Ep 373: Successful Content Website HoldCo From Acquiring 5+ Businesses with Qayyum Rajan

We just got this call that said, " Hey, we do like your business, but we have no idea what we're going to do with it. And we have no idea how to run it. So we don't really need this product or want this product as part of it. We don't have to run it. So we're going to give it back to you. They said it would give us back a dollar, but we said we'd make it more nominal. So it was $100.

Hey, I'm Jaryd Krause, host of the Buying Online Businesses podcast, and today I'm speaking with Kwame Rajan, known as Q, who is a CFA charter holder, portfolio manager, and serial online business acquirer. He founded ESG Analytics in 2017, sold it to a peer company, bought it back for next to nothing when the acquirer went under, and sold it again for six figures. And then he built his own hold co.

Acquiring Wealth Awesome, which is a leading Canadian personal finance publication with 2000 plus readers, and acquiring Wordstrap, alchemating two separate businesses into one. In this podcast, we talk about acquiring content websites from 2023 onwards, even after the Google Helpful Content Update, and most content websites are being absolutely obliterated and losing their traffic.

And how Q has gone away and bought these underperforming assets with far less traffic and built them into a hold code that is successful and making money on the backend. So we focused on distribution first, being traffic and getting as much traffic as possibl,e and then building so much value by acquiring multiple content websites and building it into one hold code that is fascinating to see somebody go away and do this and use channels that are underutilized in this AI world and this new way of doing business online and doing it very, very well and scaling.

So if you are on the fence about buying a business and you're also thinking no longer are we buying content websites, well, Q has been doing this for the last three to four years plus and doing it well and very successful even with the way AI has changed traffic and traffic distribution through Google and different tools and LLM. Such a great conversation.

You're going to get so much value from this, and it's really inspirational to see what he's done that you can also do. And for buying content websites between five grand and 20 grand, and he hasn't bought businesses for much more than 50 to 60 grand. So this is still very possible for people who just want to get into this space. So enjoy this pod.

Thank you. Welcome to the pod.

Yeah. Yeah.

I'm excited to have you on so much to dig into. I really thought about, like, where do I even start? Cause you've done so much, and congrats on what you've done so far. I know you just, you're going to continue to grow and do more in this space. I guess let's start about like this, the company that you founded, and then you sold it to a PE firm, and then they sort of took it down.

Thanks for having me, Jaryd.

Went down the tube, and then you bought it back off them. I've got a similar story where my friend did the same thing. He sold his company to a PE firm. They just cooked it, and they're like, man, we actually need you, you know? And he backed off from them and then resold it again. So tell us how did, like, how did you found this PE firm for the exit? And then what happened? What did they do to it?

That's a good question. Look, the funny thing is, the amount of things that come from just doing your own research is crazy, right? So, you know, after I built the thing and his whole backstory on that, but when we actually, when I was built the company to be sold from day one. So if you look at my initial slide deck, it's like at the end.

We believe we're an acquisition opportunity for companies like these: S&P, Morningstar, and this is an industry that will be acquired. Along the way of building the company, there were two similar companies that were acquired. And so we were always, any chance that we got, we were looking at many opportunities.

And so, you know, I think we had like two or three ongoing, just like random conversations, but this one actually just came from a LinkedIn reach out. And so I saw a competitor, I called him a competitor, he registered for the site, and I went on LinkedIn and found the CEO, and I said, Hey, we saw that you guys are on the site. Just wanted to see if you guys were open to many opportunities.

And the person said, yeah, they were. A conversation ensued from there. You know, I didn't know the scope of the company or the private equity back in or anything like that. And that's really how the conversation got started. So it's always like one of those, you miss all the shots you don't always.

Absolutely. So, you just wanted to clarify, you reached out to them when you noticed they had sort of visited the site and shown interest. Was the cue that you noticed they had shown interest?

They had actually registered for the platform that I'd built at UC Analytics. And so I saw their name kind of come through. Like, that's interesting. And I looked at their slide, and they kind of looked like a competitor at the time. And I know there was a whole, you know, whole big backend behind them and a whole, whole big company, and that kind of stuff.

And yeah, and, know, we started that process where we, we had a conversation, went through a couple of meetings, and then it quickly started to snowball, where it went to me meeting the executive team, the CTO, CTO had due diligence, technical stuff, the legal stuff. All of a sudden, it was like a six-month process. I flew down to Boston to meet the team.

And then after that is kind of when we inked the deal. A funny story is that when they did the financial due diligence, they actually wanted to check for any liens on the business. I'm like, any liens, liens on the business. like, anybody who had any charges or loans against this stuff.

Any wall in the business?

Anyways, there was this funny story because little did I know that when we got our company credit card at the bank, RBC, one of the things in their agreements is that they actually take a lien on the entire business for a $2,000 credit card.

That actually delayed the entire transaction by like two months because I had to find a way to get this bank to like cancel the credit card and like call their lien company and remove it, and then I get this thing that's... my God. That almost derailed the entire thing.

Yeah, that's why. And isn't it funny that just like one little thing can just add so much time to an exit or an acquisition. And in that timeframe, two months, you know, there's so much that can happen where you're like, okay, like a lot of people may get to a point where they are just like, okay, the business is sold, just one little thing, and they take their, you know, their foot off the pedal.

No.

And this, we had to happen where it was a nine-month acquisition on one of our last anine-months at the process. And the best thing about it was that the business continued to grow. And so it just gave us as the acquirer so much more confidence, which is really, really cool. So, how, how, what happened with the transition? Did you organize a, well, did they organize you to stay on for a certain period of time? If so, how long and then what, what ended up happening? What do they do to it?

100%.

Why did that go down the tube, yes?

So by the time that we were acquired, we had a small team. So were three of us, me as kind of the 100 % owwere with the investors, and then had a couple of developers on board as well. And so, yeah, they basically gave each of us an agreement when they hired us. Sook the company on, and they brought us to run the company.

So, effectively, the start of it was us joining the company and then keeping things as is and just running as we started to look for integration. What happened, I'm not sure on the full story behind exactly what happened on the leadership side, but slowly, each of the stakeholders who brought us in, it was like the CEO, the CTO, you know, kind of like foyou ur or five of these people of the executive team then.

So kind of quick, slowly one by one started to leave. And at the end of like six months, of the people that initially brought us on were still there. And with that, they changed the strategic direction of the company because they brought us on to expand their ESG, environmental and social governance sort of farm.

We should pause here and mention what the business is. It's analytics, right?

It's ESG Analytics. It was a system for measuring a company's environmental, social, and governance footprint on a daily basis. Before, you'd have firms like Morningstar, Sustainalytics, and what they would do, they'd have all these huge teams of analysts to go through reports effectively, and that kind of stuff.

They would issue a sustainability rating for a company, maybe once every three months or six months. At the time, ESG was pretty big on getting all these analysts to look at this information once a month or every quarter. What if we look at all the news that happens in the world and tag it to all the companies and create the data processes to do this in real time?

And that's what we did. So we basically got to a point where we were taking in multiple hundreds of thousands to a million news articles every single day, understanding which companies were involved in which ones, in which ones we're talking about environmental, social, governance topics.

And we would actually be able to give you a score on a daily basis for a company's footprint and start to break that down, which is very useful in the investment industry. And so that provided a real-time reputation score for a com And that's actually the company that bought us its Reptrap.

And what they did was in the business of identifying companies' reputation globally. So they could tell you across different countries and stuff how Coca-Cola was perceived. And that's kind of their clients, some of the Fortune 500 companies.

Yeah, for sure.

And so there was a very interesting interlink between reputation and ESG. And that's kind of what we were looking to meld together. Because that's where people were moving to, you know, the pension funds and all these kinds of companies look to invest. They're like, " Hey, how do I identify this as a good company as well as a financially useful company? You know what I mean?

Yeah, absolutely. I've seen similar companies where they do this with like donations and cha know, different charities, because there's a lot of charities out there that're just spending so much in admin costs that may not actually be necessary, right? So they bought the biz, you guys stayed on, but the executive team obviously left, and that would have changed the trajectory.

The decision makers to acquire weren't there anymore. I guess the new people who brought in the new executive team probably didn't really have their eye on the ball with this one, right? So what ended up happening, and how did it decline? Was it just less focus and it got slightly neglected, or was there something specific?

Yeah, think it was sort of this slow process of us just being a team within the overall structure, kind of like a forgotten cog, if you will. I don't know if you've ever watched Office Space, the movie. It's pretty funny. There's just this one guy who, he's like, in one of the cubicles, like a few floors down, and he's getting paid, but nobody knows what he does or why.

No.

It's just like, it's like this little thing. And so it's pretty funny. That's kind of how we felt, you know, we were doing our own thing, which is fine, right? But at the end of the day, we wouldn't really have, there was no need for us to sell. You know, if we, if we just kept doing everything we were doing anyway, that's no different from before we sold, right?

So, of course, if we just had to do everything we were doing anyway, and we were growing, then we wouldn't have sold the first place. We'd have probably grown the business to a whole different degree. But if you buy a company and you expect, and you say, Hey, just do exactly what you're doing.

Be like, well, we kind of needed all the help and resources to take this to the next level. What's the point for you? Like, there's no additive. We want this to be added to you, right? I mean, I'm happy we got paid. I paid all my investors out, and we had a great ex, it. Now it's like, it's about that company, you know, caring enough to make that integration happen.

And so yeah, basically what happened is, you know, I think a few months after, kind of one of the last people on the stakeholders team left, we just got this call that said, Hey, we do like your business, but we have no idea what we're going to do with it. And we have no idea how to run it.

So we don't really need this product or want this product as part of it, but we don't have to run it. So we're going to give it back to you. And they said it would give it back for a dollar, but we thought it would make it more nominal. So was a hundred bucks.

Yeah. So you bought, so what range did you sell this for?

I won't disclose the exact amount, but we were able to get a really good multiple for it. So it was like 20 times earnings at the time. And if you think about it, if you think about the time period too, like that's another thing, right?

Like we're talking about how everything needs to line up, lock needs to line up, industry needs to line up, strategic fit, investors, like everything needs to line up pretty well because that was in 2021, no, 2022, 2023, I forget the year, but that was like just the time where pipe and micro-acquire were just coming up. so fast valuations were at like, people were used to 15, 20 X like one year later, and we talked about how like, yeah, that Leon could have messed everything up one year later, you cannot go on acquire.com and list for like 10 times earnings now, like that valuation is like four or five, six X now maybe, right? And so there was a lot of luck that happened with exactly the right peak of like exit multiple.

Especially now, as multiples in for SaaS have decreased largely due to AI, like just taking over and doing what a lot of SaaS companies are doing. for free, and I've got a podcast coming out soon about this. wild. Let's not go too far down that track.

Yes, that's a big, big rabbit hole.

That's another podcast in itself, right? So you bought it back, and then did you take your resources that you got from the exit to put back into the business to scale it back up and sell it again?

Yeah. So what happened after is I had kind of my own holding company that was just used for some light consulting work, and it's called New Ventures, NUU, which is a nickname my brother used to call me as a kid. And so the capital from the exit basically got rolled into New Ventures, which I now kind of looked at as kind of like a startup studio. You know what I mean?

Cause now that we have, now we have all this capital, and it's like, and we can build stuff. So it's like, okay, we can actually just kind of start to build ecosystem distribution and not really have to worry about it with Yishan. I raised money from family and friends, and looking like TikTok on an 18-month burn. I remember, like, okay, we have two months of runway left.

What do we do? I went to Google Cloud to give me some free credits to run my MLP process. Anyways, with the... exactly what we were saying, but just put your, I'll just say.

Yeah, I put in just a little bit. I hired a designer, I cleaned up some systems, some of the distribution, and that stuff. Probably put like another 10, 15 grand to like re-skin it and just clean it up. And then I listed it on MicroAcquire.

Yeah. Cool. And you sold that for obviously significantly more than $100. Yeah.

Definitely more than that. I put it at way less than the initial price that we sold it to the first company for. At this point, I was like, I don't really want this company anymore. To me, it's like I'm moving on. It was nice the way it worked out because there were actually two competing buyers.

There are four or five acquisition conversations that we got ourselves into from Microquire, and then there were two competing acquisitions. It's fun because I remember one person was like, and pop and do something new, the price and then I said I told the other person like that's what the guy's price is and he's like I'll go it up and then there's like this two hour period I was writing down to my wife every like five minutes I'm like it's like this price this price this price this price and we ended up selling them to extract alpha what's been really nice about that is they ended up actually being the perfect candidate because they truly understood the data the process in fact I've been working with them ever since and really happy to you know I feel very fortunate to have found them as kind of like a you know part of by kind of family network and like a really good team where I really enjoy the work and stuff that I do with them now since the acquisition. So in a weird boomerang way, the right match was found and obviously better off for the double.

That's so cool. Yeah. It's so nice to be able to sell to a good acquirer or buy from a good seller. The value really is in the relationships, right? Like, like I say, this on the buy side is like the relationship you build with the sellers, typically the most valuable thing, and can be more valuable than the acquisition alone. And it can be the same for you, like for you still working with them, em for what? Another 10 years, maybe. What's it been?

Makes all the difference.

Yeah, it's actually been three years. All of a sudden, you look at the time, and it's like, oh, I've been with these guys for three years. And I'll probably say that they were the best thing that came out of that acquisition. They might say the same thing, like, hey, whatever they did with the product, they're like, yeah, I was probably one of the best things that happened, you know what I mean?

Because then we come in with all this energy, and the work that we do expands to so many other things, right? I say we, but yeah, sure, like you help each other win, right? And that's the main thing. That's the best thing about it. So after that, you went out and started your own holdco, and you bought a bunch of businesses.

What did that look like and why? What was the motivation for starting a hold co? Cause you're, you're a C, you were a fractional, CFO, right?

Exactly.

Like a factional CEO. I just ended up working with a bunch of different people where I would join their startups, or we would build partnerships and stuff together. I'm the guy that people go to when they have an idea because I can build stuff. I ended up with a whole bunch of ideas flowing around.

The whole co-structure ended up being pretty good because I worked with some other people, where we decided to incorporate for each little venture. It's honestly just a pain in the ass to manage multiple corporate structures. You don't want to be managing multiple cap tables and registers, and you spend all this time making them all.

I figured out the structure where I'm like, okay, if I am starting a business with somebody, I have these partnership agreements where it's like under the whole code, we are creating this little entity, and we each have this percentage ownership in this sub, like a synthetic entity almost. It's like the IP's code and all that stuff, and if we exit, interest carries over.

We roll this into something else, and the interest carries over. We make revenue, and the interest carries over. And then also just from my own stuff, know, obviously a hundred percent owned. And then that way, you know, just one structure, and you can manage all the multiple brands. It means you can also use our Google account to share all the infrastructure, HubSpot, all this kind of stuff is all just kind of shared infrastructure.

And that became pretty powerful. Yeah. Pretty powerful over time, right? Cause then you can just economy of scale. So what was the first business? Are the first two ones that you bought like a work strap and then, well, awesome first, it? Or work strap?

You just move fast, right? With everything.

Yeah, kind of, okay. So I'll tell you what we were trying to do initially, which was after each channel that I built, we built the analytics and we, and we created the distribution to sell it with the SEO and all that kind of stuff. See, as many people may know, our same founders are focused on the product.

Second-time founders are focused on distribution. Okay. Next thing, next thing I'm going to do is like make sure I have all this distribution first, and then I'm going to funnel products into that distribution. And so I started to like look in a few different areas.

Finance was definitely one area where it wanted some distribution. And then this freelance and remote workspace was another one. And so we, and we'd got like really, really good results from like SEO and email marketing and that kind of stuff with use analytics. So that's kind of some of the stuff that we, that we built.

So I think what happened is we had built like an automated AI, a sort of service called rankings. And then we created a blog for freelancers, that kind of stuff, because we wanted to compete with Upwork, which was just charging crazy fees. It was like, freelancer today. And then we bought Workstrap, which is a blog about freelance and remote workspace.

I created a payment startup called Lancer to pay your freelancers. And then I acquired like a remote job hunt called remote job hunt buddy, which was like a remote job boards kinda of all aggregated. And then I picked up Wealth Awesome, which is the most significant.

That one was like, know, 50, 60K compared to the other ones, which are like in the 10 to 20K range. So, Wealth Awesome kind of remained. We can talk a little bit more about that, like right after, but it was kind of funny with the, this kind of freelance ecosystem we were imagining was kind of like, all these blogs and stuff, and people look for remote work, and then they get hired on Lancer and pay stuff.

But what we did is like, we took this, we took three of those acquisitions. One of the sites that we paid in freelance is today and we took Workshop, the blog and then Remote Job, and we just sort of mashed them all into one, into one brand called Workshop and kind of, you know, just consolidate all the traffic and all that kind of stuff into this thing, which, you know, is still like runs today and just has all this traffic related to that. And then that kind of can work with the other stuff that we build. That was the initial intention.

And so you took two and formed it into one, right? And so was it the plus one? Yeah. And, how did you, how did you merge that, amalgamate that in together? Like, is it under one domain, now, or is it? Okay. And what did that look like? Mean, it's a big way because there are so many listeners here that were like, hang on a second. Like, I've got an e-commerce brand,d and I can buy a blog, and then I can buy like maybe a digital marketing agency, and like, how do I merge it all together?

That we had built into.

Interesting.

I mean, there's some good tech stuff that happens under the scenes. Let's say the site that had the most domain authority was WorkStrab, and that one had some good backlinks and good content. Yeah, that was a blog. And so we said, okay, let's take the remote job site. That one is like blog rot.

Because of the velocity of the data, it's like, you know, five, 600,000 remote jobs in the database, and that kind of stuff. But the domain authority was lower than the workstrap.

Yeah, so the remote job site was that also a blog, or was that like a forum or something? It was an application that scraped all of the remote job boards that exist and made one meta remote job board. It was an XJS app, a single-tick, a reactive web.

And were people paying to get access to all these jobs, or how?

Yeah, that was one of the opportunities that we saw. The founder, because now we have a five- -10 year view, right? But the people that we bought things from are founders who are trying to create a startup. Their view is six months to one and a half years. So you see them do funny things.

This guy had thousands and thousands of people coming to this remote job site, but he was charging them a $2 one-time fee to access the platform. So we bought that, and we just took off, that. We took down all the paywalls because we didn't really care. All we wanted was traffic that we can then funnel more products into in the future. So it's almost the reverse.

And what was, so you've got a blog, and then you've got the remote job website, where, and they're the two that you merged, right? First, yeah, plus a blog that we started called Freelancer today.

Okay. So you had two blogs and the remote job website. And how did you, what domain did you decide to put them under.

So what we did, we took the remote job board app and we put that under workshop.com and then in Next.js, which was what that site was built in, we made a blog infrastructure in there that basically read it from the other blog, the workshop blog, which was a WordPress blog and also then kind of migrated all the content over from our blog, the freelancer day one to that one.

At the end of the day, you have kind of this remote job site plus the blog. Then, in Cloudflare and stuff, we just made sure everything was redirected. You can do a really good redirect with a wildcard and stuff, so that really everything matched up. All freelance state, all went to the site slash this, all the workshop content went there.

So all the backlinks, everything that's already kept, were good. And then, everything was just nice and simple under one thing. So obviously, it takes time to get all that done. But once you do it right, it's less of a headache, right? Just one thing to mention.

Yeah. And so is it all under the one domain work strap? Yeah. Okay.

Yeah, it's out.

Yeah, cool. Now, so you've got all the traffic. What did you start to do with revenue? Because you didn't, you took your revenue away with that second one, the freelance job site. What did you start doing for revenue?

Well, yeah, mean, actually, one thing that's been interesting is we have a big focus on like advertising and newsletter revenue at the moment with the traffic and newsletters. just feel like that's a more fun way to. It's a more interesting way for to get to get revenue, mostly because your incentive is aligned with the audience. You know what I mean? Like, we keep people entertained. Get ad revenue.

Yeah.

So none of these sites had ad, including Wealth Awes revenueome, had like good ad revenue or newsletter revenue. And so what we did is we added a newsletter to a workshop where we took all of our data, and we would send a newsletter,ewsletter and we still do once a week.

That basically shows the latest remote, known, highlighting the known of one company. And then we added like ads, banner, pretty simple bands on the top of each job post because these jobs start to get indexed by Google pretty quickly. And so we did some changes, you know, on the technical side of that, added the schemas and stuff.

So yeah, we made more Son ad and newsletter revenue than was ever previously made by the SaaS, $2 SaaS revenue, know, like hundreds of X. Again, even at this point, we're still just building up the traffic. And I wouldn't say that we've taken that to a serious revenue place that it could be, but that's like, so like all come in there, like into the traffic has gone from like a few thousand to, you know, 40, 50, 60 thousand.

Awesome. Congrats. so you so you've got ads. Are you also charging for newsletter subscribers? That's right?

No, we do. That's just ad revenue from newsletter subscribers, and just about ad revenue like cost per click within the newsletter.

For what news?

Within the newsletter. Okay. And you do have it on the blog post as well on the site.

Yeah. Yeah.

And then this will sort of merge into other styles of monetizing this stuff, because we effectively start to have a community of people who are looking for remote jobs. Then you can kind of go forward with flex jobs, where you then actually make this free for everybody, but then charge enterprise access to the database of those who are vetted. You know what I mean?

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's also affiliate revenue that's pretty good within that newsletter. Not so much on the site, but within a newsletter, which is really cool.

And that's where like Wealth Awesome, like Wealth Awesome is much more mature as far as like a revenue perspective.

Maybe we need to know what Wealth Awesoto me is as well, because we're going to refer to that later as well. So what's Wealth Awesome?

Yeah, so Wealth Awesome is a Canadian personal finance site. bought it from a... Actually, it's exactly the kind of site I was looking to build. One of my friends, with whom I used to work a few years ago, one of the companies that we're working for got acquired, and we kind of went our separate ways. went this whole startup route with a few different things before I ended up at East Analytics.

He traveled the world and started this as a finance blog. And as a way, we kind of came back together after a while, and he was looking to exit, to exit, and I was looking to buy this, and somehow it just magically worked out. It basically was a finance blog, which had product reviews, of the best ETFs and stocks to buy in Canada, like that kind of stuff.

Also had a pretty good growing a YouTube channel with about, I think, 10,000 subscribers at the time, 50,000 subscribers, and sort of like a really bare bones newsletter with 2,000 people on it. And so we thought pretty good opportunity because that one was right in 2023 when Google started doing all the helpful content updates. And all of these blogs are relying on SEO traffic.

Like they had their traffic slashed by 90%. Right? Anslashed on my side, I'm like, hey, these guys are all suffering. They want to get rid of their stuff because they didn't really build anything else. For me, looking at them, like, there's no newsletter, er, there's no social.

All these other channels are like underutilized. Like, once again, if you have a bit of a long-term, more long-term perspective, like five years, you're like, you can take this and turn it into something big, right? You're just taking the next like, you know, one, two months, that's not going to be a fun time.

You're just going to be fighting Google. But if you just eliminate Google and look at everything else, anyway, that's what happens to it. I ended up needing it for him for basically one time's revenue at the time. It's a lucrative space because even just from an ad perspective, you're tier one. North America, finance, content, you don't need that much traffic to do some cool stuff.

Yeah, it's cool. didn't know too much about this part of your story. And I'm really glad that you've come on and shared that you bought a share of content sites after like the helpful content update that has been absolutely obliterated and bought them for cheap. People just wanting to get some money wanted their business, which had been failing. And then you turn around and merge them in and build out a whole company with a bunch of these sites, and like, it's not like you've gone and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars, right?

You've gone away, and you know, 10 to 20K, like you said, wealth awesomeness, you know, more than that, five to six times. Yeah. It's really cool to see that you've built this out of the destruction of what has happened with organic traffic and Google.

And because a lot of people are listening, going, okay, like this, can be done, you know, when people had just run away from content, whereas you ran towards it and saw a massive opportunity where most people see just absolute risk. But as you can, as you can, as you've shared this, it's been great for you, you know?

We've made back our entire investment in Wealth Awesome in the first nine months. It was like, yeah, it was Iod from there. It's actually, and I mIt's obviously helps that I am a developer now. I am a self-taught developer because I come from the finance world originally.

So, you, obviously, with some of the work, in this kind of stuff, I did put significant money into, like paying for the right designer to come on board. You know, if you look at your brand now, it's like when I talk to people, like, oh, it looks like this is the team of 50 or 100 people behind there because we're looking to compete with...

I never thought that I would actually go into the publishing space, but now we are like, you know, we have the data and infrastructure and programming and stuff behind us to like compete with like newsroom teams, you know? I think that, you know, I have an idea of who I want to acquire this like in five, three, three to five years. I love that.

And so what are you doing now in terms of content production? Are you doing now, eating like it's a pressing space with Google, know, overviews now, and AI traffic. What is your content production sort of schedule?

Great, really good question. And I have some really cool things that have happened over the last two weeks as we go to this. Basically, okay, so our traffic is still significantly down. Our Bing traffic is significantly up.

And of course, know, Chanty BT and Perplexe and all of them kind of use Bing on the back engine of their search, right? So we've definitely been doubling down on Bing. Then we have taken...The newsletter was something that got sent once every other month or something with the old earners.

We've taken that to build that into a real newsletter. So we publish a topic on Tuesday, and a weekly market update on Saturday. We have never missed a day since we started. So I think we're on like an 80-week streak, know, Beehive now. So this kind of consistency. Yeah, yeah. And this has actually built, excuse me, a good community around us. So we've taken the whole site and kind of really geared it to push there because through the newsletters, we're future premium products.

Two a week for 80 weeks.

We have good deals and affiliate links and that kind of stuff that goes through. Anyways, so on the content side, what's been nice as well is we've taken our YouTube channel from 10,000 to 30,000, just about 30,000 subscribers now. It's been kind of fun, too,o because we started to figure out different content, different niches, and that's just a whole other channel, right? That's a thing.

Thanks for watching the YouTube channel.

We've taken this entire event from face to faceless. Wow. Because I'm too lazy to be in front of a YouTube, in front of a camera on a week-to-week basis. will not find me doing, also know that you want to exist in five years or ten years, you keep us in dependency.

Exactly.

Absolutely. There are a couple of other Canadian sites that have been looking to acquire, which are now face brands, and I do think this is a really cool opportunity for anyone who even does TV, because there is a school opportunity to take a face brand and turn it into a faceless brand.

I just want to pause there and just say I love your outlook on it, where people will go, no, I can't buy that because it's a single person's dependency on this brand. Whereas you could buy it for far less, like you're looking at doing probably, and then turning it into a faceless brand.

Yeah, you might lose some people, but if you play the long game, as you said, which is what you should be doing when you're investing, you can really win.

Absolutely. And it also becomes a good leverage point in a negotiation with anybody, right? Whatever you're telling me here, I'm going to take 40 % right off the top for the fact that this is your face here.

Right. How can they, how can they deny that it's every person is going to know that that's a risk.

Exactly. Right now, we've also been, like I said, you know, never, initially we built this for distribution. So let's get all this traffic, and then we're going to funnel some kind of product into this, right? Like some kind of premium product, premium newsletter, whatever.

But what was interesting is that I started to, we started to make really good ad revenue, and it was making good ad and affiliate revenue before. What we did was like, there were 30 affiliates. We just took that all down to like four or five core ones and just simplified everything. And the cool thing about that is that the traffic has been in good ad revenue and good affiliate revenue.

And I found that really fun because, you know, and the other side, you're always kind of convincing somebody to sign up for your product and go into the product and like just that full conversion flow. But I found it really entertaining to like send a newsletter and get people to the site and enjoy the content they're on there, and the ad revenue is ther,e and then they come back next week, you know, and I just thought this whole last year is just being like, hey, this incentive is so aligned Like, I can entertain my audience, they keep coming back and they say subscribe.

And that's just like repeatable ad revenue that is actually pretty lucrative, which I'm like, that's so nice. I don't even need to build a product if I don't want to. feel like I'm 100 % on the same side as my audience.

Yeah, absolutely. An idea for you is what I share with a lot of people in terms of adding a product: you don't need to know what that product is. You can literally send out a newsletter poll and just be like, where, like, what are you guys striking with the most? Because maybe find somebody who can help you with this.

Then you create a partnership or create the product yourself. It's, you know, like they're going to tell you what they want. When somebody is on the newsletter, high trust within your brand, they're likely gonna pay for your help.

Exactly. And this is like, I don't know if you market it max on Twitter at all. Good guy. Really, really great guy. I really love his marketing stuff, but he has a sponsor called the SD funnel, which is like the funnel today is not, you know, ads and buy my stuff. Get the newsletter, get people in, you know, and just build that high trust and go.

So, back to your content thing, one thing we started to do is kind of go into kind of news publishing, you know, like Google Discover, Google News, and like other kinds of more high-volume publishing, because a big part of my background is data. And so there wasn't really that much data on the site, but we've brought in like, I have all these data pipelines that run every day, that have been in the news, stock data and prices, and all that kind of stuff.

know, our content is our content, our page is that kind of stuff, or, know, increasing by the thousands every month. And so what I've built now with my team is this concept called the newsroom, and it's our own software in here, which kind of pulls in events, and we talk about our own price changes, stocks, and that kind of stuff.

So what used to be like one or two articles a day, even just like two months ago, now my team, two people, one can go in, and they have this kind of newsroom with stuff that's happening. We built kind of an AI generation engine that is based on our data, as opposed to like, Hey, you know, not touchy-tee, give me an article.

Okay, here's the article, and here's all the context. Here's like our data context, price context, and chart context, and all this kind of stuff to build something kind of really refined. So that allows us to take our velocity up to 20, 30, 40 if we want per day. And we did the same thing on the video side.

So I've just started rolling out, still early days here, where we have kind of a generation engine that uses, I forget, re-motion the React package, but we can actually pull in all of our stock data, and we've made these flexible templates that can actually start to create the explainer videos and the shorts and that kind of stuff.

Using our data, charts, and animations, it's like uniquely ours, not like the, you know, generating a video with like random cut scenes and the AI video. This is more like, oh, here's like, here's a chart with animation, here's the stuff, and exactly. And so this is my thing. I want to compete with the monthly tools and these guys and see if we can really step on their toes so that they can acquire us later. We can eat their lunch over the next year or two. That's ultimately what I'm going for.

That's awesome. Yeah. It's really cool to see what you've built and are building. There are probably other acquisitions, I would say. And I think you mentioned that in an email, that there's been some that you have looked at, or asked and maybe bought,t and that didn't do so well. What, what did that look like for you in your acquisition process? What is your style? How strict are you on due diligence? What are some of your key metrics that you're really looking for? What have you learned? You know, so many questions in there, but let's just take that conversation.

Yeah, good question. Mean, I had an acquisition conversation like two weeks ago that I said no to. Was this guy? I like to look for products that are being built with love by their founders. And so you can kind of always tell when a founder is protective of their work, and they really did put in the time and part and soul and energy into creating something, because it shows, it shows in the product.

You know what I mean? And I'm okay paying a bit of a premium for that, especially now, where it's like, you know, I don't typically make acquisitions that are larger than like 50,000. So my acquisitions are usually in the 10 to 30, 40, 50, orf say it. So typically, that founder has either run out of money or just turned on the light here. The founder has run out of money, run out of steam, the board has realized it takes more effort to market the product than they thought, your first time builder.

Those ended up being the kind of people I'm like, I can spot really well, and I can see that, okay, that's what's happening. So this guy had actually built this really great financial platform with all the stock charts, all the earnings metrics, transcripts financial dashboard. And so he had listed it for 10k, emailed him directly because it was on one of those random marketplaces.

He responded, saying," Heyy, that price doesn't really work anymore. But, you know, I'd rather go for like 20k or something. So we had to call. I really liked the product. And the first thing I kind of checked is Ahrefs to look at the domain authority because usually I'm looking because I can kind of build anything these days, right? So if you're just running a platform, I'm just applying domain authority, and yeah, you can build that content pretty fast.

I want to see if it's a stack that I'm familiar with and how they set it up. This one would have cost an additional five or six hundred bucks to run. I could have probably gotten to run like a hundred bucks, but it was built really nicely. It would have been the perfect thing to skew horn into Wealth Awesome as a premium product. To be like, oh, here is Wealth Awesome premium, the platform here automatically, here's another 40,000 pages. I was super, super seriously considering it, and actually, I'd even said, because he actually wanted more time. I had said, I move pretty fast.

So if I see all that stuff in the checkout, I'll make an offer within 24 hours, and from all these acquisitions, I can imagine I got my templates, I got my legal stuff, and I got all the sheets in process for that. So I can get something closed within 24 hours if we really want. One thing for me, I can move super fast, and I'm the developer as well, so I can integrate everything as well myself.

So in this case, what was interesting is he actually, I said, if you can agree today, I'll pick it up for like 15 grand, like done, like I'm down with this. And he's like, I need more time because I have another conversation. As we said, in the four or five days that happened, I did my own research. like, you know what?

Actually, I can probably build the specific parts of this that I need. It's already working with the data infrastructure I already have, which costs like a hundred bucks a month. And I'm like, think, you know what? I think I'll just build what I need.

And so when he reached out, I'm like, you know what, I really got too far, and I did end up building my own version of it within my own site for my purposes. I would have taken it that day.

Like if you had said it, like I was ready to wire the money and set up the agreement. But yeah, it's funny even for yourself, like you have a few months to think and everything sort of simmers down a bit.

Sure. So that's one that you've passed on. What are some of the ones that you have bought? Have you bought any that haven't worked out,t and what are some other key metrics that you looked for during your time?

Yeah, that's a question. think for me, is mainly like, so yeah, those are really the two things I look for. It's the domain authority and the love that's been put into the product. So I really like looking for that. Mean, it's a little bit, that one might actually be just a little bit less these days.

Cause I'm, you know, some of the ones I made that didn't work out, which I'll talk about in a second. That's like, we're talking like, you know, like a year and a half ago, like the AI world. So these days, you know, I think generally what you're seeing is like really good products, but like no domain authority.

So yeah, there's a couple, there's two, there's two things I bought that haven't worked out yet. And I've kind of purposefully shelved just so I can focus on the last little bit of what I've done, which is I've, you know, with this whole co-op, a bunch of different stuff, I've actually narrowed everything down into like the two things that make 98 % of the revenue. And I've just kind of shelved the rest. There's still work, they're still there.

Correct.

But that actually brought like, so, you know, we talked about this financial ecosystem, and we talked about this kind of freelance remote work ecosystem. The third ecosystem we were looking at was kind of like the SaaS, the hacker SaaS kind of ecosystem. So I picked up a blog called SaaS Right.

It's been like eight or nine grand on it and had really good domain authority, affiliate, affiliate stuff. Like that, the founder really put a lot of love into it. As you could, you could just tell, I could just tell just by how much he, uh, like it should have that.

It should have been like a $5,000 purchase. He had spent so much work paying each thing that it was not worth it this time. And I'm like, okay, fine. Like whatever. So I bought that, and we put some effort into it. And then there was another guy who I bought something called a product kit that he started, which is kind of a way to, it's another version of like a testimonial to where you can get people to, you know, add your testimonials and that kind of stuff. And you can kind of showcase them on your site.

And so I acquired these two and actually one of them was, he actually was the designer of Wealth Awesome. So he's another person who shows that love in his product. It's just so, you can just tell that like it's, there's care, and it just looks, feels different. I love that because I'm not good at that. Like, I can put stuff together and make it work, but I'm not like a detailed guy. So I don't take that extra step.

I just can't be bothered, right? The idea was like, okay, let's have this SaaS blog and platform and do the same kind of thing, right? And these two are both there. They don't make us that much revenue. I haven't had a chance to take them too far. So for now, I've shelved them. They do fit the domain authority thing. They do have the traffic, but Wealth Awesome has just gone too far.

Our workshop has just gone too far. And so I've realized over the last little bit that I've been spread too thin. And so I'm really trying to just concentrate on things that are working really well. Push this forward.

Maybe I'll get to that later. Maybe I won't right now. As I said, it's just the error running in the background, but nothing happens to me. So I'll consider them a failure for now, but double down on what's working.

Yeah. I don't see it as a failure. Like I've had the experience of this before, where something else has just taken off and needs my time and attention, and it's done really well. And I found more fun, enjoyment, and ROI from it. And I'm like, that's this other thing. The second business that I bought was one of the best businesses I ever bought,t ROI wise.

Got my money back within seven months. Everything else was just like free money. I had started like this, a company buying an online business, and it just skyrocketed. Just took off. It was making a ton of money. And yeah, I was just like, why am I enjoying this, like this other business, like I've got somebody else running it, but it just got neglected a little bit. And over time, it just degraded because I didn't give it the attention, and that was totally okay. Like that's just the way it was supposed to be. It's, it's the price. I guess it's the price of success.

Philippe.

It's a portfolio effect. like, you know, I say failure as far as, yeah, it's the portfolio effect of things. It's just, and it's kind of funny because again, going from, I even canceled a bunch of other partnerships I was part of, and like, I would say my life is the most FUBRE concentrated it's ever been.

And what's so funny is like, you remove 20 hours of commitments in a week, 10 hours of commitments, and then you focus on a couple of things, so time doesn't necessarily go by. It's now it's like, oh, here's a whole other universe and layers that I didn't get a chance to get to on my big ass Trello board for the team that has all of my herobrine ideas. know, now we can actually execute on which is, which.

So I'm fascinated. Where did you find most of these businesses?

Good question.

I've seen a couple on MicroAcquire, although that was kind of early days. These days, they kind of focus on a few bigger ones. I know on Flippa, there's a couple that have come from there, so one's Lil Exits, or I think it's called something else now. So, and then in some cases, it's also just being founders I reach out to directly.

And so on Twitter or something in that kind of community, when you see people building stuff, I'm kind of always, you know, now and then, as I'm in that ecosystem, I do send out a bunch of emails here and there to be like, Hey, this, uh, yeah, this is cool. Like, you looking to sell or I got a bunch of people who don't want to sell or who are afraid to sell, uh, especially those Canadian financial blog space.

Like it's going to a large transition. I'm always kind of messaging all the people. It's me. I'm like, do you want to sell now? Like, you sell now? Like, you still want to sell? Uh, and so there are those kinds of conversations. So I think it's kind of just always been on the hunt, and I'm always interested to see where things are, especially if they're kind of content and random distribution and stuff that's unique.

I also have another kind of paid-inn platform that fell through, and that was interesting because the founder put so much love into it and, as a result, was not willing to accept a price that was commensurate with it. He was at like $20,000 for an awesome-looking thing that had two users, and I was at like 10,000, and we just couldn't make it work.

That's fine. Yeah, you get that. When there's, can't meet in the middle. That's the only way a deal happens:s when two people meet in the middle, and both people are happy to execute. Yeah.

But for somebody looking at buying content sites now in this world, what advice would you give to them as an acquirer in terms of AI due diligence, long-term thinking? What sort of advice would you give to somebody looking to acquire?

Yeah, I think you've got to look at things from like a brand perspective. So I think to myself, our brands, brands, domain authority reach in different domains. This is the stuff that AI cannot replicate overnight.

This is the stuff that lasts, right? So if I'm looking for a content site, obviously, I definitely am not going to rely on SEO these days. Maybe you do find something that's doing well, but I just prefer right now it could be doing great. It could be amazing. It could be the best thing, right? But that is not where I'm going for my valuation. going to look at a site that's doing well, that has got some traction, that has found its little pockets of niche, and has underutilized a few channels.

So that's the key thing I'm looking for. This person did great, has whatever, multiple thousands of followers on Twitter, and they have good stu,ff, and they're indexed by Google nic, el,y, and they got some good backlinks and people referring them, but they've left Facebook alone, and they haven't explored TikTok, and YouTube has not been explored. you know, there is no newsletter.

Where can you take this and put in that additional reach and systems around it? Like, now really create something powerful because I find that these days you really just have to stay where the puck is going. Right. So like we are constantly experimenting on content on Twitter, on Facebook, on Google, on whatever and see which one works and continuously double down. like right now, YouTube has been a great channel for us. Google's whatever going like five, 10 % here, but like our YouTube channel, we had like a short that got 25 million views last week or like a couple of months ago. we were like, I was shocked.

We were being on YouTube, like refreshing the page. Every time you refresh, the number goes up by like 2000. I'm like, Holy shit. It's possible. Right. Like, I would never have said that's possible, but to see that as actually being possible. It's like, yeah, everything's still.

And that works. think like I think all of systems work, but you just have to find the right challenge. That takes a lot of experimentation. If you're buying something, the fewer channels that are utilized with some success, I think it's right.

I love that. I love that you shared that because there are so many content sites out there, not doing newsletters, not doing socials, not doing YouTube. And as you said, it's a massive opportunity, and I'm glad you used it and ran with it. And Hugh, thanks so much for coming on. Where can we send people to find out more about you? Should we link to Wealth Awesome and your LinkedIn, or what do you think?

Say right now, if you want to follow me, reach out, that kind of stuff. I know we just talked about socials, but I don't want to just socialize on social media these days. can scroll to me. I probably wouldn't scroll to you. So yeah, find me on LinkedIn if you do want to figure out more about me. Then yeah, check out Wealth Awesome, more so to give me some traffic and send Google some signals that my pages will not bounce up. That's all I can ask.

I love it. Love it. Yeah. Congrats on what you built. It's really cool, especially at this time, to see it's working so well for you. And yeah, thanks for coming on and sharing. Really appreciate it.

Awesome. Thanks to me.

Thanks. Thanks, everybody, for listening, and I'll speak to you on the next one.