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

This episode is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network. What? What is the HubSpot Podcast Network? That's right, it's a new thing by HubSpot. They started with our podcast and now they're branching into more and more podcasts with experts in different business areas. So you might have a podcast about marketing or sales or operations or customer service. And we're gonna go over through the different podcasts on this network. Some are more entertaining, some are more informational, some are a good mix of both. That's what we try to do here. And HubSpot's goal here is to have on-demand mentors. So if you're an entrepreneur, you're a startup, you're scaling up, you're gonna be able to hear practical tips and inspirational stories by listening to the different podcasts on their network. Which by the way, I think this is a smart idea. Too many brands just try to sell you their thing. HubSpot, they, I love their approach here. They're like, let's put out great valuable free content and help more companies succeed. And the more companies that we help succeed, the more will eventually come back to us, sort of like a good karma kind of thing. So listen, learn, and grow with HubSpot Podcast Network, hubspot.com/podcastnetwork.

All right, so I love huge companies, I love big visions, I love all that stuff, but a lot of people complain to me when they listen to the podcast. They go, "Sam, I like these big, huge ideas, these $100 million, billion-dollar ideas. These are fun to discuss, yada, yada, yada, but I wanted to know about something that I can just create a great living on, let alone a fortune." I mean, I don't care if it gets big, I just want to make a living. And today is a great episode that addresses that. So this is an old episode that Sean did a couple years ago, and the guest is one of my best friends. His name's Ramon Van Meer. He created a content site that was making something like $400,000 a month in profit, and he eventually sold it for close to $10 million in cash. I was a small shareholder and I got to see the behind the scenes on how he built it, and it was really cool. And Ramon inspires me for a couple reasons. The first is that he's an immigrant, he's a single dad, and he came here without a lot of opportunity in front of him, and he kind of made it work. And Ramon's a bulldog, he just gets it done. So he's inspiring. But it's also exciting because I love content businesses a ton, and I know a lot of you love content businesses. And this story is about a content business, and not just any content business, it's about one that might shock you. It's about soap operas. Yes, soap operas. Ramon Van Meer built this company called SoapHub that was the most popular soap opera website, kind of like TMZ or, or episode recaps, but for soap operas. It was the largest in the space. It was one of the largest soap operas blogs in the space. It only took him about 24-ish months to build this thing. And in this episode, he goes through a lot of detail on how he got traffic. So we got a lot of traffic from Facebook groups. Which is something that you can still do, by the way. Facebook groups crush it. They crush it for my company and they're still great. And he goes step by step how he did that. He also talks about how he hired writers. He talks about how he monetized through advertising. It's just really fascinating. And this is the type of company that if you're listening and you're willing to spend 40 hours a week doing it, I would bet everything that if you give it 6 months of 40-hour work weeks, you totally can start a company like this that makes a really good living. And so this story is great because we're going to talk about small business. So something that grew to, uh, like something like $5 million-ish in sales in a very short amount of time. And $5 million seems like a lot, but it started small, like a couple grand a month and then tens of thousands of dollars a month and whatever. Uh, it's really good. So it starts small. Second, it's about content. A lot of people are interested in content businesses. Ramon didn't know anything about the content business. In fact, he's an English as a second language type of person, so he He didn't, he's not that great of a writer, but he built a really cool content business and it's kind of like a puzzle to him and he'll talk step by step how he did that. And third, a lot of people say follow your passion, some people say don't follow your passion. I err on the side of I tend to start stuff that I really care about, but not Ramon. I mean, he doesn't, he's a 40-year-old dude, single dad, he doesn't watch soap operas, but he built this really wonderful business on soap operas because he's not passionate about soap operas, he's passionate about building companies. And I think most of you probably fall into that category. So you have to listen to how this guy builds his life. It's so fascinating because he has— there's no excuses to why he's not going to succeed. He just says, I don't care, I'm going to do it. I'm going to get it done. I'm going to run through a wall.

I'm going to—

I'm going to make it happen. And Ramon is one of my best friends and he's a huge inspiration to me. He's one of my mentors. He's a person I really look up to. And I think you guys would like the story. He's going to talk about how he built SoapHub. You can find it now, SoapHub.com. He sold it for something like $9-ish million. And he's going to talk about that story about how he grew it and he sold it. And Sean does a really good job of asking questions, so give it a listen. See you.

At this point, it's a money printer.

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

And we're talking monthly, you're pulling in between $400,000 and $500,000 in revenue. What's up guys? Sean here. I'm doing a special little introduction to this episode from my phone. This week's conversation was with Ramon Vanmeer and Ramon is a really interesting dude and this episode is going to be different than most episodes. I would say that majority of the guests when I have them on, they are intimidatingly smart. When they're talking to me, it's pretty obvious within 5 minutes that I'm the dumbest person in the room and I just try to ask questions so that I just let them talk and let them tell their story and I just do my best to keep up. But Ramon is not a genius. That's what I'll say. Our buddy Sam, who introduced us, he says it differently. He calls Ramon like— He just tells him, "You're so dumb. You're the dumbest smart guy I know." He means it with love because what Ramon does is he doesn't overcomplicate things. You're going to hear that in his story. For example, the essence of his story and he'll tell you better than I will, but it's He, you know, wanted to start a blog. He just looked at what was already popular and then he started a blog in that little niche. He bought a $49 WordPress template because he doesn't know how to code. He outsourced the writing to some freelancers because he doesn't know how to write and somehow, someway just did those simple things and built the most popular blog about a subject that he doesn't even really know. It's a soap opera blog like, you know, Days of Our Lives, Young and the Restless, that's like soap operas. He's never even seen an episode of a soap opera. Somehow this guy who can't code, can't write, and never watched soap operas built a blog filled with daily stories about soap operas. The business started printing money, generating hundreds of thousands of dollars a month before selling it for about $9 million. Ramon is one of the most humble guys I've ever met in Silicon Valley. Very good at just keeping things simple. And if you take nothing away from this, it's to remember that you don't have to be a genius and you don't have to have some super complicated high-tech business plan to make it work. Sometimes if you just find a niche that has a lot of passion around it, you can build a very simple business, and he's going to tell you about that. So hope you enjoy the episode. If you do, leave a review, shout me out on Twitter, uh, do something so that I hear you guys. Uh, that's what gets me excited to, to keep making the show happen. Uh, I don't have to do the show. I do it because I love it, and, um, I really appreciate everything that happened after the first episode. All right, enjoy. Okay, here we go.

Let's do this. All right. Sometimes I get asked to do a podcast or an interview, and I'm a shy person in groups, so I don't really like to do TV or interviews. I don't like to talk too much about myself. It's just— I don't know why. So sometimes it gets awkward. A friend of mine asked me to do a TV segment for him. It was not a TV like national TV. Nobody would really see it. But as soon as he hit the record on the camera, then I started mumbling and And you froze. I froze. Yeah. So, all right, well, I'm trying to do my best.

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

All right. Nobody will guess this and nobody believes it when I tell them. I started a blog about soap operas. It's a news, news blog that will write about the running soap operas. And we're talking like Days of Our Lives.

Young and the Restless.

Exactly. And the first question people always ask, oh, are you a soap opera watcher? Because especially when they see me, you know, then they cannot believe it. Up to now, I've not watched one episode of any soap opera, but yeah, that was the website. I built it and sold it in 3 years later.

Wow. So, okay. So, so the story is going to be, you decide to make a soap opera blog. God knows why. And then you somehow were able to make a soap opera blog successful despite never watching a soap opera. And yeah. You sold it how long ago?

10, 11 months ago.

All right, so 11 months ago you sell it for, say, $9.5 million?

$8.75 million cash?

Cash, yes.

And this isn't like a Silicon Valley, like you own 4% of the company. This was your company, you owned, there's no outside investors?

I had no investors, I bootstrapped it. I had some advisors. I think I owned like 98% still.

Wow.

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

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

Yeah, I started this and I called the golden age of Facebook where you can basically create a fan page about any topic and very cheap and fast could build a huge fan page. And back then the newsfeed algorithm was still in favor for publishers. So whatever you posted, a lot of your fans will see it.

So are we talking like the BuzzFeed, Upworthy days when they were getting a ton of traffic off Facebook? Yeah.

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

and take me back. Are you just at home?

Yes.

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

Yeah. 800 square feet apartment, me and my son together and just brainstorming ideas. And what was your son's ideas?

What was he, what was he thinking?

The engagement was probably higher than people getting outraged.

Are you a technical guy? I mean, what's your because a lot of people get stuck, right? You know, hey, I want to build this website. Yeah, I can't code. Do I go learn Python the hard way? Do I go buy this course and try to become a developer? Do I try to outsource it? Yeah, do I try, you know, a WordPress theme?

So I think that's why we live in such a great time, right? Like, you don't actually need to know a lot to get stuff, you know, built. WordPress, it's so— or Shopify, if you want to start selling something, Shopify is very easy. And if you want to build a content site, WordPress is also So I am technical, but I didn't code anything to build like this website. I built in a couple hours, was a WordPress, a theme, a very simple logo because I'm a, I'm just a believer like trying a lot of different things fast, fast, and then see if something works. Then you, you know, optimize or make it better or make it look better or faster, things like that. But you know, I try to prevent spending too much time in the pre-launch phase where, like, I made those mistakes too when I was younger. I had a business idea and then I, you know, I took weeks to design a business card and, you know, and a website. And eventually, after months of hard work, and then it didn't— the idea didn't work, right? So now I'm the opposite, just quick. So a couple hours, very ugly site. Now I had the problem, I don't know anything about soaps. And as you can hear, I have an accent. English is not my first language, so writing is also not my strong point. So I went on Upwork, back then was called oDesk.

So this breaks all the rules, by the way.

It's—

yeah, you know, oh, founder market fit, zero. Passion is passion, zero. Exactly. Skill, skill set, zero. Can't write, and I decided to start a blog.

Exactly.

But you knew one thing. So if we're recapping the kind of what you had, what you didn't have, all right, that's the stuff you didn't have. But sounds like what you had was you knew that at least for this time period there was a cheap way to buy likes on a Facebook page. Correct. And then whatever that Facebook page is, and you tried 20 of them, WWE and pets and whatever, and then take that traffic on the— take the likes on the Facebook page, turn it into website traffic.

Correct.

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

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

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

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

What's like a big magazine that covers soaps?

The biggest one is called Soap Opera Digest. Okay. It's been around, I think, 40, 50 years.

Straight to the point.

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

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

Exactly.

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

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

Yeah. And so she starts cranking out content and give me your mindset. I mean, are you, are you pretty certain that this is gonna work? How are you paying the bills at this point? Yeah. Like, take me back to, cuz I know it works, right? The spoiler of this podcast. Yeah. Shit worked out. Yeah. Sold the company, you know, that worked. So, But I think it's important to go back when it wasn't clear that it was going to work. Yeah, you have some belief, but like, again, I want to know, how were you paying the bills? And then what was your certainty level on this, or were you still hedging your bets with other things?

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

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

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

Yes, exactly. So it's a lot of content. And when you write about the topic or you think about, you know, starting a content site, you also want to think, okay, is there going to be enough content to write about? So for example, if you do a Game of Thrones blog, you're kind of limited because it only airs 2, 3 months. I don't know, actually, a year.

This season was 6 episodes and now it's done.

And it's done, right? So then 6 Sundays.

Yeah.

So that's not a lot of, uh, content.

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

No.

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

So start a petition, right?

Start a petition. Exactly. All right, let's talk about one of the most important parts of any business, your CRM, right? This is where you see who are my prospects, who are my customers, who are my hardcore customers, and you wanna have conversations, you wanna have information about them. That goes throughout all stages of the customer journey. So HubSpot's CRM platform, it's easy to align your team using the features that they have, like their messaging tools, live chat, email templates, and having a unified system of record. So how does it work? You can install live chat on your website, and this will let sales and customer support talk to your prospects. You could send marketing emails on behalf of your sales reps to, to your customers. You can have prospects book meetings with your reps without wasting time. And all of this is stored in one unified system of record so that teams can get access to all of your contact history. Why is it so important to have live chat in a unified system of record, you ask? Great question. Um, it's because when you're— all your systems are separate, you're just cobbling together data from one place and data from another. It's all disjointed. There's no single source of truth. What I like when I'm the CEO of a company is to be able to click one button and see who are our customers, where are they at in the journey, how do we quickly message them, how do we get them moving forward to success. So that's what it does. That's HubSpot CRM. And if you wanna learn about how you can scale your company without scaling complexity, go to hubspot.com. So Soap Operas had this unique property, daily content, new content every day. And I mean, what is your article about? Is it, here's the recap of what happened in case you missed it? Was it like speculation of what's gonna happen? What was the content like? Or was it just pure clickbait on Facebook of like, see which character you are on this, you know, quiz?

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

So like a theory or a spoiler?

Yeah, really spoilers.

Okay. And just like the answer, this is what's going to happen.

Right. You said the first few months you're trying to get traffic, first 4 or 5 months, not very much traffic, you know, $2 a day in AdSense type of thing.

Yeah.

But you keep going because you see the engagement.

Yeah.

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

Yeah. So I had an online travel agency company before with my previous business partner, and I sold half of my shares, and the new buyer that's who bought my shares paid a year long every month. So that was exactly what I needed to pay my bills. So that was, you know, it was, was my luck that, you know, I could then, you know, just do other things.

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

Yeah, I've been an entrepreneur. Like, I've done so many different businesses. Like, I had some jobs when I was 18, 19, but basically I always had my own companies. So it was never a thought of, okay, if the soaps doesn't work, I'm going to go get a job. It was actually, if soap doesn't work, I'm going to figure out something else. Right.

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

It was like very slow, like flat almost, but very little bit uphill, like, and then suddenly, yeah, we started growing much faster because I was starting to collect emails. Starting when a person came to my website, I asked, hey, do you want to get a push notification? So I started to diversify my traffic sources, not just Facebook. And then, yeah, 4 or 5 months into it, then it started doubling every day, and then the growth went really fast.

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

So I only bought 30, the first 30, 40,000 likes at below 1 cent per like. So it was very cheap after that was all organic.

Wow.

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

Yeah. When I started, I thought, because I was in, you know, I sold my shares.

Okay.

What I'm going to do next? I know I like internet marketing and I was always, you know, doing marketing stuff where buying some small websites, selling them or building them from scratch. And so I thought, okay, this will could be a fun project that maybe makes me, you know, $20K a month. And, you know, there will be— I didn't know, like, you know, my first goal was $100 a day and then very quickly was $1,000 a day. And then I thought, oh man, this is $1,000 a day. This is amazing. And but it kept growing.

And the thing I love about you is you're so different than all my other friends here where a lot of people, you know, you live in Silicon Valley. There's a lot of people who love self-promotion. I'm one of them, started a podcast. But a lot of people who love Twitter, they love talking to people. They love meeting people, they go to networking events, they host dinners. You don't do any of that shit. You're like a, you know, solo guy who just makes shit happen, and that's really all you're interested in. It's just that, that very singular laser focus. So when this is happening, my question is, how do you celebrate? How do you get ideas? So when you're hitting these milestones, is it just kind of you doing a fist pump in a room? Are you talking to somebody? You're just telling your son? What— yeah, how did you celebrate? And then I also want to how did you get your ideas of, hey, I should do push notifications, I should do these next things? So tell me a little bit about both those.

Yeah, this might be the entrepreneur test, right? If you're listening to this right now and you're like, you know, those Viagra commercials where it's like they describe 50 symptoms in half a second. It's like, "If any of these apply to you, please go see your doctor." The way I see what you're describing is the, "If any of these apply to you, please become an entrepreneur," which is like most people that you meet, they work their sort of 9-to-5 and the objective is to turn off their brain and turn off the work part of their brain. So can't wait to go home, get off that. The weekend is here. All right, fantastic. Oh no, Monday Monday is back. Now I have to go apply my brain to this thing that I don't necessarily want to be thinking about. Yeah. Whereas it seems like for an entrepreneur, there's a certain level of curiosity and obsession that just makes it where you can't turn that part of your brain off. You're always thinking of ideas. Yeah. And so that's the— you know, if those apply to you, please go see, you know, please go see your doctor, please go see your investor, and go get a check to start your business.

It's, it's true, and it's a blessing and a curse at the same time because I cannot— I always I was this morning talking with somebody and I said, even if I want to, I cannot turn off the switch, right? So it's very hard for me and for my family actually for me to go on vacation, right?

Like, you're not a great date.

No, even on vacation, I, you know, I work. Of course I will combine it with doing stuff, you know, I have to do that for my son. It's always spinning, so to speak. So it's a blessing and, and a curse.

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

And then you're not trying to be a genius, you're trying to get the result. Yes. If somebody else has an idea that's getting good results, you'll try it.

Yeah, reverse engineer.

And you told me, I think maybe the first time we went out to dinner, because I was like, it was something around why soaps, why did you even try soaps to begin with, and you had said something like, tell the story where you said you saw somebody selling a website like this, and he, you know, the guy was asking for $100,000, and you were like, I mean, I don't even have $100 to give you for this, but— If you're selling it for $100,000, that means there must be some value here. Is it, is that how it went down for that part?

And then so you can— what's an example? Where would I go if I wanted to find websites that are for sale?

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

This morning, actually. I was looking at— yeah, when I went to Quiet— because I hadn't heard of Quiet Light. I had seen some of the different Shopify buy-sell ones, and I went to Quiet Light, and you're right. I mean, you just see, hey, I have a business, I sell leather products, and I'm doing $2 million a year in sales. Yeah, hey, that's kind of interesting. Let me see, you know, whether you want to buy it or you want to take inspiration and sort of come up with similar businesses. Exactly. That's a strategy.

Yeah. It's like real estate, right? You go, you know, you see these listings and you say, hey, go raise the rents. But sometimes if you have no money, the beauty of the internet is it's like you can go build building just like that. You know, in the real world, okay, well, I can't go build my own building. But what you were able to do in maybe 6 to 8 months was you built your own building. Hey, I can't buy that one, but I can build my own. Own. Yeah. And so, so at what point did you realize this is going to work, this is going to be successful at a scale that is even bigger than I originally thought? Yeah. What was that turning point?

I still remember, it was December, I think, '27. It was when I was testing different articles and different times to post and different things. And but that day was the first day we made $100, but it was really calculated. Okay, we post on this time, this kind of article, and it's it all sort of fell into place.

So you made $100, but you knew you would make the $100. Yes. It was not luck.

No. You had a system. Yeah, you got to— now I got finally— I was working on a system and it was kind of working, not kind of working, but now it was like it fell in place. Okay, now the strategy, the blueprint, it's working. And then now it's just a matter of scaling, you know, getting more fans to the fan pages, building, you know, find different ways to get traffic you know, more content. So now it was more a matter of scaling, so to speak.

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

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

And did you see that coming, or was this a reaction? Oh shit, Facebook turned off the traffic, we better do something. Or did you sort of anticipate that?

The first time around was on this, like, I— nobody really knew. And then, you know, the news came out and then suddenly the traffic came down. But the second time, the big update, by that time I had a couple advisors. One, Sam Parr, who runs The Hustle, and another advisor that used to work at Facebook. So, you know, he told me, you know, like in big lines, like, you know, okay, I don't know exactly how or what or when, but I know, you know, Mark Zuckerberg's vision is really be, you know, not pro-publisher, so to speak. You know, he really wants people, you know, so make sure you hedge, like, you know, focus on Facebook groups and focus on getting into, you know, as you know, Google, Google News and things like that. So a little birdie told you a little. I had—

yes, you should, you should look at this. Yes, I strongly emphasize that you should look at that.

Right. So you're going down this path and in different businesses, there's a moment. There's this guy, Ben Horowitz, who's a venture capitalist in the city for Andreessen Horowitz. He has this term that he likes to use, WFIO, WIFO. What that stands for is we're effed, it's over, meaning something goes so horribly wrong that you're unsure if you can really recover from Were there any of those moments? It sounds like the Facebook traffic thing could have been one of those moments, but you're a very calm, cool, collected guy. So I don't know if— did you ever have that panic? Did you ever hit the panic button and say, yeah, this is it, we're effed, it might be over?

So did you talk to any of the soap opera folks? Do they know who you are? Yes. And did you have to pretend? Were you like, oh, I'm a huge fan?

Oh, so sorry. So not me personally. I didn't, I didn't talk to them, but our writers, our writer team, yes. So after After I hired the first one, she already had connections with networks and soap opera actors. And then some of our other writers, one that lived in LA, he knows all the publicists and the networks. And so we got also, you know, interviews, exclusive interviews with soap opera actors. We got the spoilers for 2 weeks out, you know, so we'd write more about, like, what's gonna happen tomorrow, all that stuff. So we had some, but I didn't do it. And but even if I—

You didn't have to pretend?

And I would not do that either.

You wouldn't have pretended.

You would have told him, hey, I never watched an episode. I don't watch it. I'm sorry. But I love the audience. I love the traffic. Yeah, I love the traffic. So the fan base is amazing.

And so when you advise people, if somebody came to you for advice, are you one of those people who says, listen to what I say, not what I do, as in follow your passion? Hey, I'm not doing that necessarily with the topics I'm writing about or the companies, kind of the customers I'm serving. Want to, you know, I'm not scratching my own itch, I'm not super passionate about that space, but you do it anyways. You think that's a good strategy, or it's just a strategy that works for you and maybe not advisable for others to follow?

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

It doesn't matter, right? It's the game of driving traffic quick customers, or however you see it, from point A to point B as cheap as possible. So that's, that's a little bit my—

you get to the, you get to the end. What, why did you decide to sell? Why not keep going? Because at this point it's a money printer.

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

Because you don't get often, you, you know, multi-million dollar offerings, you know, like, so I thought it's, it's a life-changing, uh, so somebody just came to, or did you, did you go out and market it? So first I wanted to see, hey, can I, can I even sell it? So initially I went to ask one of the advisors, Dave Nemitz, one of the founders of Bleacher Report. I asked him, hey, how much do you think I could sell this, right? Like, and he brought me in touch with an M&A, a merchant acquisition person, or a guy, however you and I hired him and he shopped it around. And, you know, I got some meetings with some companies that were interested in buying it. I got horrible offers, like, you know, like 1x my revenue, for example, and 1x revenue, 1x revenue, and then maybe with a little bit of cash, and then the rest of the money I had to wait like, you know, 4 years.

Every month I will get a little bit, you know, they're trying to drip you your money.

Yes, it's like the— you know, the private equity play, right? Where they try to repay or pay with the cash flow from the business. Right. So that was not worth it. Then I reached out to the broker I used to work with, Quiet Light Brokers. I bought and sold a couple other smaller sites through them, but I always thought, oh, this is too big of a website. I don't know a lot of people that can afford, you know, or can buy, you know.

Did you go in with a number in mind? I think that's hard for entrepreneurs, right? Somebody says, well, what would you sell it for?

For.

Yeah, you're like, shit, if I know, you know, I— some days I wake up and this is worth $100 million, and some days I wake up and I say, take this off my hands. Yeah, you know. So did you have a number in mind? How did you think about it?

That's true. Like, a lot of, especially entrepreneurs that are married to their idea, right, they think their company is worth way more than it actually is. By that time, I had, you know, friends that are in the same industry, and then you kind of get to know, like, there's a standard. Yeah. Or like, oh, this site sold for XYZ, and so you can see a different valuation So I had a number in mind that was actually way lower than I actually sold it for, right? And I went to the broker, I said—

I hope that guy's not listening.

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

It's a, it's an emotional rollercoaster because it's a lot of money on the, on the line. My biggest issue was like, okay, can this person really close? Like at the end of the day, like, because you go through due diligence period.

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

Yeah. So once they, you agree on a price, you sign an LOI, letter of intent, and then they have X amount of weeks to dig into all your numbers. One big mistake, one of the many mistakes I made was my books were not as clean as I supposed to. Like, I had other websites. I had just one LLC, one bank account, you know, at very scrappy basic.

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

So we had to go literally each item of all bank statements, each line item. Okay, this is not for the soap side, this is for that. Like, we had to go through everything. Their lawyers, my their CPA, my CPA. So it was a very painful, long process. And of course, there's— now looking back, it is easy, but at that moment, I think, oh man, maybe they're gonna change their mind. Maybe, you know, maybe in between the due diligence period, my traffic, you know, Facebook makes another update and my traffic goes down and they pull the deal, you know. Like, that goes through your mind the whole time, like, man, you know, let's hurry up. Yeah, it took 2 months. And the buyer had some issues too, that one of the investors pulled their, their funding 2 weeks before closing.

And yeah, stuff like that, all the adventures. Okay, so it ends up closing. Does your life change? I mean, this podcast is called My First Million. Yeah, I think I remember, you know, thinking, hey, if I had a million bucks in the bank, then my life would be so different. Then I would feel this way, I would act this way, I would spend this, I would do this. In reality me from doing this podcast, talking to people, that doesn't seem to be the case. What was the— what was day one of, yeah, that life for you?

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

Anticlimactic.

Climactic. Yeah, so anticlimactic, because I remember when the money came in the bank and, you know, I was hitting refresh over and over again. That I did. I was looking for it, and, and of course I took a screenshot, but I, you know, I got some paying for the office. We did the toast, and then literally like 15 minutes later, we all were back answering emails. Yeah, like it was. And the next day, you know, at night, I just— I had to pick up my son, cook dinner, you know, it's just normal life. And then the next day, went back to the office and just work.

I think— what did your son say? He's— he was 8 years old at the time or something. So does it register in his brain, you know, what, what this means? No, doesn't care.

It doesn't— no, he didn't care. I think it's different when you have really no money and then suddenly you hit a— you win a lottery and then the next day you have a lot of money. This, even though it was relatively quick, 2 to 3 years, but the website was already doing, you know, really well, very profitable. So if I wanted to buy something, I— most things I was— would— could already have bought, you know. So it was not, not something, oh, if I sell this, I'm gonna buy, you know, this and this and this. Like, I didn't have that. It was just, okay, now now onto the next journey, so to speak.

And so we got about 10 minutes before they kick us out of here, but the questions, you know, what happens then? So you, since then, you've bought a handful of other websites. Yes. Again, like a real estate guy, you sort of buy it, you try to build it up, you either run it or you sell it from there. Was that a good idea or bad idea? Are you happy with how you, how you parlayed one thing into the next, or would you do it differently? I can see that look on your face.

Yes, because you know the answer already. But yeah, no, I— what I wanted to set up was sort of like a PE kind of setup, like a private equity, where I could buy, you know, undervalued internet businesses, you know, make them better, and then resell them. Mistake what I did was I bought from totally different— there was— there's no synergy for the properties I bought. So all the properties are profitable but it would have been just make more sense now looking backwards if I had just around one topic or one like industry so it could be easily to— I could scale it easily. I need less people, less headache.

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

Yeah.

It's like a, that's a B2B company.

Yeah.

And then you have a content site. Yeah. You have an e-commerce, you know, a pet site.

Yeah, exactly. And you all, you need different skill levels and different kind of people, different models, different ways how to drive traffic. Right. So it's not that focus when I started. So one thing was on my mind, how to drive more traffic, how to drive more traffic. And now it's like, oh, we have a, you know, B2B, like we need a sales team for this. Oh, we need, you know, a content scientist, we need, you know, different things. So we all live and learn.

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

Yes.

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

Yeah.

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

Yeah, my mom has read I think like 55 Danielle Steele books. Yes, exactly. I think some article came out saying she's written more novels than anyone. Like she's got like 300 days on the— 300 weeks straight on the bestseller list or something crazy with different books. As you know, she's a machine.

Yes.

And then there's obviously Fifty Shades of Grey. There's Twilight. There's all these kind of franchises that have been built in this same kind kind of, you know, romantic fiction genre. And so you see something there. You think that this romantic stories or romantic fiction is— yeah, is big.

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

Yeah.

And I think one day I crossed over into that, and one of the books in the sports fiction was like a sports romantic fiction or something. I remember taking I was at home reading it, first 10 pages, I was like, "What is this?" By the 15th page, I was like, "All right, I'm finishing this book. This is a great book." As an 8th grader, I remember that. So yeah, there are all these subgenres just within it. So what does success look like? What do you think? Where do you want to be with this project, with Novely, 6 months from now?

6 months? Well, 6 months is—

Okay, maybe 12 months.

6 months, we hopefully will be launched and have a good number of of, of downloads. But in, in a year, we want to be at least at 100,000 active users and build a platform not just for readers but also for writers. I think because I had a lot of writers in the SoapHub time, I think writers are very undervalued nowadays. It gets more and more difficult for them to make money, and for different reasons, you know, more competition, Amazon, probably things like that. So we want Novoly to also be a really good platform for writers to make more money, have access to their audience, communicate with their audience, with their readers, and get also more exposure.

I think this is a great idea. I think that the writers getting that opportunity— yeah, it's very hard to make a living writing now.

Yeah.

So knowing that, hey, if I publish here, I'll get readers and I'll get money. And then on the other side, for readers, you know, there's a reason Netflix paid like $100 million for one more year of Friends, or, you know, The Office is the number one show because people love this comfort and familiarity with content. They love that if they can just push a button and then they will feel a certain way. It's like push a button, get an emotion.

Yeah.

And that's really what comes of, you know, if you build a platform like this, because somebody will be able to push a button, they'll know what they're getting out of it. It's not like opening up Amazon and saying, here's a bookstore. Yeah, go find what you want. This is saying, hey, you want to, you know, here's a great story, it's a romantic fiction story, and they'll be trained to say, hey, if I want that feeling, if I want that type of entertainment, entertainment, yeah, this is the app to go to. I really think this, this has a lot of potential. I'm excited to see what you can do with it.

Yeah, we're excited too.

And, uh, all right, it's great. So we'll wrap it up there. Everyone, it's been awesome having you here. You know, I would normally say, hey, where can people find you? This is your chance to shout out your social media, wherever.

Self-promotion.

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

If, if somebody has, uh, like, I always like to help and advise, or, or, you know, if people have a specific question They can find me on LinkedIn if you look, Ramon Vedmeer, right? Then you can, uh, shoot me a message. Awesome.

Well, thank you so much for coming. It's been awesome, uh, hanging with you. And, uh, I believe we have a Spartan race this Saturday to go to, so yes, I will, uh, I'll see you in the mud.

Yes, very soon. All right, awesome. Thank you so much, buddy.