow

39:53 - 43:03 - How Escrow is dealing with potential issues and disputes

44:03 - 45:14 - Matt’s advice regarding entrepreneurship by acquisition

45:25 - 45:57 - Details on the biggest Technology Conference in Australia

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CEO of Empire Flippers, Joe Magnotti shares the last numbers on deals and revenues and describes his processes for hiring and managing a remotely distributed team. He also talked about Empire Flippers’s scoreboard, valuation tool, new platform login, and how they are setting the bar in the industry and what the future might hold.

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Joe Magnotti has a background in engineering and spent the 90’s at a startup in San Francisco before moving onto the mortgage business. Now Joe spends the majority of his time in Manila, Philippines. Like the rest of the Empire Flippers he enjoys traveling often with frequent trips to the rest of SE Asia. In his free time, he enjoys boxing, basketball, and playing poker. He goes by “Joe” -- only his grandmother calls him Joseph.

Connect with Joe: Linkedin | Email
Visit Empire Flipper’s Website

QUICK LINKS:

Scoreboard

Valuation Tool

New Platform Login

Users will have to email support@empireflippers.com before October 8th to get access*

SKIP TO THE GOOD PARTS:

00:27 - 02:12 - Empire Flippers in numbers

02:47 - 03:21 - Main business expenses

03:55 - 08:14 - Hiring process + tips for a globally distributed team

08:14 - 09:58 - Average deal lifecycle in Empire Flippers Marketplace

09:58 - 10:57 - Deals at Empire Flippers

11:33 - 13:39 - Dealing with Transparency: Way of the Future

14:14 - 26:34 - Selling Business on Empire Flippers

26:30 - 31:01 - Buying Business on Empire Flippers

33:05 - 36:28 - Making Post-sale changes

37:27 - 38:32 - Buyer qualifications

38:53 - 40:53 - Tips for Buyers

41:01 - 42:53 - What’s coming ahead for Empire Flippers

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On the fifth episode of The Domain Magnate Show, Michael shared his tips from over a decade of experience in buying and selling profitable online businesses. Michael discussed what’s the top reason why buyers are losing money on their first deal.

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SKIP TO THE GOOD PARTS:

00:15 - 01:26 - Why do most people lose money in their first deal?

05:14 - 8:50 - Things to look into when buying an online business.

8:50 - 16:03 - Assessing the risks

18:20 - 19:44 - Thinking ahead

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On the fourth episode of The Domain Magnate Show, we had a discussion with Mediavine’s Co-Founder, Amber Bracegirdle about the technicalities, tips, and secrets you haven't realized yet on monetizing your website through advertisements. We also run through how they “accidentally” created Mediavine out of their frustrations in the ad companies for their blogs.

GUEST BIO:

Amber Bracegirdle is a forensically trained fraud analyst, turned to Food Blogger. An experience that lead her to co-founding a powerhouse family of websites, Mediavine. She’s also the managing editor of FoodFanatic.com, author behind bluebonnetbaker.comand the co-host of the podcast Theory of Content. Amber mastered progressive ad placement, SEO, building social media presence, creating outstanding content, and developing exceptional recipes.

Connect with Amber: LinkedIn

Listen to Theory of Content Podcast

Visit Mediavine's Websie

SKIP TO THE GOOD PARTS:

00:52 - 01:26 - Mediavine in numbers

02:57 - 04:43 - The start of Mediavine

14:49 - 16:38 - Close calls and big mistakes

19:27 - 21:50 - Why your website speed matters

22:54 - 28:00 - Digging down to viewability score

33:09 - 39:11 - Health checks and ad placements

34:12 - 43:30 - Beating Google at their own game & thoughts on diversifying

43:38 - 48:16 - Requirements to qualify as Mediavine’s publishers

40:07 - 52:03 - RPM Challenge

59:00 - 1:02:19 - Mediavine payment terms

1:04:11 - 1:04:58 - Making sure your audience are real people

1:09:09 - 1:11:20 -Competition

1:15:06 - 1:15:39 - ad blockers

1:17:40 - 1:18:37 - Changes that are going to happen in Advertising

1:20:21 - 1:20:57 - final tips

SHOW TRANSCRIPT:

Michael Bereslavsky 0:14 Welcome listeners. Today we have Amber Bracegirdle, the cofounder of Mediavine. Welcome here.

Amber Bracegirdle 0:22 Hello, hello. It's great to be here.

Michael Bereslavsky 0:25 Amber, I'm excited to talk to you today because I'm really curious to get more into monetization.

Amber Bracegirdle 0:32 Okay.

Michael Bereslavsky 0:33 Where are you calling from?

Amber Bracegirdle 0:35 I'm calling from San Antonio, Texas.

Michael Bereslavsky 0:38 Nice. We like to start our show with numbers.

Amber Bracegirdle 0:44 Okay.

Michael Bereslavsky 0:44 Can you tell us a little more about Mediavine in numbers, maybe your revenues or traffic, things like that?

Amber Bracegirdle 0:52 We don't tend to discuss revenue. But we do, we can tell you that we work with 5400 bloggers. Little bit more than that actually now as of last week. We have more than 7 billion ad impressions across the network. We work, we have I think it's over 100 million in social impressions a month. So pretty, pretty substantial group of bloggers that we work with. But we started four years ago with six websites.

Michael Bereslavsky 1:26 Nice.

Amber Bracegirdle 1:27 So, the growth has been pretty crazy.

Michael Bereslavsky 1:31 How many people do you have now in the company?

Amber Bracegirdle 1:34 In the company? So, we started with the four co-founders, and we hired Brad, and that was five of us. Now we have 62 and we're hiring 10 right now.

Michael Bereslavsky 1:44 Oh, that's quite an astonishing growth.

Amber Bracegirdle 1:47 Yeah, yeah. We've grown by more than 100% every year.

Michael Bereslavsky 1:50 Is that locally or remote?

Amber Bracegirdle 1:54 Everybody's remote. Absolutely, everyone is remote. We do have, we call it me Mediapolis, or some version of that mini vine. We have a small contingency in Minneapolis, St. Paul, and another group that sort of spread out over North Carolina. But otherwise everybody is far flung.

Michael Bereslavsky 2:15 Nice. And do you mostly hire in the US or where they also hire these days?

Amber Bracegirdle 2:21 Really right now it has been US. It's not necessarily because we're opposed to hiring externally, outside of the US. It's just that we haven't had anybody come across, I think, that we've wanted to bring on board. And we're also not really set up for hiring in a foreign country. We're not incorporated internationally or anything like that. So, we would need to do that before we start hiring internationally.

Michael Bereslavsky 2:48 Yeah, it makes sense. Absolutely. And you have four cofounders, that's quite unusual. How does that work?

Amber Bracegirdle 2:57 So, the company itself was actually founded in 2004 by my three fellow co-founders. The guys, as I refer to them, Matt, Eric and Steve. They had worked together at Eric's brother's company, at one point, and then they formed something that they called iScribe limited together, and then they sort of renamed it at some point to Mediavine. And I didn't come along until 2013. And I came along to help them create and run a food website. I'm a food blogger, it was my hobby at the time. I'm also a forensically trained fraud analyst. And so, food blogging was my hobby at the time, and I came to help them start and run a food website, which I still run today. And we sort of happened into all of this, like it was complete and total luck along the way, we did not plan to create an ad management company. What happened is our ad company sort of fell apart. And Eric, who is the programmer among us said, I think I can build something for header bidding. So, I'm going to try. And within a couple of weeks, we were out earning our main network with remnant advertising, which is bananas. If anybody knows anything about advertising, you know that you never out earn your direct sold stuff with remnant, but with programmatic header bidding, we were. And so, we decided to, our contract was coming up for renewal, we decided to strike out on our own. And right around the same time, you know, bloggers always talked to each other, right. And so right around the same time, I mentioned to my best friends, that we were going to be doing our own advertising. And she said, Oh, my ad network sucks too, can you help me. And that was kind of the question that struck history. Because when you go to represent a site that you don't own in ad communities, you have to jump through a lot of hoops with Google Ad Exchange, and a bunch of others. And so, once we had done that for Jamie site, which is mybakingaddiction.com, we could pretty much do it for anyone. And so originally, the idea was, we would open up this to our food fanatics, so the people that write for food fanatic, which is the food website that we had started together. We had about 50 contributors at the time. And we said, well, this is something we can offer them as an added benefit, because we were never, we've never been able to pay like what a sponsored post would pay. But we're also allowing them to use that content on their own website and stuff like that. So, and so we thought, well, this will be a great benefit, right? And then we quickly realized that the thing about programmatic advertising is not necessarily the individual sizes of the sites, but the collective size of the group of sites. And so, we decided to just open it up to anyone, barring a few checks on our side. And so, we went from six websites to a thousand in probably five or six months. Mostly, I mean, entirely word of mouth, we've never done outbound advertising in terms of like Facebook ads, or anything like that. So, you know, I can confidently say that sort of the first thousand bloggers we worked with, I knew them on some level, I'd been a blogger for a long time, this year would be my 11th year of blogging. So, you know, and once we had that many that were just talking about us all the time, we've just continued to grow.

Michael Bereslavsky 6:33 Yeah, that's perfect. So, you just grew through word of mouth.

Amber Bracegirdle 6:38 And we still do.

Michael Bereslavsky 6:39 And how much traffic did you have when you started? Was it enough to kind of go and implement header bidding? Because it usually needs, I understand quite a traffic.

Amber Bracegirdle 6:49 Yeah, you do. So, one of the things that really is lucky about all of this is that our site, The Hollywood Gossip, by itself was big enough to do header bidding. It gets about 60 million page views a month.

Michael Bereslavsky 7:03 Oh.

Amber Bracegirdle 7:03 So yeah, it's a huge website, we have that one. We've retired Movie Fanatic and rolled it into The Hollywood Gossip, but we have The Hollywood Gossip, TV Fanatic, and Food Fanatic. And so, by itself, The Hollywood Gossip was big enough. So, it sort of carried the group of sites for a while in terms of being able to garner the deals that we wanted to get. But now the network itself outperforms THG by a lot.

Michael Bereslavsky 7:31 Yeah. And now if someone were considering to go and implement header bidding on their own, what would you recommend? Like what's the minimum amount of page views per month with it would make sense?

Amber Bracegirdle 7:45 You know, I don't know at what level sites like DFP, they call it something else now, but Google renamed it. But I don't know what their level is that they'll even consider working with the site. I know it's pretty high. The other thing is the advertisers that are out there, they still sort of have outdated thinking when it comes to this stuff. So, if you're a site by yourself and you aren't registering on Comscore. I don't know if you know what Comscore is, I can talk a little bit about that. If you're not registering by yourself on Comscore, they're really not interested. And so, for a while, when we started, we didn't have a sales team. And we struck up a deal with Conde Nast where they're Food Innovation Group would go out and do direct sales and programmatic deals for our group of websites along with their own. So, we were getting grouped in with Epicurious, and Food and Wine, and Travel Traveler, and all of that stuff. But at some point, we realized that we were actually bigger without them than with them. And so, we realized that err, not that we were bigger without them, but that we were big enough on our own, that we could go out and get these deals by ourselves and not have to share or not have to play second fiddle, right? Because when you're in a conversation on behalf of Epicurious, and all these other websites that people may have not heard of before, Epicurious is where they're going to do most of their spend, right? And that group was always wonderful. It's not that they weren't advocating for us. It's just that if you've got Epicurious versus two sites that you don't know, you're going to spend the money on Epicurious.

Michael Bereslavsky 9:30 Yeah.

Amber Bracegirdle 9:30 And so we decided, well, what we need to do is make a name for Mediavine itself, which is why we started gathering our own Comscore and moving the sites that were listed under the Food Innovation Group back over to Mediavine. And now I believe we're number four in food, number eleven or eight in travel, something like that.

Michael Bereslavsky 9:50 In Comscore?

Amber Bracegirdle 9:51 Yeah. In Comscore.

Michael Bereslavsky 9:53 So, is it like Alexa but more...?

Amber Bracegirdle 9:56 Kind of, kind of. So Comscore started out with like TV ratings. And they still do that, right. So, they still do TV ratings, like Nielsen stuff. But they also do it for websites. And so basically what happens is, if someone asks you for a traffic assignment letter, what they're doing is they're saying, you're signing an agreement that says, this entity has my permission to take credit for my traffic in a way that allows them to garner advertising deals. It doesn't refer to your traffic and taking credit for your traffic and any other way. It's literally just, they have my authority to go out and negotiate advertising deals on my behalf. And so, when you do that, and you combine 5400, 5500 websites, you become ginormous. To use a very American word, you become ginormous. And so, you really have a lot more authority in the space than most people would be able to get on their own.

Michael Bereslavsky 11:00 Yeah, I remember we had to sign that letter, that email, just recently, then we got one of our sites finally approved for Mediavine.

Amber Bracegirdle 11:09 Yay.

Michael Bereslavsky 11:10 So, you kind of started this whole thing as accidentally because of your own niches, and then you just had people coming to you and asking if they can join? At what point did you or did your cofounders realize that, you know, this could be something really serious. That this could be something big on its own.

Amber Bracegirdle 11:32 So, I definitely, so it's very funny, we had a phone call with Jamie when we were talking about her ad placements before we launched them on her website. And she and I both said to Eric, we're going to start an ad network. And he laughed at us, and said, we're not going to start an ad network. And then the very next week, BlogHer and SheKnows merged. And he goes, ah, maybe we are going to do something here. And I think, very quickly we realized, because I, we were starting things like really kicking things off and sort of the summer of 2015. We started in June. And then I got pregnant with my second son in November. And we had already hired Brad. And we were, Eric, myself and Brad were kind of doing the heavy lifting of the ads stuff because Matt and Steve were focusing on our owned and operated sites to make sure that they kept going the way, and growing, the way that we wanted them to. And so, we realized very quickly that when I went on maternity leave that we would be in a heap of trouble. And so, we had to hire some folks pretty quickly to bring them on, to do sort of the customer service, the publisher support facing aspects. And so, we hired Nicole. And then we very quickly hired Heather, we hired more engineers, and it's just kind of never stopped. But we knew I think, reality hit us when we were talking about my maternity leave, that we were going to have to hire people specifically for the ad stuff not for, you know, working on the owned and operated websites. And that was within like four months of taking on the first website.

Michael Bereslavsky 13:19 So you basically had to grow because, just sustain, just to have enough people to...

Amber Bracegirdle 13:25 Yeah. Just to have enough people to make sure that emails were answered. Like I think one of the things that made us stand out is that Eric and I, from the very start, we were like, Okay, if we're going to do this, one of the things that it's really important to us is that we always explain as much as we can, what we're doing and why we're doing it. A lot of other people in the space would purposely be opaque.

Michael Bereslavsky 13:53 Yeah.

Amber Bracegirdle 13:53 Because they didn't think bloggers cared or they didn't think bloggers would understand, et cetera. And I guess because I am a blogger, I was like, No, no, these are smart people. And we can explain things in ways that make them understand. And I think if we are transparent from day one, that will service us far better than anything else. And it really has been the number one marketing strategy is just tell the truth. If you screw up tell the truth. Just make it right, you know. And we kind of internally, you know, we never cringe if a mistake has happened because we know that just going out and telling the community here's what happened, here's why it happened. Here's how it wouldn't happen again. And here's what we're doing to make it right, is better than any advertising campaign we could run.

Michael Bereslavsky 14:43 Absolutely.

Amber Bracegirdle 14:43 You know.

Michael Bereslavsky 14:44 Did you have any close calls, any big mistakes like that?

Amber Bracegirdle 14:49 Yeah, well, I think everybody remembers that big, the yellow ad thing with Google a couple of months ago, I don't know if you remember. So I think it was in q4, last year, Google accidentally set live this, basically just a yellow square on DFP that had a ridiculously high CPM. And so it was beating out all the ads on the internet. And it ended up being something like a $10 million mistake on their part. It was live for about 45 minutes. And we've normally, if it's something that we had control over, we will always make it right, right? Like we've had people accidentally set things live in our own environment that we make right. But this was something we had no control over and we had no way to stop it. But it made people's RPM jumped by like $15 in a day.

Michael Bereslavsky 15:45 So it was good.

Amber Bracegirdle 15:46 Which was wonderful. But also, we had no idea if Google was going to pay for it.

Michael Bereslavsky 15:50 Ohh.

Amber Bracegirdle 15:51 And we did not, so some of our competitors chose to just literally shut their dashboard down because they didn't know what Google was going do. And they didn't want bloggers coming with pitchforks wanting that money. And so they shut their their dashboard down. And we did not do that. But we were also very forthcoming, like this is what's happening. We don't know what's happening but we will absolutely advocate for you, you know, with Google, because they did beat out all your other advertising. And luckily, Google chose to make it right. But we were definitely biting our nails for a while.

Michael Bereslavsky 16:30 So you had to kind of negotiate against Google for a bit.

Amber Bracegirdle 16:35 Yeah. We did that a lot.

Michael Bereslavsky 16:38 Yeah. And there are many ad networks these days and Google, obviously, ginormous. How big would you say you are compared to all the other networks working with Google? Like, would it be like in the top 10th of 100?

Amber Bracegirdle 16:51 You know, I honestly don't know where they rate us. I know that in terms of other ad management companies, we have two or 3000 more websites. I don't know. And I know that we are big enough now that when we call out a problem, it's not summarily dusted under the rug. Like there, you know, there is an actual conversation that happens. We don't always get our way. But we, you know, we work really hard to get our way as much as we can. So I don't, because I don't think even Google is public with that information. And so unfortunately, I have no idea where we stand, I just know, like, you know, and looking at things like Built Within or, or whatever, that we are definitely larger than by two or 3000 sites, than the other companies that people would lump us in with. We don't actually see ourselves in that space but you guys all seem to, so.

Michael Bereslavsky 17:50 Yeah. So do you guys still see yourself as you know, as a network for bloggers? Or do you see yourself as kind of a major player in the online ad industry?

Amber Bracegirdle 18:01 So we actually, this is what's really funny is we don't consider ourselves an ad company at all. At all. We have an eye to the future, which is why we aren't just focusing, like, obviously, we have an entire team of engineers that works on the ad tech. But we also have an entire team of engineers that works on the WordPress tech. So we've got Create, we've got, which is our WordPress plugin. We've got Trellis coming soon, which is our WordPress framework. We've got it live on a couple of websites, it's kind of a game changer when it comes to site speed. And we're just kind of eyeing the future and realizing that, in order for us to help people make as much money as possible, we need to provide them with the tools that don't get in their way. In the same way that our ad tech doesn't get in the way, like our goal has always been, let's not screw up the user experience as much as possible. Let's not screw up site speed as much as possible, because we didn't want to lose our number one rankings for The Hollywood Gossip, right? That was, it was a selfish goal. Like we don't want to screw up our own websites. But when you don't want to screw up your own website, you're not going to screw up anybody else's either. And so we definitely see ourselves as a big player but not in the space that you're defining us in currently.

Michael Bereslavsky 19:25 Make sense.

Amber Bracegirdle 19:25 If that makes sense. Yeah.

Michael Bereslavsky 19:27 Yes. So you mentioned site speed, that's interesting because the last time when we chatted briefly, you looked at one of our websites, if you remember, and you gave us some tips. And basically, you told me that most of those tips were just about improving the site speed. Just making it faster. And I was a little bit surprised. I was expecting somewhat tips on how to reposition ads to improve conversions.

Amber Bracegirdle 19:53 Oh, yeah. So.

Michael Bereslavsky 19:54 So how important is site speed really these days?

Amber Bracegirdle 19:58 Well, let me tell you. So first of all, site speeds a major ranking factor, right? The other thing is that everybody's on mobile phones. So the faster your website loads on a mobile phone, the more people are going to stay engaged with it and not hit the back button and go for somebody else. Also, your ads load faster. So the thing about the ad positioning, you know, as a single site owner that's trying to do this yourself, really the best advice I can give you is what we do ourselves, is test it out, figure out how readers are interacting with your website using plugin like Hotjar or something, to figure out the heat map and how they're interacting and put your ad positions where you know people are looking. It's as simple as that. Like your ad income will go up so long as you are putting ads where people will see them. They don't have to bonk them over the head, like an interstitial on mobile or things like that. You don't have to do that. So long as you are being intelligent about your placements in terms of what your readers are actually doing on your website, you're going to be fine. And that's different for every website, which is why when we scale, right? Like we we have some standard placements, but they move around based on what device someone's on, or what, how your actual content is displayed, they'll move around. And so me saying to you, oh, you should put your ads to these places, like that's not a long term solution, right? Because it's going to be different for every page that someone's looking at, and all of that. So site speed is huge, not only for the ranking stuff, but also when your ads load faster, your viewability score goes up. And viewability scores are incredibly important these days to getting a high CPM. So what a viewability score relates to is how much?

Michael Bereslavsky 21:50 Can you explain what a viewability score is?

Amber Bracegirdle 21:53 Yes. So the way an ad gets a viewability score is it needs to have at least 50 percent of the ad in the viewable screen for at least one second. When that happens, it starts to calculate a viewability score. The longer the ad is in the viewable screen, the higher the viewability score. Which is why you see everyone using like those sticky footer ads at the bottom of a browser because they stay there, no matter how long someone scrolls. They stay in the viewable screen and they have an incredibly high viewability score. In the same way that we were the first ad company to ever put an ad in a recipe card for food blogger, right? And when we did it everyone was like, that is the dumbest thing we've ever seen. It's below the fold, what are you thinking, it's not valuable. And the thing is, the way that readers interact with a food blog is that they do scroll through the content and read the blog posts, but they're scrolling all roads lead to the recipe card.

Michael Bereslavsky 22:54 Yeah.

Amber Bracegirdle 22:54 Whether they come in from Pinterest, or Google or Facebook or whatever, all roads lead to the recipe card. And so having an ad in that space, it became, very quickly became the, and to this day, the most lucrative ad position on our website, or on our network rather. And so that was literally about us switching how we think about it not worrying about traditional advertising norms, and instead saying how are people actually using these websites. And it's one of the reasons that we made that Create plugin, is we were trying to give more genres of blogging, the ability to create a what we call most valuable content card that will encourage the reader to interact with the website and scroll all the way to the bottom of the blog post to get the thing that they want.

Michael Bereslavsky 23:45 So the viewability score, how does it come into play in terms of the CPM of the ads?

Amber Bracegirdle 23:53 So we run at about, an average desktop CPM for us, across the network if we average it is about 3.50, $3 and 50 cents.

Michael Bereslavsky 24:05 So that's for 1,000 views...

Amber Bracegirdle 24:08 Yeah.

Michael Bereslavsky 24:08 Of the page, of the ad, of the...

Amber Bracegirdle 24:10 Right. But a, yes, but a typical one is around $1.75. Depending on the time of year and things like that, right? But viewability, so let me explain what viewability actually means to an advertiser. It means that their ad was actually seen. There's been advertising since Greek and Roman times, right? Like they found frescoes that were actually advertising on walls, right? But with digital advertising, with display advertising, it's literally the first time in the history of advertising, that you can actually prove someone saw this ad, and how long they saw it for. That is incredibly valuable to an advertiser, and they are willing to pay for it. Mediavine runs, so the score goes from from zero to 100, with industry average sitting somewhere around 70% viewability. Mediavine runs at eighty plus.

Michael Bereslavsky 25:10 Okay. Make sense.

Amber Bracegirdle 25:11 Yeah. Because of how we lazy load ads, meaning that we're not loading ad positions that won't be seen. Which was, again, that was a selfish choice, we lazy loaded ads from the day we launched the company, because we didn't want to slow down The Hollywood Gossip.

Michael Bereslavsky 25:25 So in terms of, so for publishers, how is it important? How can they increase their viewability?

Amber Bracegirdle 25:33 So you can increase your viewability, one, by paying attention to site speed, getting your site to load as quickly as possible. Two, would be keeping your reader engaged, right? Engaging content. We talked a lot about writing long form content at Mediavine, but we're not asking you to write just for length, like don't do that, because people will check out and they will be gone. And then you don't have viewability anyway, right? Engaging content that people are going to stay on the website and look at, and also consider ways that you can employ a most valuable content card. So Create is free. You don't have to be a Mediavine publisher to use it. It doesn't just do recipes. It does How To cards, which are really interesting, because you can literally use those for how to do anything. So initially, we were considering that schema type, no one else was doing it. And it was we were thinking, Oh, well, this will be great for our craft and DIY bloggers. So we released Create. And all of a sudden, we had like marketing bloggers, that were using this thing to showcase how to create an email course, how to set up a scheduler for your social media stuff. And they were creating that most valuable content card that people were scrolling to and printing out or scrolling through and sitting there for a while reading what's in the card, which is exactly what recipe readers do, right? Which is perfect. It's exactly what we want them to do. Because not only is the recipe card out, or the ad, we call the recipe card ad. But the card ad in view, your sticky ad at the bottom is in view, if they're on desktop, your sticky sidebar ad is in view, all of those things can refresh every 30 seconds. And if they've been in view for 30 seconds, your viewability score is ridiculously high, which means the CPM for those ad units is ridiculously high. And we're running a new option every 30 seconds. So finding a way to understand how your reader uses your website and then sort of manipulates, not my favorite word, but manipulate how they're interacting so that you know they are scrolling and they are seeing all of your in content ads where they are sitting at that most valuable content for a while can really be a game changer as far as increasing your viewability score.

Michael Bereslavsky 28:00 This is great advice. So to sum that up, use a heat map, something like Hotjar, to figure out where people are clicking and looking.

Amber Bracegirdle 28:09 Yeah.

Michael Bereslavsky 28:10 Make sure that it loads fast. Use some kind of scorecard website, sticky content to attract visitors so that they stay longer.

Amber Bracegirdle 28:21 Yes.

Michael Bereslavsky 28:21 That's about it, right? That's...

Amber Bracegirdle 28:23 Yeah.

Michael Bereslavsky 28:23 That little free...

Amber Bracegirdle 28:25 Yeah. And then video. A lot of people think that video is not for them, because they don't you know, they're not in food. They're not in crafts, they're not in whatever. But everybody has five top blog posts on their website that they can find stock images for and create a slideshow video using something like Animoto, everybody can do that. And when you engage video on your website using like the featured video stuff, your income can increase, it can become 15 to 30% of your total income.

Michael Bereslavsky 29:00 How long should the video be?

Amber Bracegirdle 29:03 So 30 seconds is ideal because if you can create multiple, you will automatically engage a playlist. So it's kind of like the same idea with the refresh. Every 30 seconds they would get a new video ad and video ads tend to have ridiculously high CPM. On desktop they're like $19.

Michael Bereslavsky 29:22 Nice.

Amber Bracegirdle 29:23 So definitely worth doing. If you go and look, Michael, you could go and look in the Facebook group right now. And search for people who say things like, if you haven't done video yet, get some on your website, and you'll find multiple posts where people were very resistant to the idea. And then as soon as they engage, they're like oh my gosh, the money, the money. And the thing is like we're lazy loading all the video. So long as you're using the optimized placement stuffs where it sits below the fold, it should be lazy loaded. So it shouldn't impact your site speed in a dramatic way. Like we're doing everything to make sure that we're not getting in the way of the site loading.

Michael Bereslavsky 30:01 Yeah, the Facebook group is quite active. And I noticed that you're quite active in it as well. Is it only for Mediavine publishers?

Amber Bracegirdle 30:09 It is, yeah.

Michael Bereslavsky 30:09 Can other publishers join?

Amber Bracegirdle 30:11 No, it's only for Mediavine publishers. It's sort of an exclusive, we are considering some ways that we can help publishers that aren't yet at Mediavine levels or perhaps were rejected. We were talking about ways that we can help that. So.

Michael Bereslavsky 30:26 So I have a...

Amber Bracegirdle 30:27 It's a long term plan.

Michael Bereslavsky 30:28 Yeah. I have a small confession to make. So.

Amber Bracegirdle 30:31 Sure.

Michael Bereslavsky 30:31 Before we start using Mediavine a couple of weeks ago, actually tried to submit some of our websites, but we got rejected. I think like five or six websites rejected.

Amber Bracegirdle 30:43 Yeah.

Michael Bereslavsky 30:44 So very strict.

Amber Bracegirdle 30:45 We are very strict. We have a reputation on the outside of the industry, as having the best content websites, we take that very seriously. But also, if enough of our ad partners are turning down a website, and won't bid, we would be no better for you than AdSense.

Michael Bereslavsky 31:07 Yeah. I understand.

Amber Bracegirdle 31:08 And so, that's kind of where we land when we reject the site. We, honestly, we hate rejecting websites, but, especially because so many people are just you know, blogging typically comes from a place of passion or a place of wanting to, you know, be an entrepreneur or something like that, which inherently has passion behind it. And so it's really hard for us to be like, Nope, sorry, we can't take you on. But a lot of times, we don't even know why a site has been rejected by our ad partners. Sometimes their tools spit something out. Sometimes they see an article they don't like, but as soon as they say no, like if enough of them say no, then we, there would be literally no competition in your auction. And so you would only have Google bidding anyway. And it wouldn't be any better. So it's, you know, that's where we land on a lot of that stuff.

Michael Bereslavsky 31:59 Yeah. Absolutely. So it was interesting, since I just checked the data today from that website that we did. And it's an affiliate website. So it makes most of its revenue from affiliate commissions. And it's make...

Amber Bracegirdle 32:14 Right.

Michael Bereslavsky 32:15 It makes close to $15,000 per month, mostly through Amazon affiliate. And we previously had some AdSense ads on it. But AdSense wasn't making much, it was making like $16 per day. That was the average when I looked up. And we replaced those ads with Mediavine. And now I checked and it's doing $60 per day. So instead of, so it's like a four times difference.

Amber Bracegirdle 32:41 Yeah.

Michael Bereslavsky 32:41 So I noticed that you had probably more ad units with Mediavine because with Google, you can just place individual ad units. And if Mediavine...

Amber Bracegirdle 32:51 They do you have, they do have a new...

Michael Bereslavsky 32:54 Yeah. They do have automated, but I usually prefer just using individual units kind of old school. And we only had I think one or two of it with Mediavine. I'm actually not sure how many we had because I believe they are placed like every couple of paragraphs.

Amber Bracegirdle 33:09 Right. So a good way to know is actually your health checks. So your health checks are averaging per session. So the first health check is for your top sidebar ad. And that is looking for your sticky sidebar ad to have twice as many impressions as your first sidebar ad. So basically what that's looking for is for your sticky sidebar ad on desktop to have refresh one time during a session. That's what that health check comes from. The mobile in content health check comes from how many ads are averaged per session in content. And then the same for desktop. And so if you actually take how many, like what your average number of pages per session are, and divide your health check by that number. That's how many ads are actually loading on a page view.

Michael Bereslavsky 34:08 Okay, so pages per session, pages per session divided by health check?

Amber Bracegirdle 34:15 Divide the health check by pages per session.

Michael Bereslavsky 34:18 Okay.

Amber Bracegirdle 34:18 So like, I think, mobile in content we're looking for, if you are at teal, we're looking for you to get eight ads per session. And if you have a typical of like 1.6 pages per session, then you would divide eight by 1.6. And that's going to give you the average number of incontinence that are loading.

Michael Bereslavsky 34:37 Okay. Make sense.

Amber Bracegirdle 34:37 For a reader, per session.

Michael Bereslavsky 34:40 And I was wondering, do you have many websites like that, that are primarily monetized through for different affiliate offers, and they use Mediavine as supplemental income?

Amber Bracegirdle 34:51 Yeah. So we have a fairly big presence in the finance industry, which is very heavily affiliate. We also have a decent presence in fashion, which again, is very affiliate heavy. We actually did this live, this Facebook Live with a fashion blogger and we specifically asked her, Do you remove Mediavine ads on your pages that are always your good performers for affiliate? And she looked at us like we were crazy. And she's like, why in the H-E-L-L would I do that? She had seen absolutely no change in her affiliate income adding ads on those pages.

Michael Bereslavsky 35:30 But have you done, have you done some A/B testing, can you...?

Amber Bracegirdle 35:33 Because we individualize everybody's ad setup, like letting them choose what they do, it's really hard to A/B test on that granular level, because we basically have to take control of how the ads are loading and not allow you to remove them on the page if you want to remove them from because like we have some finance bloggers that their top two pages, they don't have ads on them at all, which makes their RPM look falsely low, right? Because RPM is a math calculation. But we're not going to force them to put ads on those pages so that we can A/B tests. So

Michael Bereslavsky 36:07 Well, that's...

Amber Bracegirdle 36:07 So it's kind of difficult.

Michael Bereslavsky 36:09 That's always been my thought as well because it's reasonable to assume that if you put those kinds of ads like Adsense or Mediavine or something similar on a page where it gets a lot of affiliate sales, and you know that the affiliate commission's are going to be so much higher. So it's reasonable to assume that people will just click, some of the people will click on the ads, instead of going and buying some products. So you might lose some of those.

Amber Bracegirdle 36:35 Right. So there's a flip way to think of it that both, there's a travel blogger named Leah, that we did a live with as well that she sort of flipped this. And she said, Listen, I know my conversion rate on my affiliate pages is 15% or 30%, or whatever it was, and 70% are not actually going to click on my affiliate link. So I would rather monetize the 70% that aren't clicking my link than not. And if it means that I get 28% conversion instead of 30, I'm still coming out ahead.

Michael Bereslavsky 37:14 Okay, that kind of makes sense. Yeah.

Amber Bracegirdle 37:16 Yeah.

Michael Bereslavsky 37:17 But how would people know that these are the 70% and not the 30% who are clicking?

Amber Bracegirdle 37:23 Well, I think you'd have to watch the income, right? So if you put ads on a heavily affiliate page, and you see the income drop on affiliates by 10%. But you see your ad income, jumped by 20%. If they, you know, they're either going to equal out or you're going to come out ahead, would be my position. Because even if they click on, say for example, if they click on an Amazon ad, typically, the CPM from that ad is going to pay you more than the affiliate commission.

Michael Bereslavsky 37:56 Yeah.

Amber Bracegirdle 37:57 Unless you're like super grandfather and have one of their really old great commission structures.

Michael Bereslavsky 38:03 Okay. Yeah, it's a bit difficult to test also because you have so many variables.

Amber Bracegirdle 38:09 Absolutely.

Michael Bereslavsky 38:11 I got to say that I was really impressed just from those couple of weeks. So how can you really explain and how it's possible that you are beating Google at their game, you know, even just at specific niches Google is, I mean, they're the biggest company that browse online ads, they have the smartest people. What are you doing so much better that you're able to achieve substantially better results than AdSence.

Amber Bracegirdle 38:37 So really it comes down to the auction that we're running. Google, as far as I'm aware does not run an auction for AdSense. There is a little bit of header bidding happening, but I don't, I don't know. If they are running an auction, they're only running an auction within themselves, right? And so for us, we're working with all of the largest exchanges. So we're working with AppNexus, which is the second largest ad exchange in the world. We have a seat at AppNexus, which is huge. We're working with Index Exchange. And like Gumgum does our in image ads, but they also are better in that footer ad, right? So they have sort of, they're the only people in the space that are doing in image ads. But they are one of like 10 different bidders for that adhesion spot at the bottom of the browser. So it's literally, it's about providing enough competition. Our argument has always been that on these websites, on these lifestyle websites, and affiliate websites and things like that, the user, the reader is so valuable. And what the auction is doing and having exclusivity in that auction is doing is it's forcing all of these advertisers that used to buy on your website via waterfalls, or whatever the case may be. They used to cherry pick, whoever was offering your website at the lowest cost, right? They didn't care where they landed in the waterfall, so long as they got it for the cheapest price. With us, forcing people into a singular auction funnel, it's like being on eBay and having the only Beanie Baby ever in existence. I'm bringing up my podcasting partner, apparently, has a secret Beanie Baby blog that I just found out about last week. So it's like having the one Beanie Baby that everybody in the world wants and having one eBay auction, everyone is bidding in the same auction, it drives up the price. That's why we require exclusivity because anytime that someone else can sneak in behind with another listing for the same website on these programmatic exchanges, they're going to keep lowering the price. And our floor is set super high because we know what your audience is worth. And so if you have another bidder list in your website, it undercuts your auction entirely. And you'll never earn well. You know, which is why we require the exclusivity.

Michael Bereslavsky 40:58 Yeah. So is that similar to DFP? Similar to what Google does at their advanced program?

Amber Bracegirdle 41:07 Yeah. Yeah, so the DFP stuff, our ad server is DFP and then we're connecting all these other pipes in. And Google is still our biggest winner of the advertising. They buy about 60% of the inventory on the network, but the other 40% is fought over. Like it's all fought over, right? So Google and AppNexus and Index Exchange, and there's about 10 of them in total, are all fighting for the same ad position in milliseconds. And so that's really honestly what drives up that plus the viewability score, I think are the two things that sort of set us apart and make us the different player to the point that actually, Google quoted us in a blog post about lazy loading advertising and how good it is for viewability. Which made both Eric and me die, basically. We were like, Oh my God, did that just happened? And they now, now it is default, for their DFP customers that their ads are lazy loaded, which is pretty cool. It's pretty cool that, you know, this opinionated thing that we decided to do four years ago is now kind of becoming an industry standard.

Michael Bereslavsky 42:18 That's nice. So you set an industry standard.

Amber Bracegirdle 42:21 Yeah.

Michael Bereslavsky 42:21 But still, so much of your business depends on Google. Are you not concerned that one day Google might start to pay attention, and just decide to kind of do some similar things and pretty much kill your business?

Amber Bracegirdle 42:34 I mean, there's always the concern for something like that, right. Which is why we're always talking to our bloggers about diversifying income. It's why we work with nine other exchanges. So that, you know, if they decided to walk, I mean, the thing is, the nice thing, right? Is that if they decided to do that there's a whole bunch of other customers of theirs that would would be as upset about that.

Michael Bereslavsky 42:58 Yeah.

Amber Bracegirdle 42:59 As we would and it would upset the balance, right. It would upset the balance too much, I think, for them to recoup what they would lose in that process. So I, you know, it's not something that keeps us up at night. But it is something that we preach all the time is diversify, diversify, diversify. We never want ads to be the only way that our bloggers are making money. But we're also always paying attention to industry trends, so that we can stay ahead of that.

Michael Bereslavsky 43:30 Okay.

Amber Bracegirdle 43:30 We also have weekly calls with Google to make sure that we're keeping things in a good working order.

Michael Bereslavsky 43:38 Nice. So let's talk more about Mediavine and your publishers. So I understand its current the requirements are at least 25,000 sessions per month to qualify, is it right? And is that strict, like what if a website has 23,000 sessions?

Amber Bracegirdle 43:59 So it's not super duper strict. If you have 23,000 sessions and your traffic makeup is really good in terms of like, what countries it's coming from, and your traffic sources are really varied. And it's not that you had, you know, a Christmas pudding go viral right after Thanksgiving. And that's where 80% of your traffic comes from. We definitely will advocate with our partners to try and get that website in. If we think it's going to be a good fit, we don't see anything advantageous in making that website wait, if there's no red flags, you know, and if they have partners agree to it, then typically, we can go ahead and get them in the door, so.

Michael Bereslavsky 44:43 Do you know whats are the lowest traffic websites that you've accepted, roughly?

Amber Bracegirdle 44:49 Well. So when we first started, we didn't know what we didn't know, right? And so we didn't have a traffic threshold for probably the first six months. So certainly my own food blog that took a backseat to Food Fanatic, and then took really big backseat to Mediavine is not at our traffic threshold even remotely. I haven't updated in three years, but it still has Mediavine ads on it. We do allow, if you have one website with us that's in good standing and it's been with us for a while, we do allow you to apply a second or third or fourth website at 10,000.

Michael Bereslavsky 45:29 Okay.

Amber Bracegirdle 45:30 But you have to already have a website in good standing.

Michael Bereslavsky 45:34 Okay, nice. So existing customers get a bit of a discount.

Amber Bracegirdle 45:39 Yeah.

Michael Bereslavsky 45:39 And as you mentioned having...

Amber Bracegirdle 45:41 But all the other stuff still has to fall into place, right? Like...

Michael Bereslavsky 45:44 Yeah. Like you mentioned, so having mostly US traffic, having stable, consistent traffic, with some varied sources, right? And probably mostly in theniches that you focus on? Or do you take all the niches?

Amber Bracegirdle 45:57 No. We definitely do take people across multiple niches, like, you know, we're not setting the world ablaze in the gaming industry or anything like that at the moment. But, you know, we absolutely could, if enough gaming websites wanted to come on to us, right? But we do focus on lifestyle, simply because they are the most lucrative in terms of audience member value. But also we come from that space, right? So we started with our Food Fanatics, and for a while people thought, oh, they're only for food. Never the case, it was never the case, it was simply that that's where we started, because that's who we knew. But you know, we work with everybody from marketing and finance to, like your website, and affiliate website, we have a whole contingency of like book reviewing websites. Obviously, with The Hollywood Gossip, anything along those veins we have, which is as far from like, party planning and parenting as you can get. But we have those as well, you know. So I think really what is more important, is that your content lends itself to long form content. If your content only lends itself to short form, like little, you know, three paragraph blurbs, you're never going to do well in Mediavine. And so we actually just, you know, won't take your site out of the gate, because we know that you'll never earn well with us. You know, you're not keeping people engaged with short form content, you're not going to have high viewability scores, you're not going to load very many acquisitions. And people are just going to bounce away very quickly. And we know that that just doesn't perform well, with the type of ad formula that we've cooked up, you know, the way that we do the things we do. So really long form content is super important.

Michael Bereslavsky 47:48 So how long is like, what's the minimum? Or what's the average? Would you say like 1000 words?

Amber Bracegirdle 47:54 I mean, if you want to be in teal, which is our health checks, right? It's red, yellow, green, feel, we're a little obsessed with teal. If you want to be in teal, probably 750 to 1000 words is good or if you have a decent amount of photography included, you can be a little shorter. The bare minimum I would say is 500 words.

Michael Bereslavsky 48:13 Okay. 500 to 750 is better.

Amber Bracegirdle 48:16 Yeah, 750. I mean, the longer the better, basically.

Michael Bereslavsky 48:20 Yeah. And I looked at some of your top websites on your website. And I have to say it looks like they're all women oriented sites and owned by women.

Amber Bracegirdle 48:31 A lot of them are, we're about 78% female. And again, it's not, I mean, there's three guys in my, you know, three guys are my co founders. It's not something we intentionally set out to do. It's just that in the lifestyle space, the majority of that group, the story is a stay at home mom. Was bored out of her mind or needed to make some money for her family. Didn't want to get involved in a multi level marketing scheme and so she started a website. And you know, we have Mom, I mean, they're some of the most savvy entrepreneurs you can imagine. So for me, as a woman, it's awesome to see all of these female entrepreneurs just really kicking butt. But it's not something that we like, purposely set out to do. It just happens to be the demographic in the space at the moment. You know, certainly in things like finance, we definitely see it skew male, we're starting to see more and more dad bloggers.

Michael Bereslavsky 49:30 Yeah, that is great. And is there anything that people can do to increase the chances of acceptance into Mediavine?

Amber Bracegirdle 49:39 Yes. So we have a challenge on our website called the RPM challenge, right? And we created that for our bloggers to help them, a lot of people really like having a checklist. And so we created that for our bloggers as a way to say these are the things you can do to audit and improve your website. There's also a, I think it's how to audit your website in 20 minutes or less, that's in our Help Center. It's help.mediavine.com, and that's open to everybody. That's not, we don't hide that behind a paywall, or behind a password or anything. So anybody can access either of these things. And basically, if you go through and you do those things, you will have set up your website for success on Mediavine. And so long as you are getting your traffic from places that monetize well, it doesn't have to be an entirely US audience, you know, any mix of like US, Australian, British, New Zealand, Japan weirdly monetizes somewhat well, although it's still always a little scary to see it in the top four.

Michael Bereslavsky 50:45 In India. No?

Amber Bracegirdle 50:46 Anything like that. India does not monetize well. They don't even hit our floor. And so one of the things that we do is that, in order to speed up your website, if someone can't meet our floor to actually buy an ad, we don't load an ad. Like we don't have backfill, we don't load nasty toe fungus ads, like we just don't do that. Because ad quality is extremely important to us, again, because we didn't want to chase our own readers away. And so in those cases, what happens is we collapse the ad. So if you have a majority of traffic from India, the majority of your traffic simply wouldn't monetize. And it makes your RPM look like it's 30 cents, because you know, an RPM calculation is your income divided by your total number of sessions, times 1000 makes $1 figure. So if you know 80% of your traffic didn't get an ad at all, but you're dividing your income by that entire traffic, then your RPM looks like it's peanuts,

Michael Bereslavsky 51:46 So you'll only put ads that you'll get kind of high enough RPM. And if it won't, you'll just don't display an ads on the page.

Amber Bracegirdle 51:53 We just don't display, we collapse it to speed up your website. Yeah.

Michael Bereslavsky 51:57 That's great because, yeah, I think most networks with affiliates will freely load ads?

Amber Bracegirdle 52:03 Yeah, they would. And we actually have a blog post on our website called, Why 100% Fill Sucks. That goes into why we don't go for 100% fill here, we never will, it's just not worth it. It's not worth it to slow down your website, it's not worth it to alienate your audience. And it doesn't earn you much more money. So we'd rather increase the quality and performance of the ads you are displaying.

Michael Bereslavsky 52:29 Yeah. So we'll include all those links in the show notes, for those listening, for the articles that you mentioned about improving your chances of acceptance, sending checklist and the explanations as well.

Amber Bracegirdle 52:43 Yeah, there is also a blog post about the application process. I forget the exact title. But if you search for application process it should come up on the blog. And that would help as well for anybody that's looking to get approved.

Michael Bereslavsky 52:58 So about the process, I honestly found it quite long, I think I had to sign like five or 10 different documents. And it took more than a week to go through everything, and then fill out the details of the profile also. So many things to fill out. Compare to AdSense, you know, you just click accept, you add your website and that's it pretty much, the next day you are accepted or rejected.

Amber Bracegirdle 53:26 So a couple of things about that. So the first thing that you fill out is actually from Google themselves. That's basically saying, you know, I want this company to represent my ads, they require that you fill that out, not us. Then we have this TA, the traffic assignment letter, and we have our contract. And then the actual profile itself that we're asking you to fill out, AdSense doesn't have an influencer marketing arm, we do. So if we have a client that we think will want to work with you for like sponsored work like sponsored blog posts, or social media sponsored work, or whatever, we will pitch you to them. And then basically we become your agent in that space. And we'll get you sponsored work. And the way that we operate is you tell us your fee for the scope of work, and then we add our fee on top of it. So that you're never getting short change, like we're not taking a cut out of your earnings, we're explaining to the, basically we're making the brand...

Michael Bereslavsky 54:29 Like, is that a big part of your business? is that something that's...

Amber Bracegirdle 54:34 It's not a huge part but it is a decent part. And we work, we have a salesperson specifically for that. We have four employees that are specifically for that, we see it as a value add. But also, one of the things that has always been important to me and has formulated the way that we did a lot of what we do is that there are a lot of unscrupulous people in the online industry that are willing to take advantage of bloggers who don't know any better. And I know that because I personally have been, tried to, take advantage of. I think I've managed to not be taken advantage of but it frustrated me greatly to see so many of my friends be under cut, or be sort of taken advantage of. And so we decided early on that we would offer an influencer marketing arm because we have 5400 websites that a brand would find enticing. And so by having you fill out that profile, it gives us a ton of information to search through to find bloggers that fit a request for proposal perfectly. And then we can pitch you, and then once we actually have like, okay, we're ready to go. We reach out to you and say, Okay, this is the scope of work. How much would you charge for this exact thing? So like in your profile, we're asking you for rate. But we're not just like taking that as the blanket rate, like we then reach out to you and we say, okay, well, this is the total scope of work, how much do you charge for that? And so it's...

Michael Bereslavsky 56:05 What is the typical rate for a blog post these days on your network?

Amber Bracegirdle 56:11 it really depends on the blogger. You know, we have some bloggers that don't have that much traffic, that are killing it on social media. And they'll charge $1,000 for an Instagram post. But we have some bloggers that aren't killing it on social but killing it on their blog, and they charge $6,000 for a blog post. So it really, and then there are some people that charge 250.

Michael Bereslavsky 56:34 Well, let's say, like an average website. Say like 50,000 visitors per month, and some low social media presence. I don't know, like a few hundred followers, a few thoudsand.

Amber Bracegirdle 56:46 I mean, I would say anywhere from 500 to 1000 is perfectly acceptable if you're putting evergreen content on your website. And you're also pushing that out to your social channels.

Michael Bereslavsky 56:57 That's really cool.

Amber Bracegirdle 56:58 Yeah.

Michael Bereslavsky 56:58 So that's for just writing one blog post about advertiser including their links, their product, that's right?

Amber Bracegirdle 57:05 Yeah. And a lot of times it's like you're also creating something with their product. Or talking about using their product, like we just did one with a, here in the US, we have, you know, we have health insurance and then we also have some programs on top of it. Like there's an app for your phone called RX Saver. And they work out additional discounts with pharmacies, and I'm not sure how like all of that works, I just know that the app works. And so we worked with them to do a campaign across a bunch of our different bloggers, some finance, some travels, some parenting, etc. And basically, the goal was to get the blogger to go out to the pharmacy and use the actual app and talk about how much money they saved. And some people say $50. So it was really kind of impactful to their readers because it's a free app that you can download. And all you have to do is have a pharmacy scan it and you might save no money but you might save $50, so.

Michael Bereslavsky 58:05 So the bloggers had to go to the pharmacy, use the app, and then write a blog post about it.

Amber Bracegirdle 58:10 Yeah.

Michael Bereslavsky 58:11 Okay. And also probably shoot a video, something like that.

Amber Bracegirdle 58:14 They didn't ask us for video, they just kind of, some of them took like photos of their receipts, and things like that, sort of demonstrate how much money they saved.

Michael Bereslavsky 58:26 And that's like $1,000 to post, something like that.

Amber Bracegirdle 58:30 Something like that, you know, it was different for each blogger, depending on their reach. But yeah, unfortunately, we get that question a lot. And unfortunately, it is really individualized, like that's one of those things that you can't put like a standard number on because every blogger is different. In the same way that people are always like, Well, why is that person's RPM different than mine, our content is the same and our traffic is the same. Your audience isn't the same. And that's why it's different. And so it's the same with influencer marketing.

Michael Bereslavsky 59:00 So I have a couple of quick questions for you about publishers. So what are your current payment terms, is it after 30 days, after 60 days.

Amber Bracegirdle 59:08 So it's net 65. We typically, we, our date of payment is the fifth, but we usually send the money on the first, so you can typically get it. It's typically a little early. But the reason it's not 65 is we keep a very clean shop at Mediavine, we do not use your money to pay operating costs. And we do not use our money to pay publishers. That's how companies like Mode went out of business. So we have always been very straightforward about that, is we can't pay you until we have your money in house from the advertisers. So, it's net 65. And then the revenue share is a variable revenue share based on how many ad impressions you are getting in a 30 day span. So you started 75% to you and 25% to us. And that includes any kind of discrepancy, ad server fee, et cetera, that all comes out of our side. So at the end of the month, what you see in your dashboard is what you're getting. Most other companies will like I know when I was with BlogHer years ago, before they combined and everything like that, every month, like I would think Oh, great, I made this much money. And then 10 days later, they reconcile. And I made like 25% less than I thought because they took all the discrepancies out. And so what we decided when we started was we would take that out of our side, and it helps us keep the ad partners honest. Because if they start creeping up in terms of how many discrepancies they're having, we shut them down until they can fix it. And so when you jump to 5 million ad impressions in a 30 day span, you jumped to an 80% revenue share. When you get 15 million ad impressions in a 30 day span, you jumped to 85%. On top of that, we have a loyalty bonus. So for every year that you're with us, you get 1% revenue share back. So if you've been with us, there are a bunch of people this year that will have been with us for five years, you're getting an additional 5% revenue share. So if you're already in an 85% rev share, you actually jumped to a 90% rev share, which is the lowest we can possibly make it and break even on a website.

Michael Bereslavsky 1:01:16 Nice. So 75 is the default. And after they've been with you for a while, or if you have more than 5 million, or more than 30 million, is it monthly? Monthly page views, right?

Amber Bracegirdle 1:01:27 Yeah, it's 30. Yeah, and it's not page views, it's ad impressions, right?

Michael Bereslavsky 1:01:32 Okay.

Amber Bracegirdle 1:01:32 And we did that because people who are extremely well optimized, can reach those goals at lower traffic. So it's not all about the page views.

Michael Bereslavsky 1:01:42 Like a couple hundred thousand visitors per month?

Amber Bracegirdle 1:01:46 If you're really well optimized, yeah. I've seen people as low as 300,000 reach that 80%. Because they're extremely well optimize, they write long content. Obviously, it's easier if you have a lot of traffic to hit those goals, because it doesn't, you don't have to be as optimized. But we wanted the goal to be as, we wanted the goal to be based on optimization rather than gaming page views.

Michael Bereslavsky 1:02:12 Yeah. That makes sense.

Amber Bracegirdle 1:02:13 Right. Because not every page views monetize is the same based on viewability and all that.

Michael Bereslavsky 1:02:19 And do you have any referral program? Or do you plan to have one?

Amber Bracegirdle 1:02:23 We do not have one. And we have no plans to have one, which I know frustrates our finance bloggers tremendously. But we decided very early on that we did not want to grow, we did not want an opinion of us to be part of someone's revenue stream, right? We rely on the honest feedback to improve ourselves. And if you have an opinion of us tied to your revenue stream, you're not going to give us an honest opinion. The other thing is that we grow so quickly, that I don't think we could handle it if we had a referral program. And so the thing that we've always tried to explain is that as a programmatic advertising company, the bigger a programmatic network is, the more money it earns. Like just flat out per impression, the more money it earns. So you actually are getting, by referring people to us, you do actually get money back for that. And then we instituted the loyalty bonus, as a way to say thank you as well.

Michael Bereslavsky 1:03:27 Yeah. And do you have publishers that use paid traffic primarily?

Amber Bracegirdle 1:03:33 We do not. So if you have paid traffic that's not from a verifiable source, like Pinterest, or Facebook, where you've paid for a Facebook ad, or you've paid for a Pinterest promoted pin, you will most likely get shut down very quickly on Mediavine. Those types of traffic typically are not real people. They're from bot farms in a foreign country. They do not monetize well, and ad companies, Google specifically will blacklist you.

Michael Bereslavsky 1:04:02 Okay. So it's not allowed, even something like buying traffic on AdWords doing arbitrage that's against your terms of service?

Amber Bracegirdle 1:04:11 So long as the traffic is coming to you from, I don't think there'd be a problem with AdWords. So long as it's coming to you and it's real traffic, it's real people, right? Like one of the reasons that Facebook ads are so expensive, is that it's real people, you have to have real people coming to your website, ad fraud is a thing. And if your domain is banned from Google, it's across all add products, and it's for the life of your domain.

Michael Bereslavsky 1:04:42 Yeah.

Amber Bracegirdle 1:04:43 So it is not worth it.

Michael Bereslavsky 1:04:45 So basically test the real traffic.

Amber Bracegirdle 1:04:48 Yeah.

Michael Bereslavsky 1:04:48 And if it's acquired, if it's bought, it's okay. But it has to be real, right?

Amber Bracegirdle 1:04:54 Yeah. I mean, we use Facebook ads for The Hollywood Gossip all the time.

Michael Bereslavsky 1:04:57 Okay.

Amber Bracegirdle 1:04:58 That's a really big source of traffic for us. But you have to, you definitely have to make sure it's a real person because if it's not a real person, you're in trouble. And we look for that, right? Like, we look for people who all of a sudden have like a huge influx of desktop traffic, but their RPM drops tremendously, and things like that. And we'll actually turn your ads off. Not because we're trying to be punitive, but because we don't want you to get blacklisted. Because a lot of people will invest in those things, not realizing that it's a bot farm, that's going to send them traffic. And so our goal is to make sure that your domain doesn't get blacklisted from the ad exchanges, because then that's it, you're done, you're toast. Like nobody is going to be able to work with you. It's not like you can leave Mediavine and go to a competitor and be fine. If you're blacklisted from Google, across the board. No Google certified publishing partners going to be able to work with you, we're not allowed. So you can basically just shut down your business, it's not worth it.

Michael Bereslavsky 1:05:57 Yeah, absolutely. So I have a question for you from from our community. There are many people who buy websites these days, they often do it with the intention of buying websites that have been monetized by AdSense or other networks, and putting them on Mediavine. And I was wondering if you are seeing that a lot? And also, is there some possibility to check first, let's say someone is buying a website, and they want to check if this website would be approved by Mediavine now before they acquire that, is that something you allow?

Amber Bracegirdle 1:06:31 I don't know that we've ever been asked that question before, I don't think it would be something that we would allow, because a lot of the stuff that you have to sign as you're going through the application process indicates that you own the website, right?

Michael Bereslavsky 1:06:45 But this only happens later.

Amber Bracegirdle 1:06:46 But you can kind of...

Michael Bereslavsky 1:06:47 Like the application, the signing, I think it happens only after it's approved, right?

Amber Bracegirdle 1:06:51 Right. But the Google application happens sort of right away after we've done an initial PDF check. But that's, the other thing is, if you're looking at a website, you don't have access to the analytics to then send us a PDF, right? And that's something that we use with our ad partners. So we would have no way to know without that PDF, but I would say that a lot of people could figure out the likelihood based on their own approval process, right? If you've got at least one website on Mediavine, you can look at your PDF that was approved, you can look at your top posts, you can look at your traffic breakdown, and kind of understand, okay, these are the things that they're looking for. And then look at how your website is interacted with by readers. If it's long form content that is engaged with for a while and would receive a decent amount of incontinence, then you're most likely in a good place, right?

Michael Bereslavsky 1:07:47 Yeah.

Amber Bracegirdle 1:07:47 And if you have a website that isn't, you know, we're brand safe. So you're not, you don't want to be buying things that are specifically geared towards like pornography, like we're not going to improve that kind of website. That sort of thing is definitely very important. I mean, we even have a case study of a blogger who writes about relationships and marriage and things like that. And we had her go through her blog and replace the word sex with the word making love.

Michael Bereslavsky 1:08:14 Oh.

Amber Bracegirdle 1:08:14 And her RPM, her RPM went up by like $8 within a few days, because there are advertisers who have certain keywords they look for, and if it's on the page, they will not bit. And so those are things that you can definitely consider when you're looking at a website.

Michael Bereslavsky 1:08:32 Interesting. Yeah, because now that many publishers realize that Mediavine just has higher CPM, that's becoming more of the moral thing. I've personally seen some deals recently that people put that in a contract so that if a website, after the purchase, if a website is approved by Mediavine, there is a higher pay out to the seller.

Amber Bracegirdle 1:08:55 That's really interesting, yeah. Yeah, that's really interesting. But, and I will also say like, if you're seeing AdSense ads on the website, like then at least you know that it's in good standing with Google, which is another big thing, right? So, yeah.

Michael Bereslavsky 1:09:09 Yeah, absolutely. And I want to ask you a little bit about competition. So AdThrive, Ezoic, all the other different companies, what are your thoughts on that? Do you see them as competition? Like do you think that some of them are maybe better than Mediavine in certain niches? Or do you say that you're better than them?

Amber Bracegirdle 1:09:26 Well, for me, it's not about the niches right, it's about and I don't think for even them, it's about the niches it's about their process, right? We each have different processes, and ways that we choose to focus on how we deliver advertising. So I personally think that we're the best for user experience. Now I know that, for example, Adthrive now gives you the option of lazy loading your advertising, but it's not a default, you have to ask for it. Things like that. And I don't necessarily think that that's going to make their CPM jump, because if the majority of their network is not lazy loading, then you're not seeing the network benefit of an increased viewability score, which is something that advertisers look for. I don't have a lot to say about Ezoic slash Bloomly, like they use they use lots of fancy words to explain their machine learning, but we all use machine learning. So it's like, okay, you're just trying to sound fancy. You know, for a long time, people have compared us to AdThrive. But based on the long term roadmap that we have, I don't think it will be much longer that people are comparing us to these companies. Yes, we absolutely do ads. Yes, we focus on the ads. And yes, the ads help pay for a lot of the really cool stuff that we're bringing to the industry. But we are so much more than that, like we are focused on being so much more than that, that I don't think that we're even the same league. And I don't mean that like in a bad way. I mean that in like, we're in a very different business. Like we have very different goals. For us, it's always about the faster product, the better user experience. Because when you pay attention to those things, the ads perform better, like automatically. Like it's not something where we're loading 50,000 ads on the page just because that will make you more money. That's never been our goal, we're long term thinkers.

Michael Bereslavsky 1:11:20 But you do load quite a few ads. I've noticed with default, I think is 12 ads per page, something like that.

Amber Bracegirdle 1:11:26 Right. But that's the cap and that is not the default. That's not how many, like if you go look at your health checks...

Michael Bereslavsky 1:11:32 It's like the maximum, the default cap.

Amber Bracegirdle 1:11:35 That's the default cap, yes. But you'd have to have the content to support that many. hits. Yeah.

Michael Bereslavsky 1:11:42 You have two or three paragraphs?

Amber Bracegirdle 1:11:44 No. So it's not based on paragraphs at all. It's based on density. So we go by the coalition for better ads, which is 70% content to 30% advertising. Our default across the network is actually 28% advertising to 72% content. So if your content only has enough space, like enough height, to have five ads, that's all you're going to get. And that's only if a reader scrolls all the way to the bottom of your post. If they only scroll past two advertisements, that's all that loaded, right? But a lot of people think, oh, when I scroll from the top to the bottom of my posts, there were 12 ads? Well, yes, for you, there were 12 ads, because you scroll from the top to the bottom. Most users don't do that, they find the information that they want, and they leave. So using your health checks as a guide, you know exactly how many ads per page you are actually loading. By doing that, the equation that I told you earlier?

Michael Bereslavsky 1:12:49 Well, you know, until a few years ago, AdSense was only allowing up to three ads per page. So it seems that something has changed drastically in the past few years.

Amber Bracegirdle 1:12:59 It did changed drastically. So we actually only used to allow five ads on the page. And that was when Google changed it to allow five ads on the page. And then for very long time that's all that we did. And then Google themselves changed it to density, right? So like if you go and you use the ad experience tool that's in Search Console, like they talk about the coalition for better ads, and the coalition for better ads has Google as a member, we're a member, like there's a bunch of companies, Microsoft, etc. that paid for a huge study to figure out like at what point do people start installing ad blockers. And what they found is that it wasn't an actual like, total, it was a density.

Michael Bereslavsky 1:13:41 But isn't this more about pop ups and pop unders and things that's a lot more annoying?

Amber Bracegirdle 1:13:46 I mean that stuff is included as well, right?

Michael Bereslavsky 1:13:48 The ad blockers?

Amber Bracegirdle 1:13:49 So like, that's why Google, that's, I mean no, ad blockers are for in content ads to, like for sure.

Michael Bereslavsky 1:13:56 That's why I think people just install them, to avoid pop ups, mostly.

Amber Bracegirdle 1:14:02 That's not the commentary that I see. I certainly see like on Reddit and stuff that people are just talking about, they don't want ads at the bottom of the screen, they don't want it in content, they don't want it anywhere. There's just a certain percentage of the population that is just completely and totally advertisement in first, and we understand that. Which is why we say to people like don't try to shove an ad at somebody who's purposely going out of their way to not have ads like that's not, it's not great for your reader. And there's such a small percentage that the better for us, the better thing to do is to focus on user experience and quantity. Like if you're paying attention to quantity, of course, you're going to be like, Whoa, there were eight ads on that page. That's a lot of ads. But when you're actually interacting with the post, they don't all bonk you over the head like it's very natural and seamless. And it's only going to get more so.

Michael Bereslavsky 1:14:55 Yeah. So you're reading it slowly and then they pop up.

Amber Bracegirdle 1:14:59 And they're spaced out well, and all of that stuff. Yeah. So it's really more about the actual user experience.

Michael Bereslavsky 1:15:06 So you mentioned ad blockers. I'm curious if you have any data in terms of how many people these days use ad blockers.

Amber Bracegirdle 1:15:13 I think there's been several studies about it. And it's only about 5% of the total population that's online, and even less that are actually looking at like lifestyle websites. So that's why we don't care. We're like, it's, we would rather focus on making it a good experience so that people don't install them than trying to get around the ad blockers that do exist and shove an ad at someone that doesn't want one.

Michael Bereslavsky 1:15:36 Yeah. That sounds like a good strategy.

Amber Bracegirdle 1:15:39 Yeah. So it's a little less contentious, I think. For sure.

Michael Bereslavsky 1:15:44 And so talking about strategies in the future, what are you currently working on? What do you see as your current challenges or goals for the company?

Amber Bracegirdle 1:15:56 So we definitely are working to get Trellis out into the real world, which is our WordPress framework. Adding more schema types to Create, we definitely want travel to come out.

Michael Bereslavsky 1:16:07 So that's your own WordPress framework that people can use to build things?

Amber Bracegirdle 1:16:13 Yeah.

Michael Bereslavsky 1:16:14 That's nice.

Amber Bracegirdle 1:16:15 It's going to be really cool. And then we will also have a marketplace with that of Trellis approved themes that we know will not screw up your site speed on top of it. And then, and we're talking to some designers about that. And then, just improving the ad tech continuing, we reevaluate that constantly. So that's where, you know, I don't see us as just the ad company, right? Like we've never just been an ad company, we've always been content creators. We're hoping to move our owned and operated sites to Trellis very quickly, because currently they are on what we refer to as EricPress, which is Eric's own CMS that he created on Ruby on Rails. And I'm really tired of not being able to update the website the way I want to because he's too busy to go and reprogram the website. So having an entire team of WordPress engineers that I can say, please help, will be fantastic. So the owned and operated sites moving to Trellis is a huge deal for us. And really the reason that we decided to create Trellis to begin with is we couldn't move The Hollywood Gossip and maintain our site speed on WordPress. And so we were like, Well, we've got to find a way to fix that. And then we're like, well, same way with the ad tech, like, we'll just make it available to the wider world because it will only help our publishers, which will only help the bottom line. You know? So really, I think just right now, those are the main two things that we're focused on.

Michael Bereslavsky 1:17:40 And what kind of changes do you see in the market like in the next five years or so?

Amber Bracegirdle 1:17:46 I personally think GDPR is going to come a wider thing like it will make its way to the US, it will make its way across the world. The good thing is that like we created technology, like RCMP is really great. And we actually, there are certain websites among us that we were terrified, because the majority of their traffic comes from the UK or something. And they're some of our biggest websites. We were terrified that their RPM's we're going to take a dive and they actually increased by 10% in the first week of using our same piece. So you know, I think that there will definitely be more data sanitisation happening and stuff like that. So we're sort of future proofing for that right now. Like we're making sure that we've got stuff in place. If, for example, this goes worldwide, things like that. But I don't think digital advertising is going anywhere.

Michael Bereslavsky 1:18:37 Yeah, it looks like it's only growing even now. So I'm curious, being successful and growing so fast. What are your plans for the future? Have you considered selling the company? You must have many VCs offer.

Michael Bereslavsky 1:18:50 Yeah, we get offers all the time, we get offers for VC. We don't have any plans to sell, like people will always look at me like we're crazy. We have so many ideas and so many cool things that we want to do that a venture capitalists would never let us do, an investor would never let us do, that we have no interest in selling. We didn't get into this because we wanted to get rich quick, we were already doing quite well for ourselves. And so really, it's about making the cool stuff we want to make for the community that has embraced us so well. But we do, we get offers constantly. And we are just, we've never entertained a single one because we're just not interested.

Michael Bereslavsky 1:19:28 And I know you still have your own network of sites, right? Do you buy more sites? Do you do build more? Do you acquire?

Amber Bracegirdle 1:19:36 We've talked about buying other sites. But I mean, honestly, none of us has the time to run them in the way that we would want them to be run at the moment. So right now, No, we're not. We're not doing anything. I won't say never. But you know, first order of business is getting our owned and operated sites on WordPress, and then we'll see how we're doing.

Michael Bereslavsky 1:19:55 And I saw that you categorize yourself as the most tagged person in Facebook group. So I got to ask, are you still quite active on Facebook?

Amber Bracegirdle 1:20:05 Always. I'm on Facebook the majority of the day. So yeah, it started early on. We started our Facebook group probably a month in. But also I was, as a blogger, I was in other Facebook groups. So people were tagging me all the time.

Michael Bereslavsky 1:20:21 Right. Thank you. So finally, before we finish, what kind of advice can you give people in terms of something very fast that they can do on their content websites in order to improve revenue or speed?

Amber Bracegirdle 1:20:36 Optimize your images, get an optimization plugin, like ShortPixel or Imagify, and optimize your images. Also don't host on Bluehost or HostGator, any of those at all, because they will not help you with site speed. And they will throttle you as quickly as they can snap their fingers. Find a real host.

Michael Bereslavsky 1:20:55 Is there any good hosting that you generally command?

Amber Bracegirdle 1:20:57 I mean, there's not a lot of specifics. I like Agathon Group if you are big enough to want managed hosting. And then I, a lot of people recommend BigScoots and stuff like that. But I yeah, I would just stay away from the Bluehost and the HostGatorsof the world.

Michael Bereslavsky 1:21:15 Right. Well, Amber, thank you very much for talking to us today and answering all the questions. And that's been some really interesting advice for our listeners.

Amber Bracegirdle 1:21:25 I'm really glad.

Michael Bereslavsky 1:21:27 Well, thank you very much and have a nice day.

Amber Bracegirdle 1:21:29 You too, Michael, thank you so much for having me. Bye guys.

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SHOW NOTES:

On the third episode of The Domain Magnate Show, we sit down with the FreeeUp’s founder, Nathan Hirsch. Know more about hiring and scaling, freelancer vs employee, and managing a remote-based company. Nathan also shares his tips and common mistakes in outsourcing.

GUEST BIO:

Nathan Hirsch started in e-commerce, selling baby products on Amazon. After all his own frustrations in outsourcing and finding the right talent, he built a new marketplace connecting entrepreneurs to the top 1% of virtual assistants, freelancers, and agencies in eCommerce, digital marketing, web development and more. To date, their platform, FreeeUp has been catering 2,500+ of freelancers and thousands of clients from all over the world. Recently, their team just hit a milestone of billing 18,000 hours in a week.

Connect with Nathan: LinkedIn | Facebook | Outsourcing Masters FB Group | Schedule a meeting

Listen to Nathan's Podcast: Outsourcing and Scaling

SKIP TO THE GOOD PARTS:

00:25 - 01:15 - Why FreeeUp has three e’s

02:30 - 04:30 - FreeeUp in numbers: hours billed, users, and revenue

04:55 - 11:10 - FreeeUp vs Upwork and other freelancer marketplaces

11:20 - 13:10 - Popular tasks that business owners outsource and pay rates. Breaking it down to "Followers vs Doers vs Experts"

15:25 - 25:30 - Hiring on different levels: managing, establishing communication channels, setting expectations, and common mistakes

26:53 - 32:07 - Starting FreeeUp, getting the first clients and strategies in getting the word out

34:12 - 35:30 - Improvements for FreeeUp
36:35 - 38:30 - Maintaining work-life balance

40:07 - 42:00 - Best and worst employees
43:40 - 43:58 - Get a $25 credit on FreeeUp. Listen here!

44:05 - 44:34 - Advice on hiring

SHOW TRANSCRIPT:

Introduction: This is the Domain Magnate show, where you'll learn everything you need to know about buying, optimizing, and selling online businesses, with your host, Michael Bereslavsky.

Bereslavsky: Hello podcast listener. We are here today with Nathan Hirsch, the founder of FreeeUp.com and that's triple E. F-R-E-E-E-U-P.com. Hello Nathan.

Nathan Hirsch: Hey, how you doing?

Bereslavsky: So before we start, I got to ask, what's with the name? Why do you have triple E?

Nathan Hirsch: So we try to get the one with two "E" actually, eventually, or at first, but that didn't work out. Verizon actually owns it, but when we started FreeeUp, we were a marketplace for e-commerce sellers. I mean, we did everything e-commerce from drop shipping and customer service to Amazon listing, all that stuff. So the third "E" stood for e-commerce for the first year and then we kind of transitioned to the marketing industry and other online businesses. So we got rid of the e-commerce part and we just kept the third "E".

Bereslavsky: Oh, so the first, the first two E's are just "free" and then the third one is for e-commerce. That makes sense.

Nathan Hirsch: Right, exactly.

Bereslavsky: Nice. So where are you calling from now?

Nathan Hirsch: I'm in Orlando, Florida. It's not too hot today, although it's been brutally hot. I just got back from New Orleans, which was equally hot, but I'm entirely remote. I own a place in Orlando and I travel a lot.

Bereslavsky: Nice. So I'm really excited to get into this because you built a really unique and runs a big outsourcing business, FreeeUp. And outsourcing, hiring, and kind of team building that's been one of my main focus lately. So I'm really excited to dive into this and discuss some of those things.

Nathan Hirsch: Yeah, I love talking about hiring and scaling and they really go hand in hand. If you want to grow your business, you're going to have to hire people. And the difference between people that hire really well and the difference between people that struggle is a lot of times the difference between success and failure. No matter how good of an entrepreneur you are, at some point you have to figure out how do I surround myself with talent and how do I get the most out of that talent?

Bereslavsky: Yeah, absolutely. And I love to start every episode by looking into some numbers. So what numbers can you share with us about FreeeUp in terms of your revenue or members, clients, numbers, things like that? Employees?

Nathan Hirsch: Yeah, so I started at this back in 2016-ish, end just 2016. I started with $5,000 and we did about a million dollars in the first year. 5 million in the second. We did about 10 million last year, well actually around 9 million. And that's kind of what where we're at now. This year we're hoping to break 13-14 million, that'd be pretty awesome. We bill over 17,000 hours a week. That doesn't include fixed prices, which we also do weekly and monthly. We've got thousands of users all over the world. We've got about 3000 freelancers on our platform. So that's kind of where we're at right now.

Bereslavsky: That's very nice. So the 14 million you're expecting this year, is that, is that your company revenue, or that like the total volume of, of transactions on the marketplace?

Nathan Hirsch: Yeah, it's top-line revenue.

Bereslavsky: Oh, so that's the revenue that you make from the, I understand from the 15% fee, is that correct?

Nathan Hirsch: Well, no. So if we bill a client a hundred bucks an hour, we're making $15 on that, the 15%. Topline revenue is that a hundred. So we're making the 15% of that.

Bereslavsky: Oh, okay. So that's the total.

Nathan Hirsch: Yeah.

Bereslavsky: Sounds good. So you guys are profitable, right?

Nathan Hirsch: We, yes, we are. I mean we have very little expenses. We're entirely remote. We have no office. We only hire people from our own platform. We have no US employees. It's me and my business partner, Connor. All the day to day operations is run by virtual assistants that we got on our platform. The billing, the customer service, the recruitment, the success team, all that stuff. And all the higher-level stuff, the Facebook ads, the Instagram, all that is all freelancers we got on our platform that we're just one of many of their clients. And they're doing certain tasks for us. And we have our software...

Bereslavsky: That's great.

Nathan Hirsch: Yeah. Thank you. We have our software that we built, that we invested money into that handles everything from the billing to the affiliates to the tickets and the support and all that. So we use that and outside of that, there's very little overhead in the business.

Bereslavsky: That's a really great setup. So you don't actually have to go and hire people, you just have them on your platform. You just pick the best one, right?

Nathan Hirsch: Exactly. We get to kind of pick the 1% of the 1%

Bereslavsky: Yeah, that's perfect. So before we get people into it, explain to us a little bit how it works. How is FreeeUp different from outsourcing companies, so, from freelance marketplaces like Upwork?

Nathan Hirsch: Yeah, so there are four things that make us different. First of all the pre-vetting, I mean anyone can go on Upwork, Fiverr, post your job or apply and or offer services on that platform. With us, we get thousands of applicants every week. These are virtual assistants, freelancers, agencies from all over the world. We spend a lot of time vetting them for skill, attitude and communication and only the top 1% get on our platform as service providers. So it's tough to get in. We spend a lot of time screening. Next is our process. So I know a lot of people are used to marketplaces where you post a job, you get a hundred applicants, you have to interview them one by one or you have to browse through thousands. With us, there's no browsing. Whenever you want to freelancer, you just click the request a freelancer right inside your account. You tell us what you're looking for. Give us as much information as possible. It takes a few minutes and from there we introduce you to one person by default.

Nathan Hirsch: We normally send one because people don't want to meet 20 that's not why they come to us. But if you say, Hey, send me three 75 whatever it is, we're happy to do it. And then you can interview them, meet with them, make sure you like them. So it's a pretty fast and efficient process. On the back end, I would put our support against anyone out. We have 24 seven support, people that monitor my Skype's, my emails. We're always there to make sure that you have a good experience and we're there if who have even the smallest issue. And then last is our no turnover guarantee. I always used to hate when I would hire someone on another platform and I'd invest time and money and energy into them, only to have them quit. Well, if that happens on our platform, which rarely happens, but of course it's real life. If it does, we cover replacement costs and get you a new person right away. So that's really how we're different, the pre-vetting, the speed, the customer service, and the protection.

Bereslavsky: So that's perfect, you only offer, you only suggest to just one person because the biggest problem of using the freelance sites is you have like 50 people applied to your job and then you have to review everyone and interview them. And here you just suggest one person. And do most people just hire at one person or like what's, what's the statistics?

Nathan Hirsch: Yeah, it's really all over the place. I mean, a lot of people do, they let, they like the one person or if they, if they talk to that person and they want another option, maybe they request a second one. But we also have clients who, they have their own vetting process and they want to put people through that and they'll say, hey Nate, send me 10 people or send me three and I want to meet three and interview three and then pick one or hire two for trial tasks and then pick one from there. So you really have the flexibility to use our marketplace, use our platform however you want. But I think a lot of people like that, like you said, that they're not getting overwhelmed with applicants and they're really in control of that process. And we're making sure that every applicant that we send you is an actual fit for your job.

Bereslavsky: Yeah, that's perfect. And you did mention that you have the 1% percent of the best, the best applicants. So how do you, how do you sort them, how they filter them? How they figured out who are the best ones?

Nathan Hirsch: Yeah. So we vet them for skill, attitude, and communication. So for skill, we don't need everyone to be a 10 out of 10, right? There's a time and a place for people that are 10 out of tens, eight out of 10, five out of 10, three out of 10. What we care about is that your price accordingly and that you're honest about what you can and cannot do. And if you get on our platform and you're taking on requests that you can't do at a high level, we're not in place to experiment on our client base. So we're quick to remove you. So tough to get in with skill. We put them through skill tests. Once you're on, we'd hold people to those expectations. For attitude, we want people who are passionate about what they do. If I hate bookkeeping and I hire a bookkeeper, they need to love bookkeeping as much as I love being an entrepreneur, those are the types of people that we want to work with.

Nathan Hirsch: We also know that not every client is rainbows and butterflies, right? There's going to be difficult clients out there and as a freelancer, you have to be able to handle difficult clients. If every time a client becomes a little bit difficult that my team or I have to get involved, that doesn't work for us. So we need people that can be the bigger person, that can act professionally, that can do things to protect themselves, and treat clients at a very high level of customer service just like if I was dealing with the client myself. We also want people who can take feedback and not take it personally. I think you've probably worked with someone who can't take feedback. It's frustrating, it's annoying. So we look for all of that in the attitude and just like with skill, it's tough to get in. We do one on one interviews and once you're in, if you show signs of a bad attitude, we're very quick to kick you out.

Nathan Hirsch: And then lastly is communication. Communication is everything, right? I mean it doesn't matter if someone has a great attitude and a good skillset. If they can't communicate, nothing else really matters. So we have 15 pages of communication best practices that freelancers have to memorize and get tested on before they get on our platform. And then from there, we hold people to those expectations and once they're on it, they have to respond within a business day, stuff like that. And clients can let us know if they're running into issues and we're quick to remove them from our platform.

Bereslavsky: 15 pages on communication. What? What's that about, like, does it just cover communication between client and freelancer?

Nathan Hirsch: Yeah. So there's a difference on our platform between the terms of use and the best practices, right? So a term of use is you can't get paid outside the platform, right? You can't do something illegal. You can't steal the client's information, like stuff that you can't do, if you, that's against the terms of use of our platform. Then we have our best practices and you're free to, you're free to work with the client however you want. You're running your own business as a service provider. You can offer those services as long as the client's happy and they don't complain to us.

Nathan Hirsch: At the same time, we've been doing this for a while, we work with a lot of freelancers. We know what works, we know it doesn't work. We know how to protect clients, how to protect freelancers. So we put together these best practices and it comes down to, listen, you don't have to follow the best practices if you have a better way. If you have your own way and it works, that's totally fine. But if we run into issues and you're getting client complaints and you're not following the best practices, there's only so much we can do.

Bereslavsky: Yeah, absolutely. So what are some of the most popular tasks or positions that people usually hire for? And what would be kind of the common prices?

Nathan Hirsch: My least favorite question, only because...

Bereslavsky: Really?

Nathan Hirsch: Well, we get so many requests. Like yesterday we got 60 plus requests and they were all over the place. There was no rhyme or no reason. People needed graphic designers, Amazon lifters, virtual assistants, customer service, bookkeepers. It's really all over the place from, this is what I like to do. I like to break it down into three different levels. You've got the followers, the doers, and the experts. So the followers, think five to 10 bucks an hour, non-US. They're there to follow your systems, your processes. They have years of experience because we're not a marketplace for newbies, but at the end of the day they're followers.

Nathan Hirsch: Think lead generation, think customer service. Think executive assistant. I can get you someone with five years of customer experience, but the way that you do customer service could be different than the way that I do, so you have to show them how you want it done. Then you've got the doers, the specialists, they spend eight to 10 hours a day doing the same task. They are graphic designers, writers, bookkeepers. You're not teaching a graphic designer how to be a graphic designer, but they're not consulting with you either. They're the doers. And then you've got the experts, the 20 and up. The consultants, the high-level freelancers, the agencies on our platform, we have an agency program. They're bringing their own systems, their own processes, their own strategy to the table. They can consult, they can project manage, they can execute a high-level game plan. So that could be digital marketing or e-commerce Amazon experts or it could be conversion optimization. I'm hiring someone right now to do the UI and UX on our software. So it just depends whether you're looking for a net follower to help you get hours back in the day, the doer to help take projects off your plate, or the experts to come in and execute a strategy on something that you're not good at.

Bereslavsky: I like that. That's, that's actually quite new. I've never seen that before. By the way, I like how you define that as followers, doers and experts. I think it's the biggest, one of the biggest problems probably is that people hire followers and they often expect them to be, you know, to be experts or to be doers. And I think that's a really important distinction. That's, that's really, that's really great for, especially for, kind of beginner employers who don't yet have as much experience in managing employees. And that's really great for them to see and understand what kind of person they want to hire.

Nathan Hirsch: Yeah. And quick clarification, we don't provide employees, we provide virtual assistants, freelancers, and agencies. And keep in mind, these are real people, right? They don't always fit into perfect levels, but the levels are important from the mindset of the client, the mindset of the entrepreneur. So you know exactly what you want. Do you need that follower, do you need that doer, or do you need that expert? When you have that clarity, it leads to a lot of better hiring decisions.

Bereslavsky: And is it typically part-time or short term projects, or long-term or full-time projects?

Nathan Hirsch: Yeah. So there's no minimum, there's no maximum. Again, it really depends on the client. You're welcome to use our platform however you want. We have clients who will hire 10 customer service reps in the Philippines and they've had them for three-plus years. And then you've got someone else who will hire someone to build a website and never talked to them again afterward. And other people might hire a graphic designer and go to them on and off for the year with different work or hire someone for two, three-month projects. I mean you have the flexibility to hire people however you want.

Bereslavsky: So I'd love to discuss hiring on different levels. If you considering an employer or considering someone, a business owner who wants to hire, first, someone who wants to hire their first-ever VA, their first-ever employee, what would be some the most common mistakes that people usually make? Or what, what is the advice that you would give them if this is the absolute first hire and you know, they just have a new business with a kind of starting up and now making revenue and they feel like they have more work than they can handle.

Nathan Hirsch: Yeah. Good question. So I have 40 VA's, right? I didn't just wake up and hire 40 people, that's not how it works. I started small. I hired someone five, 10 hours a week. I gave them tasks. I got them really good at those tasks. Once they got good at those tasks, I gave them another, and another, and I increased their hours and I eventually hired a second person and I went through that process slow. I think a lot of people, they just keep going, keep going, keep going without making sure that they're actually, the VA's actually doing what they want and actually taking the time to set those expectations. When you hire someone, you need to set the expectations, hey, this is when we're going to work. This is what success looks like, this is what failure looks like. This is how we run meetings, this is what's important to me. These are my pet peeves.

Nathan Hirsch: Getting 100% on the same page right from the beginning. And then if things start to not go on the right way or deadlines are being missed, whatever it is, pause work, take a step back, get on the same page again, and then give them another chance. And if you continue to do that and only move forward once you're 100% on the same page and things are getting done exactly the way you want them, you're going to have a lot more success long term. And giving feedback is so important. I mean, you have to remember, especially if you hire like a part-time VA, they're going to have other clients. They've probably had 10 clients before you. Every client wants things differently. What one client likes, another client hate. So if you don't spend that extra time to set expectations and give good feedback, you're going to struggle because the VA doesn't know exactly what you want.

Bereslavsky: Okay. Perfect. So for the person who's hiring a first time, give feedback, have clear expectations, yeah? And make sure that you communicate well with the freelancer, right? And let's say the next level that you already have several freelancers and maybe you have a team to manage. Maybe I'm managing like three or five people or maybe you want to hire someone full time. What are some common mistakes that people make and what some advice would you give people that are in that stage?

Nathan Hirsch: Yeah. So once you get to that stage where you're, you're mentoring a lot of people. I personally like to put a team leader in charge and I want to talk to that person. I want to make sure that they're comfortable being a team leader and I want to set the expectations of what that looks like. What a, what's different between being a team leader than just being another VA on the team and what, what kind of communication are we going to have? How are you going to report to me? How are you monitoring the other ones? There might be meetings that you're going to run without me even there, which I do right now. There's a meeting every Monday morning at 3:00 AM with all the assistants and I never attend that because it's 3:00 AM and they do a great job, but I set that expectation of, Hey, this is what I need you to make sure you cover. This is how we run meetings at freeeup. Here's how you report to me what happened to that meeting.

Nathan Hirsch: Really making sure that you're giving them that additional responsibility and there's a way for you to get that information. So even if you're not there, you're still involved. I think the other thing is just setting up different communication channels and what those channels are for. I think I've seen some clients struggle because they only use email or they only use Skype. You really should have different ones for different reasons. This is how I set it up. So, we, everyone has email, everyone has Skype, everyone has WhatsApp or Viber, whichever one they want. So with email, that's for things that aren't urgent, right? I can send an email as long as you respond within a business day or the next time you work, we're good.

Nathan Hirsch: So that's for non-urgent conversations. If every time that I sent, that I got something, I sent someone a Skype message, they would go crazy. It doesn't make a lot of sense. You want to do email for that. Skype is more day to day. Talking back and forth, having a conversation, having a meeting. But I'm not sending someone something on Skype unless it's important and we need to talk about it now. And then Viber and WhatsApp are just for emergencies. So I think a few weeks ago our software like went down on a Sunday at like 2:00 AM and someone Vibered me and we fixed it within 30 minutes and it wasn't that big of a deal. But that's an example of how do I get a Viber type issue, if they shoot me an email saying that my software is down, I'm not going to get that email until the next time I log in. It's a lot more important than that.

Nathan Hirsch: So establishing what communication channels you use. And, and how you use each one and making sure everyone's on the same page with that. And even giving some corrections. I had a VA on my team who's brand new, who, who called me, on like a Friday night over a very non-important issue that could have been solved without me. And it wasn't a big deal, I just explained to them, hey, that that's not a Viber type issue. That's a, Hey, talk to a team leader or handle it, I'll check it next time I'm on type issue. So keep resetting those expectations and keeping those expectations in line as you go.

Bereslavsky: Nice. So on that second stage with like 3-5 people, get a manager and then set clear expectations about communication channels and which channels should be used when and how right?

Nathan Hirsch: Exactly.

Bereslavsky: And let's see. What's the next level, let's say that they have close to 10 employees, more or less, and several managers. What are some common mistakes that people make at that stage and what, what are some advice would you provide?

Nathan Hirsch: So I think a lot of people fall into the trap of not diversifying. They hire one person or two people and they really like them, maybe they had some bad hires before and they just load up those people with everything. Or maybe just load them up with the most important tasks and then that person gets sick, that person needs a week off. No one else knows how to do their tasks and that stuff doesn't get done. And that can set your business back. So when I have a team of 10 people, which I have now on my customer service team, I think it's 12 or 13, not only does, do I spread out the tasks among different people, but more than one person knows how to do every single path. So if that one, I don't need to teach 12 people to do every little thing. That's crazy. Because some things are small things that only get done once or twice a week. But if someone has a task on Wednesday and they can't work that Wednesday, that task still gets done by someone else, by the backup. So I think that's where a lot of people go wrong. They either invest the time and teaching everyone to do everything which gets a little crazy and out of control or they're just not diversifying enough and making sure that their business is protected.

Bereslavsky: Nice. So diversifying and having some backup, but how would you go about scaling that management structure? Because once you have, let's say more than 10 people, you might want to have a couple of managers. You might want to have someone, like you probably would consider doing, adding as a level of management, right? How would you go bust that?

Nathan Hirsch: So it's very specific to what your structure is and what the work is. What I like to do is for every type of manager or team leader, there are two things, there's what tasks are you responsible for and then what people are you responsible for. And if you take the time to actually list those things out, you're going to be able to see what that tipping point is. If you're working with a team leader and their tasks and their people are way more than any person can handle, you probably need to hire that second person. And then you need to divide it up and say, hey, you're responsible for Bob, Julia, and Ross, and you're responsible for Joe, Nick, and Mark. And really divided up from there. And the same thing with tasks and figuring out, hey, it's your job to check every email at the end of the day to make sure nothing was missed. It's your job to check every Skype message to see if anything was missed. Once you start to actually write those responsibilities down and define them, that's going to give you a much clearer picture of where you are. You might look at it and be like, oh, one person can handle this, I'm good for now, but in six months or a quarter I'll revisit this. Or you might look at it and be like, wow, that's, that's too much for one or even two people. We need to divide this up between three people.

Bereslavsky: Yeah. That's good advice. So dividing things up and giving clear expectations, clear talks to people. And what do you do next? Let's say you get up to, well you have now 40 employees, right? So how do you manage 40 employees successfully?

Nathan Hirsch: Yeah. VA is not an employee. So we divide it by, there are three different parts of FreeeUp for the day to day. You've got the billing team, you've got the success team, which is our recruitment and then you've got the customer service team. So the customer service team actually has two team leaders, one in the morning, one at night, because it's much more of a 24 hour around the door type thing. So we've got team leaders and then they, each of them has an assistant team leader because again it's a 24 seven thing and then everyone else is underneath them and has shifts because that's more of a set time. Now for accounting, they work 8:00 to 12:00 AM and PM. It's not a 24/7 thing. If someone has an accounting issue, it can usually wait. We can always call them if it's super urgent and there's one team leader for that team and then three people underneath them.

Nathan Hirsch: There's no real need for an assistant team leader, that one person can handle all three people. And then on the success team, very similar to the accounting team, it's not 24/7. We only do interviews at certain times. So I have one team leader and four people underneath them. And those four people have different tasks from going through applicants, to actually doing the interviews and approving people, all of that. So that's kind of how we divided up in the day to day. And then you've got the outside the day to day, right? You've got the social media, you got the marketing, the lead generation, all those stuff around it. And for that we use freelancers, and with those people report to Connor and I. So we don't need team leaders because those people are not really on my team. They're doing certain projects for us. So Connor and I divided up, he handles the developers and the blog. I handle the social media, the marketing and stuff like that. And so certain people respond to me and they update me and I'm in charge of the projects and vice versa. And as we get bigger, who knows, we might build out a marketing team and put someone in charge, but that's kind of how we handle it right now.

Bereslavsky: Nice. So different departments and different team leaders. And is it just you and your partner in charge or do you have some other people in your team, those on the job is just to manage others?

Nathan Hirsch: yeah. So it's me and Connor as the owners and then we've got the accounting team leader, the two customer service team leaders and the success team leaders. So it's those four really, those are the people that are running the business.

Bereslavsky: Nice. It sounds like a really efficient setup.

Nathan Hirsch: Yeah. And the cool thing about it is you're going to make tweaks along the way. Like when we set up the team leaders and the assistant team leaders, there was some tweaking. There was, hey, you know what, this is too much work, we got to move it here. Or Hey, you know what, you're a morning customer service person or customer service team leader. It doesn't make sense for you to do this task. We need this task in the afternoon, so let's move it to the afternoon person. So don't be afraid to create a plan, execute that plan, get things in place, but then evaluate, see what's not working and tweak things over time. And we're always doing that. We're always listening to feedback and saying, hey, how can we improve? How can we make this better?

Bereslavsky: Yeah. That's really great. And I like to get into the overall kind of progress of FreeeUp. So you start about four or five years ago, is that right?

Nathan Hirsch: Yeah. This is year four, in our year four.

Bereslavsky: Did you expect that it would get so big? Did you expect that it would cross, you know, into eight figures?

Nathan Hirsch: No, I mean, I'm a very short term thinker. I understand that the market's change, right? I mean, I use sold baby products on Amazon before this. I got into it at a really good time. I got into Amazon in 2008. If you had asked me 10 years ago if I'd be selling baby products on Amazon, I wouldn't believe you. If you asked me five years ago if I'd be running a freelancer marketplace, I wouldn't have believed you. So things change. We tried to get our minimum viable product out there as fast as possible. We spent a few thousand dollars on a time clock software that had really no features. People could clock in, clock out, clients could see the freelancers on their end and, and that was it. There was nothing else that software could do. We got it to market. We started asking people for feedback.

Nathan Hirsch: We got in front of some micro-influencers and whenever you start a company, you have no idea what the client feedback's going to be like. And I think at first the feedback was oh great, another freelancer platform. That's what the world needs right now. And it took a little bit of time for people to try us and give us a chance. And from there we treated those initial clients really well and they had a good experience and they told other people, we created a referral program where you get 50 cents for every hour that we build the people that come from you forever, which is probably one of my better business decisions because people started talking about us all over the world and us kind of expanded from there.

Nathan Hirsch: So I never start a business thinking, oh my God, this is going to crush it. I know this is the home run. I mean you can't be like that. Things change, just because you like an idea or your parents like an idea or even one of your clients likes that idea, doesn't mean that the entire market likes the idea. So it really was about figuring out what people like and continue to make adjustments. And we're very fortunate we've gotten to this place. I mean we couldn't do it without our team. They build me, they bill me 1200 hours a week. They put a lot of hard work into this business and we're really grateful for it.

Bereslavsky: Nice. So in the beginning, how did you get your first clients? Was it through for word of mouth of that referral program?

Nathan Hirsch: No, the first client was us cold emailing people and trying to get someone to give us a chance. I mean, we have built some relationships with some manufacturers and different Amazon sellers with my Amazon business. So that was kind of our starting point. We had this group of freelancers that we used for our Amazon business. We really liked those freelancers and we didn't use them full time. So the initial thing was us offering our network of freelancers to other people. And clients would email me and say, hey, I need a graphic designer. I need a lister We'd say, Hey, here's Bob, here's Joe, whatever it is. And that was how we got FreeeUp off the ground. Eventually, we ran out of freelancers and we had to build a recruitment team and start vetting and all that. But, but that was really, it is cold email trying to get people to give us a chance. It's a very low barrier to entry, right? It's free to sign up. There's no monthly fee, there's no minimum. So people were more open to give us a chance and let's say if we were selling a $10,000 product for the first time, but then once they got in the door, it was on us to make sure they had a really good experience.

Bereslavsky: And what was next? Once you got to, let's say half a million or 1 million in revenue, how did you, how did you grow further?

Nathan Hirsch: Yeah. So it's figuring out what was the best way to market. I mean we've spent very little money on ads, right? We, we do our referral program, which is great. We're going to pay out about $300,000 this year in referral money. And then we wanted to work with influencers, people who are coaches, people who have a Facebook group, people who have a podcast or community of business owners and, and that their, their audience needed people to hire and we partner with them. We provided them a lot of good content like, just like we're doing right now. We've provided the affiliate program and most importantly we took very good care of their clients, their customers, and made them look good and that made them want to keep referring business. And so we've created this ecosystem where we have lots of different influencers, lots of different partners, all that do the same thing that, that have the same audience that we do but do different things.

Nathan Hirsch: We promote them to our audience, they promote us to theirs, and it ends up being a win-win for everyone. We also realize that podcasts were a great way to just get in front of entrepreneurs. So I do a bunch of podcasts each week. For the past three years, I've probably done three to four podcasts a week. And it's a good way to just network with awesome people like you. It's a good way to get in front of an audience. It has some SEO benefits, like backlinks and different stuff like that. So podcasting has been big as well.

Bereslavsky: And for finding leads, finding freelancers to come on your platform. Do you have any, any other strategy for it or is it, do they just organically come and join?

Nathan Hirsch: Yeah. Very similar to the client-side. I go on freelancer podcast or we have our referral program on the freelancer side and we do a little bit of ads. We have our blog, we have our YouTube channel, we have our podcasts and we're constantly putting out content and then we've got partnerships with it, like virtual assistant academies, freelancer schools, stuff like that. So again, people just hear about us and we get about 2000 applicants a week getting onto our platform.

Bereslavsky: That's a lot. And what's your best marketing channel currently? Is it still mostly from podcasts and kind of is word of mouth and the referrals?

Nathan Hirsch: Yeah, it's organic. It's our partnerships, our podcasts, and our content.

Bereslavsky: Nice. So for people that are considering to use your platform, comparing it to, let's say Upwork or freelancer.com or you know, or some, some other platforms. What would you say is it just absolutely perfect for? Who would be the ideal customer to come and use FreeeUp?

Nathan Hirsch: Yeah. I mean from a marketing side, because you can't market to everyone, we target e-commerce businesses and we target marketing agencies. And marketing is kind of nice cause it trickles into every other industry a little bit. But, I mean, we have all different types of clients. I mean we have a client who uses VA's to manage their friends on the football team. We've got real estate agents, we've got software companies, we've got Amazon seller, Shopify sellers, we've got marketing influencers, marketing agencies. We've got consultants and coaches. I mean anyone can take advantage of the gig economy, whether you need a part-time or full-time virtual assistant or you just need a new website or graphic design work or you need marketing, you need social media, you need those experts. So, even if you're a brick and mortar store. I mean I had a client that I met in Orlando and we took them out, he took me out to lunch and it was his restaurant and he was using freelancers to market his restaurant. So any business owner can use the FreeeUp platform and can use freelancers in general.

Bereslavsky: So that's a really wide reach. What's your average client like? Do they have one freelancer or do they work with 10 different freelancers or is it just all over the place?

Nathan Hirsch: Yeah, it's probably all over the place. I mean, I think that at any particular time people are usually working with two to five freelancers. I don't have any stats to back that up, but that's like a ballpark. And then we've got clients who use way more and we've got clients who have hired a five hour a week VA and they've only used that VA and no one else for the past year. So it's very all over the place.

Bereslavsky: Great. So you've, you achieved some really phenomenal growth with that business. And what, what's your next plan? What does the future look like?

Nathan Hirsch: I want to see how far we can push this thing. Sorry, I didn't mean to cut you off.

Bereslavsky: Yeah, yeah, no worries. Yes. So what current challenges are you facing or what's, what's your next goal with FreeeUp?

Nathan Hirsch: Yeah. So right now our goal is to improve our software and our client experience. I think I mentioned there's a very little barrier to entry. We have a lot of partnerships. We get lots of new signups every day, but we understand that our platform is different than a lot of platforms that people are used to. So we want to educate people. We want to make our software easier to use. We want the client experience, like what emails, what kind of contact they get from me and my team to just be better. I mean, even small things like what you call certain things in the process, I think can be better when we, when we fill a ticket, not everyone knows what filling a ticket means. So there's some part of clarifying things and just making it easier and easier and better. And, and overall that's going to benefit the freelancers. That's going to benefit the client. So that's kind of our thing. I mean, we can spend tons and tons and tons of money on marketing, but we don't want to do that until we make sure our funnel is as good and clean and clear as possible. So that's our main focus for the third quarter. And then after that, it's a busy season. It's the fourth quarter and everyone's hiring and all that. And then come January, that's when we reach out and make lots of new partnerships and plan ahead for the year. So that's kind of our immediate plans.

Bereslavsky: And who do you see as your main competitors right now? Or do you just not pay attention to competitors at all?

Nathan Hirsch: I mean, we pay attention. Every virtual assistant agency, every platform like Upwork and Fiverr, which went public, every single freelancing platform out there is competition. There's no shortage of it. I've yet to see anyone that's doing things the way that we're doing it. But at the same time, I mean, things change all the time, we don't want to be complacent. We want to continue to make it better and better and better. And while also monitoring what other people are doing. And usually we look at stuff that other people are doing and we say, all right, that's all right, or we don't really like that. Or Hey, that's great, we should implement that. Or Hey, you know what? That was a good idea. We're going to tweak this and make it our own, so we're constantly looking at competition, but we're very focused on what we're doing at FreeeUp.

Bereslavsky: Okay, Nathan, so I have a few random questions for you. First of all, I got to ask you, you have a very high energy guy. How do you maintain your work-life balance? How do you maintain that high energy throughout the day, throughout the week?

Nathan Hirsch: Yeah. I don't know why I'm high energy. That's just one of those things that you are who you are, right? I tend to be that way in all aspects of life. Like I go to the gym at 4:45 every day. I'm going all out for an hour. That's just, I'm just a high energy human being. The best way for me to get away from business and have a work-life balance is I depend on my friends, my family, and my fiancé. And there'll be times where my fiancé will just take my phone away from me and she'll just have it for the rest of the night because that's what I need in order to just get away and remind myself that I have to have a balance. I think anyone that's looking for that perfect balance, that doesn't exist, right? It's all about, are you enjoying life? Are you doing what you're doing for? Is your business hurting your friendships? Is it hurting your ability to take good care of yourself? Are you getting enough rest? Are you able to have hobbies and interests outside of your work? And I think you need a really good support system and it's something that as an entrepreneur, it's very tough to turn it off, but you have to continue to work at it.

Bereslavsky: Yeah, absolutely. Most entrepreneurs only have an on or off mode, you know like on, then you're just working like 16 or 18 hours a day or off, that you're just away on vacation, don't want to check email at all. It's really difficult for everyone to kind of figure out that balance. So it's really amazing that you've been able to get closer to that.

Nathan Hirsch: Yeah. It's a work in progress and I think as you get a little bit older and they're like, I just got engaged. And I think when you're, at least for me, when I was younger and I was in college like I didn't have to sleep very much. I could, I could party all night and wake up the next day and work and I can balance school and social life. And I think as you get older, you start to get into more habits, more routines, more tendencies. You, you tend to realize that that work isn't everything and you have to have that life and you have to enjoy travel and, and all that stuff. And just one of those things, you're constantly maturing.

Bereslavsky: Absolutely. What book or books are you reading, currently?

Nathan Hirsch: Reading currently? Well, I just got back from a ton of travel, so I'm actually looking for a new book right now. If you have any good recommendations. My, one of my favorite books is "Start with Why" from Simon Sinek. It just resonates with me at a very high level. I mean, I sold baby products for years. I made a good amount of money doing it. I wasn't passionate about that at all. And I think with FreeeUp, it just resonates with me because I love helping freelancers. I love helping clients. I like win-win. I like helping people pursue their dreams, their passions, their goals. And if you don't have a passion or a why for your business, I think you can only do it for so long. And that's why I kind of got sick of that, of that baby product industry and selling on Amazon. But that was kind of a personal thing for me. But that book really resonated with me. And yeah, I'm on the lookout right now. I just got back from some travel which I didn't have a lot of time to read on and, yeah.

Bereslavsky: Yeah. That is, that is one of my favorite books as well. I love the, there was another book by Simon Sinek that escapes me now, that I really love as well. I'm currently reading Homo Deus by Yuval Harari. It really gives you a new perspective on, on history, on society, on everything, it's really interesting. Kind of makes you think about all those different things, but you haven't really considered it before. So that's, that would be my current recommendation.

Nathan Hirsch: Definitely. I have to check it out.

Bereslavsky: And who was your best employee that you ever hired and how did you find that person?

Nathan Hirsch: My best virtual assistant, her name is Chiqui Ann, she lives in the Philippines. I'm actually the godfather of one of her kids. We've been working together for eight or nine years now. She was a referral back when I first started my Amazon business and we hired a VA who my friend was using and he first got me into VA's and then she recommended Chiq's and I quickly made Chiq's in my manager. She's a lot of, she's taught me a lot over the years about how to work with people in other countries, how to change my communication, changed my attitude, changed my tone. She handles our success team right now. So she's really helped build our interview process. She knows what to look for in people, which is one of the reasons that I like working with her so much. And yeah, I mean she's been a huge part of FreeeUps growth. She was with us when we were making no money. She was with my Amazon business when we were growing that up. She helped scale that and she helped start FreeeUp and we're grateful for her and I'm probably going to hopefully work with her for many years to come.

Bereslavsky: That's amazing. And how do you find her? Was it just a recommendation from a friend?

Nathan Hirsch: Yeah, from a recommendation of a friend. I've met her one time in person when I went to the Philippines last year.

Bereslavsky: Nice. And who was your worst employee? Or maybe it's some, you don't have to name names, but I'm curious how did you find them and what, you know, what was the mistakes? What did you do?

Nathan Hirsch: Back in college? I didn't really have an interview process. I was a 20, 21-year-old punk kid that thought I knew everything and I hired people without interviewing them. And I had one guy who I hired and he was drinking on the job. He was smoking on the job. He quit on me during the busy season when I actually needed him the most and it took me way too long to fire him. I didn't really know any better. I was also kind of friends with him, which made it even harder to do. That was probably one of my worst hires.

Bereslavsky: What's an unpopular opinion that you hold something about business? Something that you really believe despite you know it being unpopular and many, many people wont to agree.

Nathan Hirsch: So I'm really against hiring US followers. We mentioned the three different levels. So, I'm all about hiring US freelancers, US experts, US agencies, I hire them. My clients hire them. But if you hire a follower position, a US Admin, a US customer service rep, not only can you get it cheaper in the Philippines, you can find people just as good, who will stay with you longer. If you hire an Admin for 15 to 20 bucks an hour, how long are they actually going to be happy in the US for 15, 20 bucks an hour? At some point, they're either going to become more than an admin and a specialist or an expert, or you're going to have to increase their pace. You're going to end up paying in that 20 to 30 range when you really, the job is worth in that 10 to 20 range. And with the non-US people, if you like them and you're paying them five to 10 bucks an hour, you can give them a dollar raise or $2 raise and they're going to be happy and they're going to be loyal with you. So that's my personal opinion. That's one of the reasons why I have no US employees. All my US people are freelancers and agencies. But plenty of people disagree with me and that's okay.

Bereslavsky: Yeah. I think nowadays it's changing in the like many people are understanding that they can hire better people and cheaper people and kind of more experienced and more hardworking people abroad. So we don't have to just hire on the US. That's, that's true. So what is the best way for our listeners to reach you and find you?

Nathan Hirsch: Yeah, so if you go to FreeeUp.com, with three E's, my calendar, my team's calendar is right at the top. You can book a free meeting with me, create a free account, mention this podcast, get a $25 credit to try us out. You can join my Facebook group, outsourcing masters. We have a lot of great content there to help you hire better and smarter. And yeah, you can reach out to me or my team on really any social media channel.

Bereslavsky: Oh, thank you. So any final piece of advice to people in terms of hiring?

Nathan Hirsch: Yeah, don't give up. I mean, if you, if you struggle at marketing, you're not just going to wake up one day and say, you know what, marketing is not for me. I can't market. I'm not going to market anymore. But for some reason, we do that with hiring. We, hiring is hard, you make some mistakes? And you say, hiring's not for me. I'm going to do everything myself. Get out of that mentality. No one has a 100% hiring record. Keep focusing on what you can control, your systems, your processes, your interviewing, using the right platforms, all that stuff. And you're going to get better and better over time. And I want to provide you with resources to help you do it.

Bereslavsky: Yeah, I like that. So keep practicing, keep growing, and you know, keep improving. Well, thank you for joining us today, Nathan. It was a pleasure to talk to you.

Nathan Hirsch: Same here. I really appreciate you having me on.

View Details

SHOW NOTES:

In this episode, Alex Melen, founder of SmartSites, shares us some insights on scaling businesses, building company culture, and hiring and management processes. You also don’t want to miss his SEO tips on making your website rank better.

GUEST BIO:

Alex Melen is an award-winning entrepreneur best known for his first free web hosting company, T35 Hosting, founded in 1997. He has been featured in Business Week’s Top 25 Entrepreneurs Under 25, Bloomberg, Forbes, NPR, and more. Today, he is the Co-Founder of SmartSites, an advertising agency which was featured in the INC5000 as one of the fastest-growing agencies in the world.
Alex's Speaking Engagement Calendar
Connect with Alex: Website | Facebook | Twitter | Linkedin | Instagram

SKIP TO THE GOOD PARTS:

00:55 - 05:18 - Humble beginnings of Alex Melen in the Digital Space.

05:35 - 08:52 - SmartSitesin numbers: business model, employees, and revenue

09:03 - 11:00 - Monopolizing digital marketing services for almost every single auto brand.

11:00 - 14:20 - Secrets of scaling: Focus on small medium-sized business

17:55 - 20:05 - Cons of scaling too quick

20:35 - 23:18 - What’s managing and building a company culture like?

26:03 - 30:01 - Alex’s insights in hiring and management processes and challenges

33:08 - 37:34 - Three pillars of SEO: Optimizing your website to rank better.

37:34 - 43:11 - Thoughts on paying for backlinks and getting penalized by Google

43:32 - 45:29 - Dealing with the thought of ‘growing too fast and growing not fast enough’

SHOW TRANSCRIPT:

Michael Bereslavsky: Hi Alex, thanks for joining. So where are you calling from?

Alex Melen: I am calling from Paramus, New Jersey. So, we're right outside of New York City.

Michael Bereslavsky: Nice. So, we first met last year and we're both speaking at that conference and Spain. Had a really nice chat and turns out we have quite a few things in common. So, I'm really glad to finally catch up.

Alex Melen: Yeah definitely.

Michael Bereslavsky: And you've been actually involved in the digital space for much longer than I have. Could you give us a quick background story about how you got you started, how you start your first company and how it evolved to the current business?

Alex Melen: Yeah definitely. I started my first company way back in 1997. It was a web hosting company called T35 Hosting. For those who were involved back then in the space, there was around the same time GeoCitiesstarted Tripod, Hypermart, I think I actually started a couple of months before GeoCities.

So that was the space that was started and the original idea for T35 Hosting which actually rings even true today, was to allow people to freely and instantly post something on the internet, have the access all over the world. So right now, it seems silly to even say something like that because almost everything we do is like that. But back then it was a whole different world. So back then if you wanted to start a website you would have to go to your internet providers like AT&T, Horizons of the world. Horizon didn't even exist the way it does now back then. And they would have to provide it for you and you would have to wait six to nine months. Spend like 50 grand and that's how you would have a website accessible on the internet. So, the idea with T35 Hosting and similarly to a lot of the other free web hosts that cropped up at the time is to allow someone freely to publish content that's accessible all over the Internet and really allow anyone to do it not just the bigger company.

So that was started in 1997, a long time ago. Well if I try to come back many years of what it is now, it's a little scary. So, I started back in '97. I grew that to a little bit over a million customers before running.

So, a lot of roadblocks and challenges and funny enough the T35 Hosting still exists and no longer providing free web hosting and focusing more on the business side of what hosting but still same philosophy to allow anyone to host anything worldwide and make it affordable and stable and reliable. But at a certain point, it's just the free hosting model for web hosting stop working because of the amount of abuse that came up on a lot of other issues. So, all the competitors I had back then actually don't exist at all now.

GeoCities, Hypermarkets, Tripods of the world. So, it was definitely an interesting time. I sometimes say the internet's still the wild wild west back then it was like the real wild wild west like no one knew what they were doing. Everything was like all over the place, very experimental.

So, as the first company, after that, I worked in a lot of different roles, digital related. I work in a lot of the digital marketing roles and I wound up at places where I did digital for Samsung for almost a year and then Walmart for a couple of years after. And around that time my brother was graduating from Cornell and he also he was running a SEO company. So, he was running one of the first like the old school like link building SEO companies. Like the ones, like the companies, we gain trouble for. If you remember, if you Google late 2011 like JCPenney. J.C. Penney got in trouble for hiring an SEO company that had some sketchy fees.

That was the world he lived and he lives in all those like SEO consulting and everything. And he was graduating college and he really pushed me to, well I think he pushed himself not to get a corporate job. I think that was a point that was from his end but he pushed me to leave my role at Walmart and open SmartSites which we run today.

So, we opened 2011 and the idea was to bring together a lot of digital components that we had expertise in. The web hosting, SEO, the pay-per-click site which I spent a long time on and form really a 360 digital marketing agency that would provide the full 360 of services. And really focus on small businesses.

The roofers, the contractors, the guys out there that still don't have a website, still don't do marketing really, today I would call them the final holdouts right. But in 2011 there was almost everyone in this small business space really wasn't doing too much on the digital side so that was the idea. And we've been growing ever since. We're up to almost a hundred employees now and six offices.

Michael Bereslavsky: Right. So, you just hit one hundred employees and how big is SmartSites right now and in numbers like, revenue profits or any other figures that you mostly focus on.

Alex Melen: So it's funny. A lot of companies are very shy about sharing these and not a lot, we're actually in a lot of lists like five thousand and everything where it gets published publicly so I don't necessarily have an issue sharing with it. In today's world, so many things are public a lot more than people realize.

So, the revenue that we work, so we work a little bit different than a lot of traditional media companies. So, the revenue might seem a little bit off but the way we work for managing media or marketing, well the traditional way is that a company would pay their entire marketing budget to us and then we would decide how to spend it.

That's the traditional way. The way we do adjust for transparency and to better work with small businesses, we only charge a management fee.

So, they're actually marketing they pay for themselves and we just charge management. So, because of that revenue and everything might seem out of whack. But last year our revenue was 5 million. This year will probably land that 7 forecasted for 10 for next year.

Michael Bereslavsky: And I know you provide a wide range of services. Design, development, SEO, PPC, what's the main one by revenue or you know a number of employees involved in?

Alex Melen: Yes, so it's really a good question. So, I think it's pretty evenly split. Even looking at different ways, I think it's split between website design, SEO and pay-per-click. I think those are the three branches that probably represent 90% of what we do. We do some very high-level development that's also a very small piece. We do some of some small things like branding, like brochures like all small pieces but I think that the big pillars would be SEO, pay-per-click and website design. In terms of I think a number of clients, in terms of revenue, in terms of employees, the website design component probably has more staff, looking from that standpoint. But I think in almost all ways to look at it it's split pretty evenly. A third, a third, a third.

Michael Bereslavsky: Nice. So, you have quite a few clients and I know you'll have some big brands as well. So, can you mention some of the biggest companies that are your clients?

Alex Melen: Some of the bigger companies are the ones that we usually have NDAs with, but what I like about what we do is that we're not industry-specific. So, no industry represents more than 10 percent of our business and we're literally in every single industry. And through that, I think we just work with a lot of projects.

So, we're finishing up a website for Harvard right now. Harvard University on the automotive side. We work with a lot of both regular car brands and we work with Lamborghini, Bentley, Rolls Royce. So, I think we're pretty diversified across the board. Our focus is mostly like the small, medium-sized businesses but I think over the last couple of years as we've become more well-known, we've got pulled into a lot of bigger companies. We're GSA certified now so we could work on, we can work on literally anything for the government. So, we've really widened our scope.

Michael Bereslavsky: So you have really quite a collection of car companies. Like people collect cars and you collect car companies as clients.

Alex Melen: Yes. So, it's fine. So, the automotive worlds are all in the shoes are very different. And it's just interesting going from one to the other because each one just operates so differently. So in the automotive space a lot of the people involved, having grown up with digital, so a lot of like the general managers or like the true auto professionals that have given their like the last 40 years in the industry just haven't had the advantage of growing up with digital. And because of that, I feel like they get taken advantage of a lot of times. We work with brands where literally their marketing is being done by their cousin or something and they don't know what's going on or some company they've been doing for 10 years but they don't have access, they don't have any data, they don't know what's happening, digital. There's a lot of data but it's still very tricky to track down all the way down to like the car sale and things like that.

So, there's a lot of disconnect then a lot of these brands and dealerships really, I feel like have been taken advantage over the last couple of years by people and companies. So, we've recently got involved in the auto space and just been growing, our side of it's been growing a lot just because we're not doing anything different but we're doing the same thing we're doing for other clients with other space and it just seems revolutionary because we're literally giving them access.

We're sharing the data. It's really having a conversation. Here's the data. You have access to all of this, let's read this, let's read this. And it just seems like a very new way of doing things for them. And I think at the same time, a lot of these brands are getting more educated on digital. So, I think we're there at the right time doing the right things. But yeah, we're involved in almost every single auto brand.

Michael Bereslavsky: Nice. So, here's a question I actually really wanted to ask you. I feel that when it comes to a service-based business, it's kind of, you get some clients and then you get more clients and then you grow. But I feel that in order to really grow and get to the next level you have to get the big clients. And that seems like the most challenging thing. So, is that, would you agree with that and like how did you get your first big brand or first big client?

Alex Melen: Yeah. So a good question. I think there are almost two really good questions within that one question. I think one is about growth. And I'll go to the big client one first. And I think for how do you get the big client.

I think it's a lot different than the small medium guys. So, we still don't focus on big clients. So, we have, I know other people run agencies that have like a 100-person company and they are like one client, right. Back when I worked at a Google assist, the team that worked on the Walmart account was over 100 people. Literally for one client.

So, there's definitely a lot of companies that that's their model more so than it's our model. Our focus is still small medium-sized businesses. But I think that the clients are important and I think the way to get them is a lot different. So that's something we've been playing around with and trying to figure out ourselves.

The small medium-sized businesses are a lot more huge by literally the same advertising we do for them just like paid search. So, for example, the small medium size business, if they want a new website or they want pay-per-click or they want SEO, most likely they're going to go on Google and they're going to search, I need a website, I need pay-per-click management, I need SEO. And we spend money on our own marketing and that's how we acquire, that's the core of our business and that's how we acquire all the small medium-sized businesses. The enterprise space as they call it is completely different.

Like if IBM wants a new website, they're not going to go on Google and type, I want web site design right or like website design company. So, it's definitely, its enterprise level hasn't been a huge focus for us but it's always been very interesting to me because the whole journey for the enterprise client is completely different.

A lot of it's still very traditional. And what I mean by that it's still driven by face to face meetings and networking events and conferences and things like that. And I think the big clients that we've gotten has mostly been from word of mouth. But I think there's definitely an opportunity there. But just a lot different from what we've been doing so I can't necessarily advise people on how to do it.

But from my experience dealing with it over the last couple years, it's definitely a lot more personal connections than anything and it's a much more difficult process to even be considered for enterprise clients. It's just a very very long journey that they go through to make a decision. Obviously like, if IBM wants a new web site, they're not going to call up an agency and then next week sign the contract and say we're ready to go. So, it's definitely a different process.

Michael Bereslavsky: Yeah it makes sense because I see many digital agencies get a point of maybe half a million in annual revenue maybe like a million and get stuck there because it's difficult for them to go and get bigger clients or go and expand further. So, the advice is then to you know, to try to network, try to get some word of mouth going.

Alex Melen: Yeah, I definitely wouldn't tell an agency that that's a half a million and trying to grow. To that your key is to network and to get big clients because it's a very long, long, long tail process.

Ultimately, I think you'll get them connections and bigger clients but definitely a long long time. We have some bigger clients that it took them two years to make a decision of what agency to go to. We have some that have five- or 10-year contracts with their agencies and about two- three years before the contract start is when they start doing research. So definitely for a small agency that's trying to grow, it's going to be, I mean if you could get lucky, right. You could go to like a hotel bar and meet someone there and get it off and get new clients. But I don't know if I would necessarily recommend it as the main strategy.

What's interesting is a couple of people that I've known, that are salespersons, a couple of people I've known they're in the sales space, like salespeople, like hard work salespeople, they always tell me stories about making amazing sales, make amazing connections literally like in hotel lobbies.

Like I know I know someone that specifically goes, he would go to like a Ritz Carlton Hotel lobby for drinks to meet people. Even if he doesn't stay at the hotel that's what he'll do. Or for example always book first class flights because other than it being more comfortable, the other people you wind up with sitting next to you in that area are more likely to be business contacts or things like that. So, there's definitely I think tips and tricks of the sales profession. I don't think I'm enough of a salesperson to be handing those off. Well I really like the fancy hotel lobbies and first class scenario but I think my advice for the small business for the small agencies or medium agency if they're at a half a million sales trying to grow, I don't think you necessarily need to, all of a sudden start getting bigger clients.

I think you keep growing with the way you've been growing before and that's what we've been doing. We've been in the Inc 5000, they measure three-year growth, we've been at 100% three year-growth for three consecutive years now. So, every three years our company doubles in size and none of it's been from any big clients. I think it's been literally just doing a good job at what we do. I think with that comes to a lot of challenges as well. I think like you were saying, I think that half a million mark is a very big challenge to jump over. I've attended a lot of events like Google events because we're a Google channel partner and a lot of we work with a lot of companies at that events because there's a lot of other agencies there. And I hear all the time people are stuck at about like the half-million, million-dollar mark and it's just a big jump. And the reason it's a big jump is that at 500,000 in revenue, you're managing the team completely yourself and you could be involved in everything yourself. The next jump after that is you really can't be.

You could touch almost every part of your business at the next job but you're not going to be involved and be able to be the salesperson, the project manager, the quality assurance, and the developer. So I think that's a big jump for people in general to take. To go from like having the three-person company, five-person company and be able to control everything, be involved in everything to literally start creating levels of management and processes that allow the company to operate without them being involved. That's next, I think that's a big jump. I think the level we're heading out right now is the next big one. As I've been attending some events with bigger agencies, I heard a lot of people telling me that the jump we're about to make is the next big one going from 90 something employees now. Let's say we keep, let's say if we double again in three years to go to two hundred, right. People say that's also very big jump even bigger than the first one.

There is a guy from Australia. So, he runs, I won't disclose it just not to embarrass him but he runs in the domain space a very big company there in Australia. They have five hundred employees, six hundred employees. He was telling me a story that they grew very quickly from 50 to 100 and then 200 plus company very quickly. And there was one point where he came in on the weekends to go to his office to check something at the office building and the security guard outside didn't know who he was and called the police officer. And he didn't know the police security guy either and it was like literally an employee of the company the security person. And he just grew so quickly, it's so scary that he obviously when you have 200 employees, you're not going to know all the employees and they're not going to know you either.

So, I think that that's after the jump to creating layers and processes and putting managers in place and good staff in place. The jump we’re about to make, I think is also scary where if we double in size it's definitely going to be very hard for me to be involved in a thing let alone know what everyone's doing and know who everyone is and hopefully, I don't get arrested. I mean coming to the office on weekends.

Michael Bereslavsky:Yeah, I remember I saw a video. I think it was an advertising video that you did for a company or even mentioned that you were considering doing a TV show about your company at some point?

Alex Melen:Yeah.

Michael Bereslavsky:So there is a video there. Your team is playing pool in the office and then you come in angry and take the ball and throw it away and just tell everyone to go back to work. Is that what management is like or was like?

Alex Melen:I think that's definitely what management is and was like. So, when we just started the company in 2011, I started with me and my brother but a lot of the people came in, he knew from Cornell. So, it was a lot of like recent grads.

So, it was definitely a different atmosphere and it took us a while to actually make it so work is both fun and we do good work. If clients come in, they're not scared that people are drinking, playing poker which was in the video. But definitely in the beginning they could imagine although I'm six and a half years younger than my brother and a lot of people came in from his great sake. I imagine all the younger college grads coming in, they're like, they really loved being there. They really loved what we were doing.

But maybe a little bit too much. It became literally there were work all the time and people that would sleep there. People slept in the office. But it was very fun atmosphere and before we start creating like processes that really, everything that we've put in place over the last year or the last couple of years to really tighten up the process and allow us to grow. We were like that with 100 employees that obviously went up.

I think we had like 12 people at the time but the video is really cool. It is funny. I should probably take it down. But while I happen if you Google it around, I think it's still on YouTube. But it was 2011. So, it was before all that kind of culture was more popular. I haven't seen it but people told me it's somewhere to Silicon Valley TV show but it was it was literally like very techie young people and fun atmosphere. But I like I like your metaphor of being a boss, I think. I think that that is what it's like taking a bowl away after you after they're having too much fun. unfortunately. So, I've been doing for less the eight years here but I think I think running the company definitely out to balance the fun you know, if you're if your employees are not happy coming to work, there is no way you get produced any kind of product. Just no way. No matter what business you're in, products you could get away with a little bit but a service business, right. Everyone in our office, everyone behind me interacts with customers. If everyone like coming into pissed off each day and miserable to be here, it's going to be terrible for our company. So that painting a fun culture of people to love coming to work, love being here and at the same time not going as extreme as when we just started the company and it was like a giant frat party.

Michael Bereslavsky:So do all these people in the video still love the company?

Alex Melen: A lot of them do. I would say a little more than half to a couple people. Actually, there was a period where a couple of people ran off and started their own agencies just because they saw the success we were having and they thought that that they'll go and do it on their own. Not to name any names, not to go into details but unfortunately it didn't really work out for them. I think three different people tried at different times.

And the reason is because it takes a lot of work to run an agency and I think a lot more than people realize. There's so many, so many small things that go into it, from literally from the financial stuff to the bureaucracy really. So, there's government forms to do, and dealing with customers and operations, it's very hard for one person to really do it. From the inside it might seem like it's easy but there's so many things that go on behind the scenes and it's one of the reasons that we've been doing so well with our customers, our customers are so happy because a lot of times the option, the option of a small business, right. So, you're a small business you have employees who want to do website, who want to do marketing, who want to do these things so what are your options. So, you can hire someone internally which is what a lot of people do.

The problem becomes you're hiring one person and you want them to do design development, SEO, pay-per-click, right. There's no one person that could do all that well. And where we come in as we have all these different teams that do these things and we really are able to provide all the services. So, it's, I think I went off very far tangent but at least half of the people are still with the company. We have a lot of those original people moved on to executive positions and are now managing teams here so for people who were excited to stay here and worked on the company and helped it succeed they're done here. People who pursued other opportunities or tried things on their own they're obviously not.

And we've always wished the best to anyone in that scenario.

Michael Bereslavsky: So I'd love to talk about your hiring and management processes. You mentioned that you've now kind of improving them. Are you using any management systems or any hiring processes, specific books or methodologies that you can recommend? That's something I'm very much interested right now as well for my company.

Alex Melen: Great question. So, I'm personally, both me and my brother are probably not very into processes. And because of that, I think it took us a while to get to that level. We have other people on the executive team that helps really push for that. So, in terms of processes, we literally have now a handbook for every position. So, every position, project manager, PPC, SEO person, salesperson, every position has a full handbook. Like over a hundred pages of literal information of what to do ithatat scenario. So that itself has really helped tremendously in everything from new hiring and letting them review this to people really knowing what the expectations are and what they're supposed to do. So, I think that was a very big step.

Starting training and internally train all the employees in different things was a very big step, I think. I don't think we follow any specific like rule book or methodology or anything like that, I think it's, we've had the opportunity to kind of develop it internally over time. We've been lucky enough to grow at a level where we're growing.

So, we have these opportunities to make all of this for all the new employees and everything, but at the same time, we're not tripling in size every week. And we're not super growing. So, we've been growing at a comfortable organic pace that has allowed us to develop all this. Hiring side has been very tricky also and I don't think we don't have an official process in place that I think could really say this is it.

This is what you have to do. But we really, we try to let each department kind of manage itself in limiting micromanagement and really letting people succeed. So, each department really does hiring on their own with guidance from management and everything but hiring has been tricky because, at the end of the day, we don't make a product, we don't make like a shoe behind the scenes in a factory.

We're literally, we sell the people at the company so the boys are like the most valuable asset and it's very important to have not only people who are knowledgeable or really can talk to a customer or talk to clients and help our clients but also fit in culturally. So, it's unfortunate, I've been on a lot of interviews and we've had to interview a lot and a lot of people and at the same time over the last two years, it's gotten a lot more competitive.

A lot of good people we've made offers to have told us that they have like three, four, or five other offers which weren't like that five years ago. Wasn't like that six years ago. So, it's definitely been challenging. We've literally just been the hours of interviewing lots and lots and lots of people fighting the good fight.

Michael Bereslavsky: Is it all in the US or do you also have some offices and employees abroad?

Alex Melen: We have five offices internationally and those are all their own unique challenges. My main visibility is the office here. My brother heads up overseas offices so I don't have as much insight but I know there's also hiring challenges and every country has its own challenges.

For example, there are certain countries where if you fire someone you have to give them a certain amount of notice and they still work for you while you do that, right. I don't know that sounds weird to you in the US. It sounds a little weird. In the US it's called at-will employment. So, in the US in most cases anyone could quit any time and you could fire them anytime. If anyone really does like a really bad job, you could fire them. We don't do it often. I think we do a very good job at hiring the right people.

Internationally, it's a lot more challenging but there's literally countries where the rule is to hire on the spot. So, I think every country has its own challenges with the hiring.

Michael Bereslavsky: So I'd love to get a little bit more into the advanced details of things that you guys do and talk about SEO and PPC and some current trends that you are seeing in digital marketing. I know that you have a close relationship with Google and you guys organize events together and you have a pretty solid budget that you are managing AdWords.

Alex Melen: Yeah.

Michael Bereslavsky: So in terms of SEO, what kind of things are you doing? Like obviously you cannot do any black hat stuff.

Alex Melen: Yes.

Michael Bereslavsky: But what are the things that you do and you can recommend people to do when they're kind of on a more advanced level beyond the basics of just writing good content?

Alex Melen: Yes, it's a great question. So, we have a very good relationship with Google. We're in a special program with them where we get a lot of support from them, a lot of insight from them, at the same time like you said definitely can't, either way, I would not recommend doing black hat stuff but more so for us than anyone else. I wouldn't jeopardize the relationship with Google and all the information they give us to try to circumvent anything.

On the SEO side, what we do, so I think in general and in our business, everything we do is really centered around transparency. Just because in most cases in our world it's not especially in the SEO, there are very few SEO companies maybe more so now. But let's say five, six years ago that you would go to, you would pay them and then you would say, tell me exactly what are your doing, right.

The big sales pitch from like all these SEO companies used to be like, you pay me this and then your rankings will magically go up and what are you going to do with that money? Oh, I can't tell you. That's like a mystery box. Like I've no idea. If I pay twice more will I get twice tomorrow? Oh, I can't tell you that, just pay me twice more and we'll see what happens. So, the way we operate is literally the complete opposite and we have since the day we started. And the reason I'll go into it is that I think I'll help answer your question of what people could be doing whether themselves or with an agency.

So, SEO and I won't claim to be an expert in this. I live in the pay-per-click world more than the SEO world and we have SEO experts that could tell the story better and salespeople who could sell the story better. But I'll tell you the way we do it from a business perspective. So, we sell hours. So literally if you think about doing SEO the core is literally putting the hours in. You're not doing black hat, right. I won't talk about it like getting it like software and hitting submit and submitting to like spam blog posts.

Like if you want to do real SEO it's about hours you put in. If you're not putting in the hours, you're not getting the results. So that's literally the way we sell it. So, people buy hours from us. So, they would buy 50 hours per month and we would spend 50 hours per month doing SEO work. And what we usually break it up into three pillars. So, number one is the technical onsite. So that's usually front loaded. So that's it. Won't even be the monthly hours we usually go in certain hours at the start to really go through their site.

Do a technical audit, takes all that matters, fix anything that's literally stopping their website from ranking better. That itself is a whole science. We have an employee whose job is literally his job is to follow all the latest best practices on technical things on the web site that Google wants you to have.

Once you have this way, it was this way. How to improve mobile page on site speed and all that. So that itself is a very important pillar that similarly to the way we do it I think other businesses should also should be very front loaded. You should do that first before doing anything else. Right. Because if your site, we've had clients come to us that literally they have robots at 60 files that blocks Google, right. They just don't know. They had a developer make a website on the death space they block Google which makes sense. And then they launch it live and they forgot to change. So, their web site block Google. So, if you won't fix the technical things no matter what you do for SEO, if you're blocking Google you're not going to get through. So, the first big pillar is the technical stuff which we do front loaded. After that we literally split the hours between two things. So, we do content writing and link-building.

Literally, those are the pillars of what we do and the pillars of SEO and the pillars of what will make your website rank higher. So, for content writing, we have the entire content team. Their job is to create content. Literally, people come into the office and they just love to write and they write content. And every month we come up with a content schedule and post on the web site similar to how we do it. Any business can really do it themselves. And that's the reason to do this and the reason we tell our clients exactly what we do because there's no there's really no secret sauce to Google.

If you fix technical things on your website, you have unique content and you have authoritative web sites linking to you, you will rank higher. If anyone says there's like some secret sauce, they pay me 50 grand, I'll pour in your website it'll be better. It's just it's literally putting in the work. And the reason that the reason I tell people this and the reason people still come to me even after I tell them that you need to do content link-building is because of the hours of work. Someone running a business they have to decide themselves whether internally they're going to hire someone to do all this work or they're going to hire an agency to do the work.

But either way it's literally like manpower to create the content and then on the link-building side, it's all average. So, we do an analysis of which web sites link to your competitors. Those are usually the lowest hanging fruit. And then we do outreach. We email all those other web sites and say, hey you're linking for this guy once you link to this guy.

For example, we had a limo company. Their biggest competitor was linked from JFK's website like the airport. Contacted the airport people while bugging them. Finally found like the person in charge. It's funny how a lot of these organizations no one knows who's in charge of the website. I could do it but I have no idea who has access to this. And we got them a link from JFK's web site, right. So, it's things like that and can't anyone do it? Definitely, anyone could do it. But it's literally the hours of work. We certainly have advantages from our content team is just bring about everything, very knowledgeable or link building team who knows exactly how to contact people. We have a process where they follow-up in certain circles. We have already lists of websites in place that have added links.

So, if we get JFK, for example, to add a link for us, we keep that in our own internal lists in the future if there's another limo company or whatever it is. We know that these guys, we know who to contact pretty much. So, there's a small advantage doing it for sure, but I think those are the pillars to SEO and anyone could really be doing it. Just a lot of hours. There is really outside for black hat which I wouldn't recommend to anyone. It's literally putting in the hours.

Michael Bereslavsky: So in terms of some outreach it's a main white hat technique right now as well. And that's what we do as well. Quite a lot. But these days it's kind of difficult to get a link for free and a lot of people ask you to pay. So, is that still a white hat? Can you pay them a little bit to link to a website? Or it is not?

Alex Melen: Google says no.

Michael Bereslavsky: No never? So, then you reach out to clients well not JFK but let's say someone who has a website about airplanes or limos and you know and they say, well we can list you but you got to pay us like two hundred dollars. You can just say no, right?

Alex Melen: No, we don't. So, we never because of that it takes. So yes, you could do that. So, there are two things you could do it. (a) You could be reciprocal, right. I'll link you, you link me (b) I'll pay two hundred bucks and you link me. Both practices Google frowns upon and both processes go both ways. We do not do. I won't say they can't do it. I don't think Google will go and penalize you.

They're not going to find out that you send someone like twenty dollars of bitcoins right. And I see that transaction in the ledger. So, you certainly could. We just don't do it as a practice because it's against Google's policies and it's not that the best way to be doing things but because of that it takes us a lot longer to acquire the link.

Michael Bereslavsky: That makes sense. And if you ask someone, would you publish our article like can you give him a long really nice article and then you ask him to publish your article and link to your web site from that article and then you don't pay them but you kind of give them that content for free. So, is that white hat? Is it okay to do nowadays?

Alex Melen: So yeah, it's a great question. So, I think the way I interpret Google's policies I think that's OK to do. We haven't been doing it often. We've been testing it out a little bit here and there just because it's really in the gray area. And at any point Google could come out and say, hey guys you're not allowed to do this.

So, we've recently, as far as I know, we've been experimenting with it but we haven't rolled it out to each of our customers. But it's certainly I think the way I interpreted Google's rules, that that is OK to do. But of course, you could also interpret it saying that you're giving them, you're paying them whether it's not the money you're paying them in the content right. It's still paying them. So, it's in a gray area. But I know that's been very popular just from the fact that for the last five years, every day I get like 50 emails of people sending me content to publish. So like spam coming in. So, I know it's done. I know it's pretty popular. I would not make that like your sole source of generating links.

Michael Bereslavsky: Yeah, make sense. And I'm curious if you have many clients that come to you after they have a Google penalty and algorithmic penalty or a manual penalty, is that something you deal with often?

Alex Melen: Yeah, it's a great question. So, it was a lot, when we just started the company when my brother is running the SEO company he had. That was very popular. So, we had two things that were very popular that we don't really do anymore. Number one is the SEO penalty. And I don't know whether it's just people don't get penalized as much or maybe something else. But we really don't even have that many people come to us where we're used to. The other big thing was reputation management. So those are like the two like I would say like distant cousins of like traditional SEO. Like almost everything, we do on SEO side like traditional SEO. These are like distant cousins. So, we certainly have done it in the past. It's very difficult, it's very difficult to do and to sell. A lot of these people coming with Google penalties want us to say like, oh yeah just pay us this and we'll get you unpenalized, right. But then, no one can make that guarantee for you.

Michael Bereslavsky: You do have that special relationship with Google.

Alex Melen: Absolutely. Think I could just like up the phone and call Mr. Google, and like undone this site. No, you know that even I can't make you guarantee that a domain that's penalized will get unpenalized. And some are for reputation management. People call up and we've had people, had high profile individuals, politicians call up and say, I have all this bad stuff about me when I search my name. Can you make it all go away?

And we just don't work in that business. But I followed up with a couple of them after the fact because I know they're working with other agencies. And we'll have had bad experiences. At the end of the day, anyone that says they'll make all this go away for this money or that they'll get you unpenalized really can't make that guarantee. Yes, sometimes they can. There's a lot on the technical SEO side that you can do to figure out why that kind of thing happened. You could submit requests to Google.

There's really a lot you can do. We just don't deal with it anymore and haven't for a long time just because it's outside of our SMB focus. But I know there's a lot of it. Every time every time you run up to a US election cycle, a lot of politicians are very worried about the negative press about them on the internet.

Michael Bereslavsky: Yeah, makes sense. So, you've had a 100 percent growth in the last three years and it seems like you are still growing. So, you mentioned that you'd like to get to 200 employees. And is that the current plan just to keep growing and get bigger and bigger?

Alex Melen:I think. Yes. I think that's the plan. I think the plan is twofold. To keep growing but at the same time keep providing the same quality service. I'm very worried about growing too fast. At the same time not growing fast enough. With my first business withT35 Hosting, it was not fast enough. I had a lot of opportunities to take on equity and investors to grow the business quicker and just I wasn't, not something I was interested in. I didn't want to give up the equity. I didn't really want to rush the process, the business and because of that it really hurt the business.

And by that time, by time we were growing quicker you already had the GoDaddies of the world with millions and billions invested. So, I definitely in almost any industry you really don't want to completely not grow. Like I have conversations with people who run agencies and run other things and sometimes I'm like, you know I'm fine where I am and just leave it leave it that way. I'm good. Let's leave it here.

A lot of times it doesn't end well because even if you're okay where you are and you don't want to grow or do anything new or anything different, your competitors won't be. And eventually they'll do something better. They'll do something fast through the economies of scale. So, we definitely want to grow. I'm comfortable at the pace we've been growing which is about doubling every three years. Maybe a little bit faster than that but definitely want to keep growing at the same time delivering quality service.

So, we have five-star reviews online. We haven't had anyone really that hasn't benefited from and has not appreciated the service we provide and that's the one thing I'm really very close to as we grow. If growing too fast means we sacrifice that then I don't want to grow. So, the goal definitely three years from now is to double the employees probably even sooner at our current case.

Michael Bereslavsky: Well that's a great goal to have and definitely business is like, business is a process. Business is dynamic. You cannot stay in one place. You either grow or you’ll just you know, become irrelevant.

Alex Melen: Yup.

Michael Bereslavsky: So, it's been great talking to you and thanks for sharing. And finally, how can people learn more about your company and how can they get in touch?

Alex Melen: Yeah great question. So smartsites.com. You could go straight to the website. Better yet I would recommend people not to push Google even though I love Google.

They could go on Google and search about SmartSite that's even better because there's one thing of getting information that we're showing to you about our websites about our company. But I think it's a different perspective to see what other people are saying and the information that exists about us. So definitely Google around about SmartSites and to contact us pretty simple, contact@smartsites.com or you could fill out a form on the web site. I think the phone number is there as well.

Michael Bereslavsky:Well thank you Alex. Pleasure to talk to you. Looking forward to it next time in New York.

Alex Melen: Yeah, see you in New York.

Michael Bereslavsky:Bye.
Alex Melen:Bye

View Details

SHOW NOTES:

In our very first episode, Michael had a discussion with Flippa’s CEO, Blake Hutchison. Know more about how Flippais creating a ‘better experience’ for business buyers, tips and tricks on how to beat the algorithm, and sell better. In a more personal discussion, Blake shares his tips, habits, and routines to be an effective CEO.

GUEST BIO:

SKIP TO THE GOOD PARTS:

00:25 - 03:58 - Know more about Blake and their recent journey in creating ‘better experience’.

04:15 - 08:14 - Flippa in numbers and a bit more insider details.

08:14 - 11:39 - Are Empire Flippers and FE Enterprises Flippa’s competitor? How Flippa differs itself from the “competition”.

11:40 - 16:54 - Buying or selling a profitable business? Blake shares some tips how to get it right the first time.

17:02 - 21:01 - Verified by Flippa badge will be rolling out soon. Know more details about it.

21:38 - 23:59 - Beat the algorithm: Selling know hows from Blake himself.

26:26 - 35:33 - Predicting future demands and trends.

36:05 - 42:42 - selling domainsat Flippa Marketplace

43:03 - 45:40 - Attracting more buyers and sellers on the marketplace

46:12 - 48:19 - How quick can you sell your website on Flippa?

48:59 - 00:00 - Auctioning your website on Flippa

53:39 - 57:12 - Tips, habits, routines to be an effective CEO

57:12 - 58:44 - Want to Blake Hutchison’s direct contact? Hear it here!

SHOW TRANSCRIPT:

Michael Bereslavsky: Hello Blake!

Blake Hutchison: Hi Michael! How are you?

Michael Bereslavsky: Good. Thanks for joining. So, where are you calling from?

Blake Hutchison: We are in Melbourne, Australia.

Michael Bereslavsky: Nice! So, we last spoke about 10 months ago, when you first became the CEO of Flippa. And I really loved that you are reaching out to some of the top sellers and kind of discussing some challenges to see how to improve things. So, I'd love to know how it's been so far? What's it been like running Flippa and what was your focus for this year?

Blake Hutchison: Yeah. Thank you for the opportunity to be on the podcast. First and foremost, it's an absolute privilege to run a business like Flippa. We've got a huge community and we've obviously got huge responsibilities to that community. We know how much they want to use Flippa and I want a good experience. I guess joining Flippa, we discovered that there was, I guess some historical changes that have been made to the way that Flippa was operating, which had made it a little bit difficult for buyers and sellers to connect specifically buyers who wanted to find the right thing at the right time. And then as it relates to the seller, it is the way in which they were able to communicate and then drive viewership and ultimately bids and offers for their particular listing. And so we've been working hard to understand how Flippa historically worked and what people liked and also to understand how Flippa should work in the future to make that experience better.

And so what that means is we've tried some things. Some of those things have worked really, really well and we've tried some things and some of those things have worked terribly. And that's the nature of working in a marketplace of this size. We've got, over 600,000 community members. We get over 21,000 new community members, be it buyers or sellers each month. And so not everyone is gonna love the changes we make. But we are doing them, at least we think for the right reasons and it's about how quickly we can recover the demand for all of those super sellers, premium sellers and just people who use the platform. We get regularly. We want to create a nice experience. So look, it's been challenging definitely. But, to some extent, I think we've done a good job with a few things. So we've done a good job with enabling buyers to create profiles and then matching them up with the right businesses.

And to some extent, I think we've done some things really poorly. We've played around with the link hierarchy and the way in which things surface to the top and the product team has done their very best to try and I guess reinvigorate what we've seen historically as good demand and good volume for any given listing. And essentially way, sort of going back to the future, if you like, where we're working on a lot of things. You may have seen, the new homepage actually went live a couple of days ago. And so the link hierarchy has been improved. It's more similar to what people may have seen pre-2016, there was a big change in 2017 and 2018 and so here in 2019, we're kind of going back to the future to some extent. So hopefully that gives people some sense of what we've been working on.

Michael Bereslavsky: Nice! Sounds like you've been quite busy. Could you give us a big picture of where is Flippa right now in terms of a number of employees or revenues, sales or some other numbers that you are focusing on?

Blake Hutchison: Yeah, so, employee wise we have 27 staff and the 27 staff located around the world. So we have, the vast majority of our staff between North America and Australia. But we also have, individuals in Manila, in the Philippines, both engineering and customer support. We also have some staff working out of a European office who are there to serve the growing European demand that we have in the buyer and seller community. So from an employee standpoint, we're growing, we're actually looking to hire some support staff, customer success, and sales. Sales are defined as two ways, both the kind of education of buyers and sellers as they come on the platform, but also account management.

So those people who will help our buyers and sellers find something, negotiate, understand what is right and wrong about a particular business opportunity. And we're hiring for those people in Texas. So mostly Austin, Texas, but we have some room for remote head count also, in Dallas and Houston as well. So a little bit of recruitment going on across North America, which we think is really critical. It's still the biggest portion of marketplace demand for Flippa as it relates to sales. We've seen really, really good growth in kind of the higher value listings on the platform. And that's not something we've seen some comments outnumber in the community where people say, oh, Flippa's clearly, only orienting itself to high-quality businesses or big businesses or businesses versus startup sites and domains in reality. That's actually how Flippa has paid for some time, literally five years.

The vast majority of revenue has been derived from higher valued listings. So call it $10,000 plus listings. So that's actually the reality of Flippa. And so it's actually not that we've said we're going to ignore domainers. It's not that we've said we're going to ignore status site operators, it's just that that's the life Flippa has orientated. And so we've therefore by nature of the revenue orientated some of our product management and product development efforts around that community because you often go where the opportunity is and the marketplace has shown us that that's actually what the opportunity is. So there's a little bit of effort there, but I should say that's not to say at all that Flippa is ignoring a big, large historical community of domain owners, buyers start-up site owners, and buyers. In fact, the new website, the new homepage is very clear evidence of how much emphasis we're putting on all channels within the marketplace. And so Flippa is actually growing and it's growing in particular across the areas that we just talked about before. The plus 10K e-commerce websites, content and advertising sites, which are either backed by affiliate revenue, AdSense, Amazon associates accounts. And any other revenue streams within the content dynamic. We're also seeing growth in the number of SaaS businesses, software as service businesses and marketplace businesses listing on the platform. And, so, we're in a growth mode, we're seeing about 4,000 new listings come on board each month.

Michael Bereslavsky: Nice! So I'm curious to dig a little bit more into numbers. You mentioned 27 staff, and we know that, so one of your biggest competitors is probably Empire Flippers and they have, I believe about 60 people right now and, uh, FE Enterprises are also a little bit bigger. So does that mean that you are currently probably behind them in terms of sales as well or how would you compare that?

Blake Hutchison: Yeah, as a private company, we don't reveal revenues, but I would be very surprised if Flippa was behind those brokers, I think the clear thing is that we don't consider them competitors.

They're brokers and brokers are fantastic, we see full thousand listings a month. We say four and a half thousand new verified registered buyers each month. We say 21,000 community members join each month. We're a marketplace where our technology platform, which provides for a buyer to connect with a seller at speed and at scale. And that's very different to the way a broker operates. And so they're always going to be heavier on human resources because the nature of running that type of business requires very specific skill set. It's a broker skillset and we're big fans of brokers. We have 30 brokers operating on our platform. We have fantastic relationships with our brokers and they are a huge reason why Flippa is what Flippa is today. And so we don't need to hire lots of brokers to manage our community because we have brokers who manage our community.

We have account managers who manage our community and we have this network of buyers who are running the process themselves who are quite sophisticated and skilled. What I'll admit is we need to do lots of work around education. So, helping sellers understand how to value their business, helping sellers understand the sales process, and similarly helping buyers understand how to go through the due diligence process and negotiate in a constructive and polite manner, which is really important. And then ultimately how to transfer assets once you've got the inclusion or the pointy end of the deal. I can't speak to how big Empire Flippers or FA international are. I'm sure they run great businesses. I'm sure they are having success. I hope they're having success, but quite categorically we just don't see them as competition. We're a marketplace. We're heavily dependent on, discussions, watchers, comments, bids, and offers. And so we think about our business from a marketplace dynamic standpoint and they think about their business from a clearance standpoint. So they'll only ever accept businesses that they know they can sell because they've got x number of brokers who can deal with x number of leads. Now, Flippa context is a technology company which has a 10-year old, very, very well architected platform. We can deal at scale. And so that's the most important from our perspective.

Michael Bereslavsky: Yeah, absolutely. Makes Sense. So I have quite a few short questions for you, with, via receipt from our followers. So, in terms of the buyer's perspective, one of the biggest complaints with which we've seen, and I can tell from our perspective, we've been selling and buying on Flippa even before it was Flippa, you know, back then it was Site Point and we, I think about half a million dollars in sales now. So, I can tell you that I'm quite experienced with both sides of that. Yeah. And in terms of the buyer's perspective, one of the biggest complaints in a month, beginner buyers, people who are first time buyers or second-time buyers, it's that they feel a little overwhelmed. They see too many listings. They are not sure, you know, it looks risky, they're not sure how to choose. So what is your recommendation for them and how are you kind of improving the experience of that?

Blake Hutchison: It's a great question. We hear that a lot. And firstly, it is overwhelming. I completely accept that it's overwhelming marketplaces where you've got so much a supply side demand, are often a little bit overwhelming and it does come down to some really, really good quality search functionality to be able to find what is right. And then once you found what is right, it comes down to really, really good data availability to verify that listing. And so the first thing is, we empathize and so where we're putting in some efforts around that very quickly. The second thing is some recommendations. So first and foremost, use Flippa search functionality and filter down to a level where you get a constrained set of results. And so you can do that for websites. Obviously, you can do it for apps and you can do it for domains.

Now if you're searching for a website, the key thing is to use the filters as it relates to the business model, e-commerce, SaaS, marketplace, advertising, and content. The second thing is to use the most active filter on the top right-hand side of search. Most active will give you some sense of where other buyers are spending their time. And if other buyers are spending their time there, then you've almost got some level of verification playing out. Other people have gone through the process of asking questions in the comments section, mounting discussions, watching the listing and waiting for updates. And so that gives you some sense like in any marketplace of where the good quality lie, where the good quality resides. So that's the first thing. Second thing is, ask the right questions and discover the data, which will give you some sense of whether it's a really good quality listing or not.

Now I know that's hard and we're putting in some place, some measures. So we'll talk about the measures in a moment. But the big questions to ask are obviously, can you give me some sense of, and it does differ by the business model. Can you give me some sense of your average order value for e-commerce? How many styles do you make per month? How many units sales in the year, what percentage of styles for paid marketing, what percentage of sales are coming organically? So that would be for e-commerce. If it's SaaS, it's a little bit different. What is your annual recurring revenue? What is your return, what is your lifetime value? How many paying customers do you have and how long have they been retained for? It relates to annual recurring revenue. So each is a bit different. And so we asked buyers to learn the art of asking the right questions.

Now we have a responsibility there. So there's a couple of things. One, we can connect to more and more data sources. So we currently connected GA, so Google analytics. We also connect for the right for certain sellers who use Quickbooks online. We also connect to Quickbooks and so that gives buyers instant access to their financial data at the cloud accounting software level, which is fantastic and we're going to be connecting to all of the different platforms. So the Shopify is the big commerce's, the weeks, the square space, the word commerce, et cetera. And we're going to be providing access to dashboards direct out of the software itself. In addition to that, we're going to be putting in place some scoring so that businesses that have certain elements to their listing gets scored higher. And therefore are shown preferentially. You won't be able to pay for that preferential treatment. You'll have to show that by way of data. And so there are some of the things we're doing. But in short, I completely understand the frustration. It is hard. There are lots on the marketplace and it does come down to showing a little bit of discernment and curiosity to try and find what is a really great, great website business domain to acquire.

Michael Bereslavsky: Yeah, that sounds great. It seems like you're putting in a lot of effort to make it better for buyers. And what are your thoughts about vetting? Do you do some vetting now or do you plan to do more of that in order to, you know, help the first time buyers?

Blake Hutchison: Yeah, yeah, that's a great question. So we will soon be bringing in place a verified by Flippa badge. Now interestingly, we will architect how that plays out. And critically, it doesn't necessarily mean that something that isn't verified by Flippa isn't good quality. Because the key question is scale. And when you've got 4,000 listings of different price points, Flippa is never unlike a broker. We're never gonna eyeball every single piece of data for every given listing. It's just not humanly possible. That's exactly the same as Airbnb, not eyeballing every apartment or home. It's exactly the same as Upwork or Freelancer or Task Rabbit or eyeballing all of their community members. It's just not possible when you operate at scale. And that's the fundamental difference between being a platform and marketplace and being broadcast. They're very different things. So what we will do, though. is we will put in place, I 25 point check.

And so the 45-point check will basically enable us to, on a listing, get a subset of listings which passed that 25-point check. And we will then eyeball each one of those. We will then verify the data attached to those and we will put a verified by Flippa stamp on those listings. Now critically, that won't be every listing. And critically it doesn't, it also doesn't mean that great listings are still not available. Of course, they're available. It's where we're not going to be able to verify everything, but that's one of the things we have in our plan.

Michael Bereslavsky: So, it sounds like you are planning to have some algorithmic solutions that would be, if you are for listings that seem more interesting, probably based on revenue and as effectors and age and then, you know, you would have your staff go all of them manually. And do you have some ideas? What kind of listings, what would be, or what percentage of listings would potentially become verified?

Blake Hutchison: Yeah, great question. Don't have a sense of what percentage I think that will play out as we start to I guess, perfect the algorithm as it relates to the type of listing, it will be the listings which provide access, so it won't be starting sites because they typically don't have revenue and revenue is a key component of a verified online business, digital or digital assets and or website. So that's a really critical distinction that we will be verifying, websites and online businesses that are posted revenue. In addition to that, we'll be verifying websites which provide access to their GA, their Google Analytics data. And in addition to that, we'll be verifying businesses which have some age to them. And so I don't know the answer to that yet. We haven't thought far enough along that process where it'd be a one-year-old business, a two-year-old business, a three-year-old business or a five-year-old business. I'm not sure of the answer, but essentially the businesses and websites that we will be verifying, there'll be those that have characteristics that we believe therefore require a little higher touch. And that's where we'll be orientating our efforts.

Michael Bereslavsky: Yeah, that certainly makes sense. So we've talked a little bit about the buyer's perspective and now kind of moving onto the sellers, one of the biggest issues that sellers have is because there are so many listings now, it's difficult to get enough attention and attract enough buyers to your listing. So, do you have some suggestions for more experienced sellers, how to sell it better? Besides, of course, the basics. Like you know, adding a lot of details and a lot of integration and then the Google Analytics. How can people get more attention?

Blake Hutchison: Yup. Good question. I think there's a couple of things. The first one is most website owners don't do a great job of articulating what it is about their website, which is actually special, so someone will say, my website reviews fish tanks. Now, that's not helpful and buyers don't gravitate to listings which are not accurate and not detail oriented. The more information, the more likely that buyers watch and comment and start a discussion. Now the way the Flippa algorithm works is the more watchers, the more discussions, the more messages, the more comments, the more bids and offers, the more likely other buyers come because that's what we consider to be our marketplace dynamics. That is exactly the data which ensures that your listing finds its hands into more buyers. Now, the only way it will find its hands into more buyers is if you have an accurate listing, which completely and accurately articulates what are these that somebody is acquiring so it's not my business reviews, fish tanks. It is my six-year old AdSense powered online magazine or blog reviews fish tanks has reviewed over 200 fish tanks and delivers revenue by way of an Amazon affiliate account.

Now I just made that up. I'm not suggesting that's a perfect description, but the point is that's the top of insight and detail that a buyer expects. Now if you have that, a buyer will comment, they'll ask a question, a buyer will watch and the minute you get one, two, three, four, five, six and the list starts to grow, Flippa is just going to work. Flippa is the algorithm that will start to surface you up to as many people as possible is wait, belief in that listing the market places told us to believe in that listing. That's piece one. The second piece is Flippa is interested in promoting the listings which we think are priced well and reasonably and there are so many sellers on the flip of a marketplace which exaggerate their value and exaggerating your value won't get you any buyer interest. And from a marketing perspective, the marketing and team at Flippa aren't interested in promoting websites that exaggerate their value.

Why? Because Flippa is a success-fee-driven business. Ultimately we want to sell the good things cause the bad things don't sell. And so the marketing team will look at businesses which are priced well based on their traffic and their revenue and revenue aren't test to profit and then price point or asking price or in types, twin net profit multiple. And so for businesses that are priced reasonably, and that's different for each business model, but if we see anything priced at a 7, 10, 12, 50 times net profit, multiple, our marketing team quite simply will not look at it. A big, very, very honest, very transparent. But there are two things that play out at for the buy. One is marketplace dynamics and one is merchandising. And the people who benefit from marketplace dynamics have fantastic listings. The people who benefit from our marketing efforts are priced reasonably.

Michael Bereslavsky: Yeah, that's a good tip about making your listing look special. I have definitely found that if you are able to stand out, you'll generally get a lot more interest. It's going to be much faster to sell. I think that's great advice. And, in terms of current trends, I'm curious, what are you seeing as some emerging trends or you know, some potential things that vary higher interest among buyers right now, but maybe not enough demand from sellers? Yup. So, what would be some of those opportunities for experienced sellers to get into?

Blake Hutchison: Yeah, great question. So at the moment, we're seeing a lot of demand for Amazon affiliate businesses, so not fulfilled by Amazon. That there's certainly a trend there, but Amazon affiliate businesses, so the businesses which are reviewing a product and making their money by way of affiliate revenue. So lots of demand for those businesses, lots of demand for niche businesses. The businesses which have a very good community orientating around a topic, a product or a theme, which isn't hugely competitive. So there are large numbers of online fashion businesses. They're not particularly interesting because they're so easy to acquire, lots of themselves, but it's also a competitive space. And so from a seller's perspective, if you're selling one of those businesses, you really need to shine for you to really stand out in the crowd. Whereas businesses that are operating on a niche basis, so we had a finance blog that was delivering AdSense revenue and it sold within 48 hours for $33,000.

We had a business called Thankbot and Thankbot, it's really cool. So Thankbot basically, you upload a CSV, of records or type in a note and then it will send out a handwritten note. So you upload digital notes, I then send out handwritten notes and that business sold very, very quickly because it was considered a niche proposition. It was considered not to play around with lots of competitors and it was considered something which was very easy to grow on the basis of its existing traction. So niche interest type sites. A super interesting from a business model standpoint, Amazon affiliate, and Adsense, well, AdSense is still hot. Amazon affiliate is growing. E-commerce is particularly good around subscription commerce right now, which is really interesting to see. And of course, there is an extraordinary amount of demand for SaaS businesses still, for obvious reasons. Recurring revenue is everyone's dream.

Michael Bereslavsky: So at the summit up, make your listing special, include a lot of data focus on, Amazon affiliate or simple business models and then price it to sell the tribe.

Blake Hutchison: Yeah. Product to sell. And it doesn't mean that you won't get an amazing price, but the best thing to happen to a Flippa user, Flippa seller is competitiveness. So, what you want is buyers wanting your listing. Now the minute you overprice it, people don't even come in. But the number of times we see businesses that sell 10, 20 up to 50 times 50% greater than their asking price is huge. That happens regularly, but it only happens if you set a reasonable price, to begin with. The best thing you can have is more than one person who wants to buy your business. The worst thing you can have is no one.

Michael Bereslavsky: So on that subject of price, do you have some data in terms of average revenue multiples? So profit multiples for example, for Amazon affiliate sites or SaaS businesses from what has been sold on a platform recently?

Blake Hutchison: Yeah, great question. I'd actually pull that data and Michael and I'll send it across to you and perhaps you can distribute it to the community. I must admit I just don't have it at my fingertips, but certainly, SaaS businesses we are seeing sell upwards of three times net profit, multiple e-commerce businesses, we never see themselves above three and a half times and more typically we see them sell between 2.1 and 2.5. As it relates to AdSense businesses, I must've made, I can't remember the exact numbers off the top of my head, so I'm going to send you that data if that's possible and you can distribute it to the community.

Michael Bereslavsky: Yeah, sounds good. And we've talked about some current trends and what do you see as some future trends? Maybe a few years down the line, how do you expect with the change or do you think it's going to be the same and you know, affiliate and AdSense sites will still be the most popular ones?

Blake Hutchison: Yeah, great question. Not necessarily. I think that we are still at the beginning of this asset class. And what I mean by that is the standard small business today looks very different to what it did 10 years ago, obviously. And so, if Flippa was founded 10 years ago and there were very few websites available to buy at that time and now the standard in, or at least the changing face of small business is digital and online. So I don't think it will be what we are seeing today. I think it will be entirely different. I think SaaS is a very interesting one because I think that SaaS businesses are so rare because it's so early in the SaaS life cycle. And so I think for many years to come and probably the sweet spot really will be in probably three to five years when there'll be more and more SaaS businesses on the market who have realized the true value and, and now looking to exit.

But at the moment, most of them are scallops and so they're not ready to sell. And so all the buyers want them, but all the sellers aren't ready to relinquish them. And so I think that you'll see more SaaS obviously over the next three to five years. But to answer the question, I think that new business models in the online sector, surprising us every day. Right? And so subscription commerce was one of those, clearly, marketplaces are, there are lots of them, but is still a relatively immature sector. Uh, SaaS businesses, as we mentioned, I think that Amazon affiliate is here to stay for obvious reasons. And so there are more and more people coming online who are very, very good marketers, uh, promoting niche topics and driving an Amazon affiliate revenue. So, I think that will stay for some time to come. But I think the most exciting thing is that we'll probably see some emerging business models shine through.

Michael Bereslavsky: Yeah, that makes sense. I think that the attractiveness of most businesses is that they have practically unlimited potential. You might end up buying something that could become the next Airbnb and that's not going to happen with an affiliate business because you might buy an Amazon affiliate website and maybe you'll be able to grow with a little bit fair share or like, maybe you can get 50% more revenue in like duplex revenue. But if it's SaaS business, it's potentially so scalable, so that probably drags a lot of people.

Blake Hutchison: Yeah. One of the really interesting things there is, some people don't realize that they should be a SaaS business. That's the most amazing thing to me. So, there are some really good businesses on Flippa that are not SaaS businesses, so they're not listed as SaaS businesses, but it should be. And so that's an interesting part. Can you find a business that has traction that is paying a one-time fee for an unlimited license or has a community act divided against a particular interest or a niche that you can turn into a SaaS business as an example in this right now I'm not sure whether I'm being particularly fair to the seller. Cause it's a great business, but, he charges a one-time fee. Well, actually it's free to use for 99% of the community and then he charges a one- time fee for a perpetual license in perpetuity. That should be a SaaS business. He should be charging a monthly recurring right for access to his software and technology. And so think about that. I encourage your community to think about are there any businesses out there that they could acquire and turn into SaaS business?

Michael Bereslavsky: Yeah, absolutely. That's a very interesting angle to consider. So, let us move on to some other things. First of all, domaining, Flippa has entered domaining I believe about five or seven years ago. So it was not originally part of the marketplace. And I'm curious, how big thing is domaining for Flippa? Is it something like 10% of your total sales? So I understand you probably can not give us a number, but just to give us an idea of how big this is and how much focus is Flippa giving that?

Blake Hutchison: Yeah, I'm just having a look right now. So it looks like, well it's about seven and a half percent. So seven and a half percent of the total transaction value is domaining, which means it's small compared to the rest of the marketplace.

Michael Bereslavsky: But you've sold quite a few really expensive then ultra-premium domains before. I think you've even had one domain sale for about a million dollars. Is that right?

Blake Hutchison: Yes. So I think that there will always be a place for really, really high-quality domains in the macro environment to sell for large amounts. But what we are seeing is, um, less and less high-quality domains up for sale each month or quarter. And I think that's probably for a few reasons. One, I think that you can now acquire domains in any given category, you know, dot travel, dot food, dot whatever. And that's probably opened up a market for an alternative beginning for a business. In addition to that, categorically, we are not the biggest domain environment in the world. And so, it quite simply could be that Flippa's domain community is finding their way onto other platforms and trading on those other platforms. Now, we completely respect the domain community. And we will have that avenue and if buyers and sellers can connect there and use the marketplace constructively, we absolutely encourage that. But the reality is given, it represents seven and a half percent of the business per mile, I look up just then, it's clearly not where the vast majority of the community's orienting their time and efforts.

Michael Bereslavsky: Yeah, it looks like you have quite a few good domain names listed on Flippa and I think we have some potentially really good deals for buyers because it seems that you would have a lot more sellers than buyers in the domaining space compared to, websites and online businesses. Yeah. So I'm curious, what type of domains have you seen to sell better on Flippa in general or compared to, for example, other marketplaces, you know, yeah. So what would be your suggestion for domainers? What kind of domains should we prioritize on Flippa?

Blake Hutchison: Yup. I think there's a couple of things. So primarily, Flippa has the North American audience, so that's the first thing to consider. Which means we've primarily got a North American buyer base and so clearly those domains which orientate to a North American, old business owner I've got to sell better than those that don't. So that's probably the first thing. I think the second thing is, um, I don't think we're probably any different to go daddy in the sense that it really does come down to the usability of the domain. And so if the domain isn't considered usable then it's less likely to get any demand or half decent value on the first to say I'm not an expert in the domain space adult. That's not my core competency. We do, however, have some members of the team who are experts. So I'm happy to take the question on notice and come back and we can then distribute that information back to your community. But I think you're right in the sense that there are clearly still some really, really good opportunities for domains to make a good amount of money and there's some really, really great demand for high-quality domains.

Now, what does that mean? So the first thing to say is that one of our colleagues here at Flippa, can basically provide a Hawaiian matching service for good quality domains. And so if anyone would like further detail on that, I can send a note to support@flippa.com or just address me directly if you like blake@flippa.com and I will connect those individuals with my colleague. And in short, what she does is she ensures that it gets premium placement on the marketplace should she deem it to be a high-quality domain, which needs to find itself into the hands of the right buyers. So that's probably the tip I've got. Send us an email, let us know that you've got a high-quality domain and we'll make sure it's in the hands of the right people.

Michael Bereslavsky: And I know that Flippa acquired a domain company a few years ago. I know it was a private transaction, so you probably cannot disclose many details, but if you can share some information about that, why did you decide to do that? How did it go? You know, are you looking to acquire more many companies or is it not an option anymore?

Blake Hutchison: Yeah, I think that Flippa has realized that the strength of its operation is the marketplace less of brokerage. And so Flippa did acquire a business called domain holdings and that was a domain brokerage and Flippa has since divested of that brokerage. And so, I wasn't here. I can only imagine that like any acquisition, it's designed to add incremental value. And so if the business has divested of it, I can only imagine that it didn't add incremental value, but I'm speaking out of turn to some extent. I've been the CEO now for 10 months and that acquisition took place many years ago. So, that would be my hypothesis.

Michael Bereslavsky: That makes sense. And moving onto some other topics, I'm curious about what Flippa is doing right now for promotion and marketing in order to attract more buyers and most sellers. And what was most effective in your marketing channels?

Blake Hutchison: Yeah, great question. The first thing to state is that Flippa's demand does come from word of mouth mostly. And so Flippa is blessed by a very, very high net promoter score. Sellers and buyers who sell and buyers who buy have a very good experience. And so yeah, occasionally you'll see someone comment about a scam. The reality is there are very few people who get scammed. They just happened to shout the loudest. In fact, it's been one example of a fraudulent transaction in the last six months. So our marketing is benefited by extraordinary word of mouths, huge amounts of positivity around the marketplace experience and the fact that we are the speediest path to sell. And we have the largest buyer community in the world. And so with that, we get really strong word of mouth. So, Flippa doesn't spend aggressively from a marketing channels standpoint. In fact, I would challenge anyone to find any example of Flippa spending money to go and acquire customers.

So, most of that comes organically, what works for us, however, different lead channels. So, certainly, valuing a business is considered to be a sort of valuable, people want to understand the value of their business. And so our valuation calculatoris the single best way to get on the right flip up. It's also the single best way to get a quick evaluation on your website. Critically, that's not a perfect valuation. It's algorithmic and there are lots of things which go into evaluation of a website, size of the community, age of the site, age of the domain, current financial performance, traffic-wise, marketing channels, whether they are paying for most or whether the vast majority of it is organic, organically generated, but it's not a perfect valuation. But that's our single biggest lead funnel. So since February, we've had over 4,000 people come through the valuation calculator, which is significant. That's our single best performing marketing channel.

Michael Bereslavsky: Yeah, that sounds good. And you mentioned briefly the speed. I'm curious if you can share some details about what's the average time that a website is listed on the marketplace, of average can have time to sale. For some, the most popular categories. So for example, websites under $10,000 or maybe between 10,000 and $100,000 for like an Amazon affiliate site.

Blake Hutchison: Yup, of course. So, there are two ways to list on Flippa. You can either list by auction and that's obviously time-based or you can list by a fixed price, in which case you've got a minimum asking price, but it's not a fixed time period. And so it's quite split in that regard. And, so, the first comment is that across the board it's 2.84 months. So, call it three months on average to sell a website. Now if you sell it to auction and most of the time auctions are less than $50,000. There are some anomalies, but most of the time auctions are less than $50,000. If you're going to sell, you will sell between 30 to 45 days. On average. Most auctions run for 30 and then there's often a post auction negotiation in the event that there's no winning bidder. And so a lot of auctions actually sell post auction. That's a really important thing from a seller's perspective. And auction can be used to drive demand at that point. The best thing to do is negotiate with those people who have demonstrated some interest, categories. Again, I might have to take a question on notice and give you a sales cycle length for each category that you can distribute to the community. I don't have that at my fingertips. I'm sorry.

Michael Bereslavsky: No, that's perfect. So you mentioned 2.84 months and about, you know, 30 to 45 days. So that does sound reasonably fast.

Blake Hutchison: Yeah, that's quick, right? I mean a lot of sellers sell more on business fast, it comes down to the quality, one and two we're probably, I don't know this categorically, but we're probably the quickest path to style globally. I can't imagine that anyone who's moving businesses as fast as us or websites as fast as us. And that's because we've got the largest buyer pool you've got on demand.

Michael Bereslavsky: That sounds good! And one of the biggest issues with Flippa a few years ago for the sellers was there was a very large number of non-paying buyers. So you would often have someone winning the auction or you know, placing a big bidding offer and then just not following through. I know that you've implemented quite a few KYC methods and you know, in as verifications. But, that's what still happens is that it's still an issue. And you know, if you can share some numbers for example, or if it's, or is that not relevant at all these days?

Blake Hutchison: Now, it's relevant. Yes, it happens, but it was a very, very small percentage. I think that's the important thing. Now, remember the web is a very vocal environment and so a small few can yell very loud. Flippa's non-paying buyer market was always under 1.5% of transactions. That's very small, but it happened. So I accepted it happened and we have invested lots of effort around this. It's not perfect yet. So there are a few things. The first thing is a KYC check. So basically what happens is when a buyer goes to buy something, we basically put them through, okay, I want to see, check, I know your customer checks. So there's ID verification there. We do ask the same facilities actually, but buyers obviously relate to your specific question. The second thing is really that sellers do need to take responsibility.

I know that sounds harsh, but they need to take responsibility for speaking to buyers during the sales process. We will see occasionally a seller say, great, someone just put in a bid for $15,000. I'll close the auction except for that price. They've never heard anything from that particular buyer other than the fact that that person dropped the number one five zero zero zero into the keypad. That's not a buyer you want to sell to. So what we encourage people to do is if you receive an offer that you are comfortable with, don't close your auction and accept it, stop to get into a dialogue with that buyer. Because while Flippa accepts that we have a lot of work to do around ensuring that every buyer is verified, we accept that responsibility and we will take that on. But in the meantime, we ask our sellers to make sure that they're not selling to someone that they've never had a conversation with.

You're unlikely to buy a car, you're unlikely to stay in an Airbnb and you're unlikely to buy a house from the person that you have had absolutely zero correspondence with. It's highly unlikely Airbnb, you chat with them before you get there. Buying a car, you'll typically make them before you go for a test drive and buying a house, you typically walk through the house and you meet real estate agent. It gives you some level of comfort. We simply ask that people go through that process on Flippa and ask the buyer to show some evidence of their interest and have a discussion over email on the discussion forum or of course on Flippa.

Michael Bereslavsky: Yeah, that definitely makes sense. And I find that it's interesting that you mentioned Airbnb. I find it strange with you can go and book a house without exchanging any messages with the host. It just feels weird. Yeah. I hope the message before, you know, booking something unless

Blake Hutchison: it's fully a little bit different for them though, isn't it? Because the actual experience is staying in the home, versus with a business or website, you need to understand how it's being operated and whether the person has the means to afford it. And buying a $5,000 website, buying a $500,000 website, buying a $5 million website is often very different to spending 50, a hundred, $200 a night on some accommodation. The amount of money at stake is often higher on Flippa than it is traveling.

Michael Bereslavsky: Yeah, absolutely. And when we sell on Flippa, we always make sure to engage in some dialogue with potential buyers early on, send them some message, to check a little bit, ask when, what we are doing, what's the experience with this kind of business to see, if they have the qualifications. I think it's very important to have somebody really have good and clear communication.

Blake Hutchinson: Yeah, that's right.

Michael Bereslavsky: Blake, finally, on a personal note so, I've listened to some of your previous interviews and you have quite an extensive history of running different companies. So I'm curious, what are some things, some habits, routines that you found to be very effective that I thought as CEO and running a company, what are some things that you apply for increasing operational efficiency?

Blake Hutchison:Yeah, it's a wonderful question. It's a great question. Not necessarily a question I expected. Well, thank you. It's been really interesting seeing different industries and it's been really interesting working with some fantastic leaders in different organizations. And, so, I learned a lot for those processes. But for me, to some extent, it comes down to asking myself every morning, what is the single biggest thing I can do to drive impact? And so I try to stay disciplined around achieving that one thing each day. And so that can mean that lots of things go unanswered. And it can also mean that you don't get to do everything. But in a business which has very, very significant growth ambitions, we see ourselves as empowering business owners all over the world to be able to exit. They, someone who has a very small start all the way up to someone who has a $5 million business. We want them to have the opportunity to exit. And so that's where we orientate our impact focus. How do, what do we do right now to assist more people to be able to exit? And so that can mean at an engineering level, it can mean let's improve on-boarding for our buyers and sellers so that we can connect the two of them. From a recruiting standpoint, it can mean hiring people who understand how to sell or how to operate or have lived within a small business ecosystem because they're the people who will understand what our customers want. And so each day I wake up, it's about what is the single biggest thing I can drive impact for. And after that, it's very much customer orientation. So I always start my day responding to any customer queries before I do anything that is internally focused.

And so I've done that everywhere in all the organizations I've worked in. I start my day focusing on the customer and know that they come first and then I orientate internally after that. Probably the second biggest tip is, to limit prioritization to very few things, which is the nature of prioritization. But people will actually say, well, this is my priority. This is my priority, this is my priority. There'll be lots of things that I need to work on. In our case, right now it's very much about listings engagement. So that's the number one priority of Flippa on listings engagement. So your questions before were pertinent. And so I think that anyone in any organization, small or big, should think about the number one priority and only worked on tactical level delivery, which can influence that priority. And so that's how I tend to orient my time and also the way I manage.

Michael Bereslavsky: Yeah, that's a great question to ask yourself. As a leader of an organization, you know, what can I do today to bring the biggest impact?

Blake Hutchison:Yeah. I think it's simple, but often we get confused and conflicted around all of the things that we've got to achieve.

Michael Bereslavsky: Well, thank you for sharing some thoughts and details. So how can our listeners contact you and any final thoughts or any final kind of piece of advice for sellers and buyers and why should people prefer Flippa over other options to sell their business?

Blake Hutchison: Yeah, great question. I think that there's there's some really fantastic progress out there. So, we respect that, that community from our perspective, we don't think that there is a better place to sell from a speed, efficiency and demand standpoint. And, so if you're looking to understand demand, there is no better place than Flippa because we have the greatest buyer pool in the world. We're saying four and a half thousand new verified buyers join every single month. And that's growing. So from a seller's perspective, we see ourselves as the one and only real marketplace. It's one thing to call yourself, a marketplace. It's another thing to be one. So, that's a key point. People can get in touch with me very simply. So Blake, B, l a, k, e@flippa.com. I'm also on LinkedIn, very easy to find, like Hutchison. H U T, C, H. I. S. O. N. There's no n in the middle, which most people always mess up. I'm at Twitter at Blake now, B, L ,A, K, E , N, O, W. But as I said, blake@flippa.com, and I'd love to hear from any and all of your listeners.

Michael Bereslavsky: Thank you Blake, and I'm looking forward to seeing how Flippa develops in the future.

Blake Hutchison: Yeah. Thank you, Michael. I really appreciate your time. Thank you for having me on your show today.

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Domain Magnate dives into the world of podcasting. For our pilot episode, our CEO and Founder, Michael Bereslavsky and our Deal Manager, Colton Moffitt gives you an overview about our company, Domain Magnate. In this 11-minute episode, we dig down into more details about our own approach, processes, and a few things we have learned from over a decade of experience buying, optimizing, and selling online businesses.

We also provided some practical insights and tidbits on how we are able to sell profitable online businesses done within days! Lastly, Michael discussed what can you expect from us in the next episodes!

Skip to the good parts:

00:20 - 00:45 Know more about Michael Bereslavskyand Colton Moffitt

00:45 - 02:25 Know more about Domain Magnate, our funds, and services

02:50 - 04:53 Our very own process that lead to 300+ successful transactions

04:53 - 05:23 Overview of our portfolio

05:23 - 07:11 What makes our process different and effective? How do you pick your focus?

09:03 - 09:50 What to expect in the next episodes?

Show Transcript:

Michael Bereslavsky: Hello, podcast listeners! Welcome to The Domain Magnate Podcast! I'm Michael Bereslavsky, the founder and CEO of Domain Magnate. I've been involved in buying, managing, and growing online businesses for the past 15 years.

Colton Moffitt: And I'm Colton Moffitt, Deal Manager for Domain Magnate. Over the past few years, I've managed over successful transactions assisting with a variety of aspects from the deal flow and due diligence, negotiation, and closing.

Michael Bereslavsky: So at Domain Magnate, we buy established online businesses, we currently mostly focus on organic traffic, content websites, and SaaS businesses.

And we also recently started our first fund, we have several of our investors and we are planning to launch more funds and we also have a few different services for buyers.

Colton Moffitt: Yeah. So the things that we do for buyer from the due diligence side all the way, actually just finding the deals to begin with. Depends on what you need, but we do concierge buying to help you determine what your criteria will be or if you already have that in mind.

And we'll go out and find those deals and complete the due diligence. And we actually also offer a service to manage those sites. We purchase them. You don't have to worry about managing, and we have that as well.

Michael Bereslavsky: And we have done hundreds of deals in the last decade and a half, and our focus is quite different from most other buyers because most buyers tend to look at managing as the area where they bring most of the profits, most of the benefit. Well, we generally focus more on the deal flow to manage our own deal flow if you buy only directly and privately and the focus on finding the very best deals that we can for ourselves, for our funds and for our clients as well.

Colton Moffitt: Yeah, that's something that I've really enjoyed about working here with Domain Magnate is that we actually really emphasize relationships. So you have referrals that happen quite often and repeat business. So with such a small industry that is growing rapidly, it's so important tofocus on that. So when we do outreach, and we do source new relationships for deals, you know we keep that very targeted and personal with the focus on quality. And then when we begin to work with a seller, we'll go from, you know, getting that initial information to verifying it, completing that quickly and in a way that's smooth for them and easy relative to what they might have to do to go list somewhere. However, we're also very thorough and so have we emphasize keeping things simple for them but also safe for our investors or our buyer clients.

Michael Bereslavsky: We also have our own approach to due diligence. So the way we try to look at every deal is a little bit different from how people are used to looking at it. And if you divide every deal into three different categories, they separately look at the numbers and then we tried to assess the risks and assign them into different categories and we look at the opportunities for improvement of each business and then give you the results of our research. And that's how you could find a good deal, the one based on all these three criteria. Many buyers tend to make themistake of most in focusing either on the numbers or the opportunities or the risk but not taking the full picture in the account before making the decision.

Colton Moffitt: Yeah, that's been quite interesting as we began to work together, learning about how you conduct due diligence versus say, some of the brokers I've worked with are sellers and buyers on Flippa. And that's quite a unique perspective because you've incorporated the approachthat you might get from books, like never split the difference or what you might get from other sorts of books about how to look at a deal, how to look at a negotiation in a way that it still gets everyone with their, what they want, but where we don't fall into cognitive biases that might make us really just fit the data to whatever we feel we want to get out of it, which is quite dangerous, you know? But it works well. And recently, we were able to acquire a content business in the health niche. And that has an annual net profit of over 150,000 and just the month before that we picked up a SaaS business with 50,000 in annual net profits. So we can move fairly quickly whether we're doing this for buyers or we're going out and representing our investors, our own fund. It's something that we also try to make sure that the sellers enjoy too. And we maintain that relationship because we always want to work with them again in the future.

Michael Bereslavsky: And our goal at Domain Magnate is trying to make the process much more efficient and much better for both sides. I personally think that the regular process when you go and sung your business with brokers, it's just way too slow. It would often take you several weeks just to get, uh, to get it listed. That's a good start. We basically, for process of listing your business for sale and then several more weeks to get things approved and then many months to wait, to see if the buyer comes in, make many calls, and then the closing process might also take many, many weeks. And then you might not even get your money right away because often you would have a name, a longer period of potentially twelve months, sort of a couple of years during which would get most of your money and you tried to make it much faster and much more efficient and you've been able to close six figure deals in just a few days or up to a week or too often, especially helping sellers that are looking for a quick deal.

People who just want to move on from their business and go into something new. And most sellers, they don't really want to learn about selling a business. They just like starting businesses, building businesses. So, we try to generally revolutionize the industry by allowing people thatoption of quickly selling their business and at the same time, and we are also constantly improving our methods and our ways of doing things and trying to be more efficient and more targeted at how we pick the best deals, which are also based on our current strengths. So we do not do any e-commerce deals right now just because we don't have as much experience in that. So we are mainly focusing on the content businesses and that's been working quite well for us in the last years we've been able to consistently achieve a return of 100% on the invested capital and now as we are expanding and growing, we are looking forward to incorporate some of those new methods and keep expanding our portfolio.

Colton Moffitt: Yeah, that's really impressive and it's exciting the things that we're getting into in the next year, two years ahead because of what you mentioned before, providing that option for a seller to quickly move on because a lot of the times they are serial entrepreneurs and they'vecreated something of value, but they don't really want to push it to that next level and we know how to identify that and help them with that process and then find the next person once we've kind of gotten it stabilized that they're going to take it to that next level. And so that's, those are our buyers often, and we enjoy working with those sellers. And we also give way to sell their business without having to show it to so many people. For instance, when you put it on a marketplace where you go to a broker, there are a lot of people who are looking into it, and if you end up not making a sale, that can be quite rough on you. And alternatively, as a buyer, when you buy something that's gone through a brokerage or a marketplace process, you might have a lot of competitors who's everybody else who wanted to buy it then. So it's tough, and that's why people tend to prefer private sale, and it's difficult. But we specialize in mastering that process.

Michael Bereslavsky: Yeah, and about the podcast, so, over the past few years I've been veryfortunate to meet some of the most successful online entrepreneurs and business owners and have been able to have some really interesting conversations now. And I was always thinking about how amazing it would be to recur some of those conversations? And that's the main idea, we are going to be talking about buying and managing online businesses, and we are going to interview some guests that are doing some really interesting things at a good scale in this industry. And wewill also discuss our methods, our ways of doing things, and generally our approach to the industry and to buy businesses.

Colton Moffitt: Yeah, and if you want to hear more about this and follow this progress or if you're interested in selling a business you might own or participating in the investment or buying one of those that we might have listed of our own, just go to domainmagnate.com. If you do want to sell, it's domainmagnate.com/sell, and if you would like to consider being an investor with us, it's domainmagnate.com/investors

Michael Bereslavsky: Thank you for listening and I'm looking forward to connecting with you in later episodes.

Colton Moffitt: Thank you.

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