Ep 388: 8 Figure Exit, 19M Users, Zero Ads, All Content – Here’s The Playbook with Seph Fontane Pennock

What I've always experienced is that organic visitors can be worth ten, twenty times more than just Facebook clicks. right. So it's more durable if you do it right. Then yeah, I mean we were getting two million organic visitors per month with a possible psychology account. If we had to advertise to get the same reach, we would have to spend three million a month, you know, with a dollar and a half cost per click or something.

Hi, I'm Jaryd Krause, host of the Buying Online Businesses podcast. And today we're speaking with Seph Fontan Pennock. He's a serial entrepreneur and eight-figure exit founder who built positivepsychology.com from a personal blog into one of the world's most visited mental health platforms serving over 19 million users.

He grew it to a peer acquisition without spending a dollar on ads and relying purely on SEO and content-based strategy. And post-exit, he co-founded a SaaS platform, Quenza, and he's since launched another business, regenerator.com, and he just recently acquired psychology.com.

And in this podcast episode, we talk about his exit, what he learnt from his exit in terms of tax implications and legal implications. We talk about what sort of offers he said no to and why he set his business up the way he did.

We also talk about his first-ever acquisition back in 2011 for a few thousand dollars, all the way up to him doing an eight-figure exit, and what he's learned on both sides of buyer due diligence and seller due diligence, where he shares things that you should be looking out for.

We also talk about what he's thinking about when he's building businesses to prepare them for an exit if he does want to exit further down the track. We talk about running ads versus content. We talk about an email list. He also shares his content creation strategy in the world of AI and how he's thinking about building authority and brands in an AI traffic world.

And with Google and Zero Search, or Zero-Click Search, and all that sort of stuff. We also talk about what he's going to be moving forward to next. The main thing that I think is fascinating is his content strategy in this AI world. And there's so much value in this podcast. Of course you're going to love it, but if you're here, you're probably looking at acquiring a business, obviously.

But don't do this with a lot of risk. I want you to decrease your risk of buying a lemon by going away and getting my Judah and the framework. It's free. There's a link in the description. It's what I use; it's what my clients use. And it's not only made people millions of dollars, but it's saved people millions of dollars.

So check that out. Let's dive into the podcast.

Seph, welcome to the pod.

Thanks for your time.

Yeah, it's so good to have you on.

You've done some really cool things in the online business space. What, firstly, sparked you to get into positivepsychology.com and online businesses versus maybe other assets or investments or traditional businesses?

Jaryd, thanks for having me.

Yeah, just blogging out of interest, I would say. Found a course, actually- well, back then it was like torrents and stuff like that- on how to blog and how to build a w build a WordPress blog, and I got really fascinated by it.

So I just started experimenting with that, and I built I built my first website about self-discipline and building discipline was called builddiscipline. com. I no longer operate it, but that was my first guinea pig website. And then I also bought a website on Flippa about apps and technology.

And made a lot of big mistakes, got hit by Google Panda and Penguin and what have you, all the algorithm updates, and kind of, yeah, learned SEO and websites and blogging the hard way in the beginning. And then I got really fascinated by the topic of positive psychology, and I figured, hey, why not build a w website around that? Because there were no online resources about it at all at the time.

This is two thousand thirteen. So yeah, I started building a website, got some help from people on Facebook groups, guest authors, guest contributors to the site, and gradually started scaling it with the primary method, and that's always been my number one acquisition method of SEO, doing keyword research, pu publishing a lot about these topics, and kind of growing organically.

Yeah, cool. I didn't know that you had acquired Flipper. When did you do that? When was that? What year? Do remember?

That was two thousand eleven, but this was like a yeah, but back then it was a lot of money for me. It was like a couple of thousand dollars, you know. And I bought it from, like, an ex-military veteran guy who'd been building the site for a decade. And I think I managed to completely decimate the traffic profile in a matter of a couple of months.

Was that due to your fault, or was that really like pan?

Yeah, that was like that was good, the algorithm. Otherwise it would probably also have gotten hit because the whole business model was just allowing other people to guest post on the site. And what you get as a result is like a really thin content site with just like kind of like crappy content that's just there for the links, right? So I learned back then that you really want to build something valuable and sustainable and be in it for the long run.

And have a proper business model as well in a way of monetizing the site.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, my first business was a lot of my money as well. I wasn't didn't have that much wealth then. Fifteen thousand dollars in twenty fourteen for my first deal on Flipper as well. What did you have you bought any other businesses since, or have you just started and scaled?

I've bought domains, not businesses. Yeah. Yeah. Just domains. I bought positivepsychology.com because the website that I started was on a different domain, Positive Psychology Program.com, a relatively long domain. I was able to acquire that one, then redirect everything over. I have my business partner, nd I still have a software business called Quenza. We built that from the ground up.

And I have some other websites as well. Some I just play around with, and some are relatively new ones. One is called regenerated dot com. This is more in the health longevity space. And then since last week, and this is super exciting, I also own psychology.com. Yeah. Yeah, thanks. Thanks. I've been chasing that domain for about eight years as well and was finally able to buy it last week, actually, here in California.

Wow.

So I was willing to let it go after I stalked him for eight years.

Yeah. What was so you were so it was you're still contacting them for eight years to be able to get it. Are you able to share the price or the domain rating or authority, or how did you vet the thing, I guess, even?

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. On the price, I'll say I managed to get it for a lot lower.

than the seller originally wanted. He wanted seven figures, and I was a I was able to get it for a lot less than that, luckily. Cool. He reached out to me at this time, so he was probably in a position where he could use use the, and then we were able to close the deal pretty quickly. I flew over to California to meet him. Actually stayed a couple of days at his place. He invited me to just stay and hang out.

Which was incredible. And I kind of built a new website on it, literally from his place. So that's been an amazing experience. I've just been vibe coding, building content and stuff since last week.

So super excited to like get back in the game again, but then with the domain that I've always wanted. Because the progression has kind of been like positive psychology program.com, then positive psychology.com. That's the business we can go into that we ended up selling, and now a psychology.com. So every time I like dropped a word.

From the domain name. Yeah, that's pretty funny and cool that you go and buy like a six-figure domain and you stay at the person's house.

And actually built the website from their place as well.

I'm sure it would have been helpful doing that with him around as well. I'm sure it was a good, fun experience, and I'm sure you've built a friendship out of it now.

Yeah. We became fast friends, and he's staying on as an advisor as well. And he has a lot of experience in the field of psychology and assessments, and he's still working in that. So it's incredibly valuable to have him as an advisor with his network and stuff like that.

So yeah, really, really happy with how everything turned out. And it goes to show, yeah, sometimes you just have to stick with something and stay persistent. And even if it's like for eight years.

Absolutely. can your persistence i is is important, and consistency. With the sales of positivepsychology.com, you've sold that now. And you sold it on FE International, did you?

Yeah, yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Through a fee.

And so I know that you got a lot of offers. What made you say no to some, and what were the ones that you liked and why versus maybe more money or?

Right. This was in the summer of twenty twenty two. We created the brochure and started getting some offers in. And I remember the range of offers was pretty wide. So we were able to let go of, like, the bottom liket, like, kind of to drop them right away. It's like, that's never gonna work.

They're never gonna get close to this range that we were looking for. And some of the others had contingencies or like very extensive earnouts or more like a fifty-fifty cash upfront, cash later kind of thing that wasn't that appealing to us. So yeah, there was kind of one offer that really stuck out, and we were able to enter negotiations with them and luckily also end up closing with them.

Yeah.

Cool. And what sort of made you decide, okay, I wanna I wanna move on from this? Like how do you how did what was the timing for you like in terms of like it's it's it's right to move on from this and sell it? Like what went to your head?

Yeah, it was a couple of factors. I remember I did a LinkedIn post about it back then with our reasons for selling. One of them was that we were kind of doing more of the same thing and had been doing that for a couple of years in a row.

There wasn't much personal growth for my business partner in it and me anymore. Like, okay, we know this trick. We know that if we keep on doing this, we're gonna get these results, this kind of growth rate.

And it's kind of I don't wanna say yeah, it got a little bit boring, right? We weren't really developing ourselves as entrepreneurs or as persons anymore through the business like we had been in all the years leading up to that stage.

Another part of it was that we saw AI as a threat already coming because everything that we were doing was content-related, and we were like, hey, if it's gonna get really easy to create content, not just on the SEO part, but also on the product part, that may be a huge threat.

So maybe the right time to sell. And I don't think that my business partner and I had what it would take to bring the business really to the next level in terms of revenue and growth. We were like, we kind of like we've applied everything that we know how to do, and maybe it really requires a completely different, like go-to-market sales strategy or something to take it to that next level.

But that's not a skill set that we had back then. So all of that combined and then combined with a good offer, of course, right? Which is okay; that doesn't come around all the time. I personally think that when a good offer comes, you really need to take it seriously because they're rare.

Yeah, cool. So did you get an offer before you decided to list with FE International?

No, but they were able to offer us, like, yeah, no fee, you know, let's just enter this process and see what comes, like ano-curee, no pay kind of deal. And that was really attractive to me. Otherwise, I don't think I would have done it. I wouldn't have, like, paid them to go and look for offers. But I think them taking the risk to enter that process with us was extremely helpful.

Yeah, yeah, cool. Yeah. So you mean by broker side there's no, no six, only success fee, really?

Yeah, exactly. Success fee, but no fee up front.

Yeah. Cool. And I just spoke, I just got off the c phone with a seller as well. Just thinking of the timing of somebody or other people listening are like, when's the right time to, you know, sell your business? And it doesn't need to be timing. It could be like you said; you would obviously, a little bit, you know, like semi-mundane.

But, like, for this seller that I just spoke to as well. He was like, Yeah, I'm just spinning the wheels; it's working, but I'm good at the start-up phase, and I enjoy that more, and I don't know if I can take it to the next level. And it's really good to know, like, your place in each business operationally as well. A lot of my buyers are like, I want to buy something that's already got legs and a foundation and come in and use my energy to to grow it or to use it as a as a as a leverage tool for lifestyle.

Right. So it's really good to understand your phases and what you're good at. And it sounds like you know, with, you know, positive psychology dot com. You started that one, right?

Yeah, exactly. That was everything was like bootstrapped and and self funded that we've never done. We've never taken on outside investments. We've also never really bought something to grow. It's just all created out of nothing.

Yeah. Another, like sort of interesting question, and congrats on, you know, what you have created and the exit is: when you bought your first business for a couple of thousand dollars, learning how to do due diligence, you know, and being on the buy. What did you l like?

Obviously, psychology.com being a larger exit and acquisition, what did you learn, like, on being on the seller side versus the buyer side through due diligence? And what what what are some of the things that buyers should be aware of to look out for, or sellers should be thinking about when they're coming to a purchase or a or an exit?

Yeah, that's a great question. And there were a couple of different answers I have to that. One would be buy what you know. I think that's extremely important. I bought like a technology blog with like reviews of apps and stuff like that that I had zero affinity with, no interest in. I had no idea, like, how the website, like, really, I mean, it wasn't that complicated- but just I wasn't like feeling it or something.

It's just not a niche that I enjoy being in. I'm not a reader in that niche, where there was just a complete disconnect there, right? With that first websiteSo I I would say buy something, you know. Know that the domain psychology.com in my hands is worth far more than in the hands of t everyone else on the planet. And I say that coming from a place of humility, interestingly, because almost everything else in the world I probably suck at, but this is like one thing I know that I know how to do, right?

Like give me a domain like that, and I can build something beautiful. Almost everything else is like probably not gonna work, right? So yeah, buy what you know. The other part of it is like have a very good sense of what it is that you're buying. That first website, I, you said like I got experience with due diligence;e, I really didn't, you know, I just bought it and like kind of winged it from there. It's good to make those mistakes, of course, because then all of a sudden you've got this like this new website, the FTP details, and the domain upload area, and you have to like figure it out from there.

Yeah. Yeah. It's better to make the smaller fixes on the smaller deals. I'm sorry, the smaller deals, though.

Yeah, the other part.

Yeah, yeah, no, for sure. For sure. And then the last part, and that pertains more to the exit that we have, is that you have to be really, really clear on what's expected of you post-sale. And this is kind of like the biggest mistake that I made in all of like buying and selling businesses, is not having that complete, hundred percent clarity on what is expected of me.

Because we ended up with two and a half years of taking care of tax liabilities, paying VAT all over the world to co countries and tax officers all over the world. That cost us almost the entire amount of money that was parked in escrow for us. That was like our money essentially.

Half of that went to lawyer fees, to a law firm that they that they of their choosing, right? That was expensive. So yeah, that took a lot more time and a lot more money than we thought.

It would because we were like, half a year, you know, a couple hundred thousand maybe, and then it's done. It ended up being a lot bigger than that. So yeah, that was a big lesson learned.

So what do you mean they chose the lawyer that you need to use for the they chose the escrow service that you needed to use and the lawyer that you needed to use for the sell-side advisory?

No, no, sorry, that was not Sales Height Advisory. We had our own MA firm that we worked with- a really good lawyer and super happy with them. It was more that there were like tax liabilities that still needed to be taken care of because we had never paid VAT in every country around the world where we technically reached a threshold to knock on the doors of the tax office and say, Hey, we owe you this much in VAT.

And mind you, that's like sales tax. That was all sales tax that we didn't charge our customers. So also that had to come out of our own pocket. But how it worked, I later learned, is that a PE firm, like the firm we sold to, they have to be completely compliant when it comes to everything, right? That's that's like their duty to their LPs. Yeah, exactly. And they get audited.

So in order for them to be compliant and like pay sales tax to all these countries around the world where we reach the threshold to charge and hand over the sales tax, they had to have that relationship already with the tax office. But when you go to a tax office like that, and you say, like, yeah, can we owe you this much, the first question they ask is, How long have you been selling products in our country for?

And then you have to be honest with them, of course, because you're you can can't lie at that at that point. So then have to say, well, like pretty much for the past five, ten years, like whatever it is. So then you have to, depending on their verdict, ri basically pay sales tax over all of those years retroactively. That becomes very expensive. And that is kind of the situation that we were in. We had no idea that we would have to carry all of those costs.

Again, sales tax that we didn't charge our customers because we just charged zero. Because, starting, we just had no idea about how any of this worked, right? You just start selling products online, and it's like, what do we care? Yeah, that we exactly, yeah. And that we like sold for fifty K worth of product in Croatia or something and now have to like deal with their tax. It's completely absurd, right?

You don't have a lawyer on the payroll or in-house to take care of any of that. It's just impossible for small vendors. In Europe, they now have the one-stop shop, right? To kind of like take care of all of the EU co. But I mean, that's just Europe. There's a lot of other countries around the world.

We experienced that first hand, and it was pretty expensive; that was due to selling to a PE firm that needed to backlog all of that. But if you sold it to, say, somebody that was a buyer like yourself and not a PE firm, not having to report that, they could get away with it or not have to pay all of that tax.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's like you're just waking sleeping dogs, as we say in Dutch, right? Like no one would have ever cared, no one would have ever noticed. I bet ninety-nine percent of e-commerce guys never have this in order. Not at all. But indeed you s yeah, you sell to PE and then they then you have to have this in order.

Yeah. So would you I mean, there's so many ways I can go in this conversation. You mentioned you sold because you thought AI might be your thing, but also, you know, you got to a point that you didn't think you were gonna be able to take this take this deal to the next level or this business to the next level and move it on. As you've seen, as we've all seen, the internet has changed over the last four years, five years, with traffic, especially organic traffic.

Yeah. Obviously it was a great move. And now you've spent so much time learning keyword research and SEO and scaled positive psychology.com through content creation. How you how are you scaling Queenza through content creation?

You know, are you doing G E O A I E O for L L traffic and/or just looking for Google traffic? Zero-click searches and stuff are a thing now. So how do you see this landscape, and you know, yeah, psychology.com. I'm sure you want to build a bunch of content out for that now. What are you thinking about and how to grow a business organically with organic content or organic traffic? Yeah. You know, twenty twenty six, twenty twenty seven beyond, do you think?

Absolutely.

Yeah, I've recently been diving headfirst into exactly this. I'm no longer operationalln involved in. I'm just a shareholder. My previous business partner is running that business with more of a product-led growth strategy there, which means like being in really close touch with the users and just building what they want and kind of like growing from the inside out. With the other brands, like psychology.com, Regenerate, I've another brand called Fatfire.

More in the finance space, a community for high net worth individuals. This question is really relevant. What I'm doing, I mean, I still have the bias of I like to build profitable companies. I think giving all of your money to Meta and anogle that can that can be a great strategy. But I like to build brands that really become an authority in the space. And a part of that is having organic rankings and having people find you instead of doing interruption marketing where you just appear on their feed.

Because what I've always experienced is that organic visitors can be worth 10, 20 times more than just Facebook clicks. Right. So yeah. And it's more durable in the end, if you do it right. Then yeah, I mean we were getting two million organic visitors per month, the way the puzzle of psychology hascome. Yeah. If we had to.

Absolutely.

Advertise to get the same reach, we would have to spend three million a month, you know, with a dollar and a half cost per click or something, which is completely crazy. And this reach was just coming in every month again and again. And you build a mailing list, and now you have owned reach, right? Now you can generate your own reach just by sending emails. So that has always been the model.

The sell is significantly more than something that's a tenancy on paid ads, and yeah, it's just a much nicer company to run because it's a slower people aren't, you know, like you said, interruption marketing. People aren't. You're not going, Hey, have you thought about this? You should do this, let's force you to do it. It's somebody that's already thought about it, made the sale in their head already, and gone, Where is this? I want to go find it, and then you're there, right?

Yeah, yeah, and it's also a personal bias because I'm sure that if I was a really good media buyer myself and I was trained in that and that's just what I knew how to do, I could tell you a story, you know, that's the exact other side of the coin where I'm like, SEO is so slow and you can just scale much more quickly and all over the world and and and whatever, right? But this is my personal bias. It's like I like this; I think it's a more beautiful business. And that's also super important. I enjoy doing that a lot.

Right. I think the worst place on earth that I've ever been to is the Meta ads manager. It's just like the whole Meta back end is just a place I never want to visit again. It's the worst. They've got the worst support. Like, let this please be on record for this podcast. Anyone from Mata's listening, please please fix it because it's absolutely horrific. So I just, I just don't enjoy that.

And I know there's tools you can integrate that you technically don't have to be in the back end, but what I really enjoy is like creating valuable content, creating better content than the competitors, understanding search intent, understanding what do these people actually want when they're searching for this keyword, and then creating like the best possible content we can to match that intent, sourcing the best people around the world who have like most experience or authority when it comes to creating that content, that whole puzzle.

That whole game, that's what I enjoyed. And then it's like I used to play RPGs when I was a kid, and then you can just like look at analytics, and you can see your rankings increase or your DR increase. And it's that same kind of dopamine boost that I get from looking at those stats in HRES and Google Search Console and stuff like that.

It's just enjoyable for me. I'm really happy that we built a big team at some point, but doing all of this myself again. I'm just back in the trenches, and I can play around with these tools again. And to get back to your question, to figure out like, okay, how does GEO work?

Right. And I found yeah, it differs from SEO, but it's kind of the same game. It's just like a little bit of a different rule set that applies to it. But I also think it's a fun game. I've got three new brands that I can just start to play this game with and figure it out myself again. And luckily now, with you know with Clot, I can do so much more myself. I don't have to wait for freelancers or team members or build a big team or something.

I'm just able to have five windows open and run it all myself, and with a couple of freelancers from Upwork that I hire for really specific tasks. So much leaner, so much faster. And to me it's more enjoyable because the one thing that I absolutely hate, and this is maybe also why, so building software is not for me, is having to wait on people and having to wait on developers. It's just also not an enjoyable game to me. Yeah. I'm curious to hear your experience with that as well.

Yeah.

Yeah, I just don't like, like, I like to hire contractors to get a job done in a short period of time. I don't I'm not I'm not about like just having this product or this service that needs to be built out and taking a long time. Like it's just not; it's just not fun.

But I'm curious, Seph, what does the cont like, 'cause like how are you doing it today? Like, how, I mean, you mentioned you're using Claude, and you've got five different team members that do very specific tasks, and then you also mentioned keywords. Like, are you just are you doing keyword research and just creating amazing blog posts for those keywords, and the goal is to rank in Google and LLMs? And what does the pro like what does what does the process look like, like from ideation to finished piece of content? And what does it look like at scale? I'm just the reason I ask is somebody that's looking at, you know, buying an online business and wants to grow organically- what's been working for you?

Yeah, and I think in large part it's still the same as before AI and like before GEO, right. What you wanna do is you wanna map the entire search landscape. That's where it always starts. You just wanna look at all the keywords out there, and there's a subset of all the keywords out there that is relevant to your business, right? And then it's like concentric circles. There's one core circle that's like buy terms.

Buy terms intent. They're directly your customer actually looking for the product or service that you have to sell. It's a smaller circle. Circle around that, you maybe still have to educate them a little bit, but also very relevant to get these people on the website and on the mailing list. And then the circle around that is more in an informative intent.

They may at some further point down the line be interested, but those visitors aren't really worth a lot. The 80-20 rule applies, right? 80% of the revenue is gonna come from like that 20% of those search terms that people use to find your website. So you start to map that, and you use keyword research tools. You can use a whole, you know, wide array of tools, of course, to map all of this.

And now with AI, it's of course it's a hundred times faster and more accurate than it was before. Because I used to do this myself with Excel formulas in way too big spreadsheets and everything like that. VLOOKUPs, it was absolutely terrible thinking back, and now it's just like, you know, in one minute I have the exact result that I'm looking for, which is, you know, we're blessed with that, I still think.

Yeah. As much as the hype, yes.

Yeah, it's it's it is amazing, especially back to twenty eleven, now to twenty twenty six, fifteen years of now having AI and being able to create your whole content map with that. So once you have your keywords and you've got your content map, then you mention freelancers and other writers or experts in the space.

Do you go away and have, like, a brief of like how you want something written and what you want in it, but also have an ex somebody who's an authority in that space write that, and then you have it edited by an editor and then published. So what does it look like from the content that you create in keywords to publication?

Yeah, great question. It really depends on the niche and the space that you're in, because for regenerated.com, we're in the medical space. It's like the strictest kind of space that you can be in online, right? The ETH part of the Google algorithm applies. It's like your money, your life kind of niche. So what you have to do is I would say stay away from purely AI-generated content.

Definitely source two people per piece of content, one that writes it and one that reviews it. At least one of them needs to be an MD, and for psychology I would say at least one of them needs to have a PhD in psychology because why would you settle for anything less than that? You know, it's just an opportunity for your competitor to get a more credentialed person to sign off on that content.

Yeah, yeah.

It really depends per niche.

Websites that are not so much in your money or life, it's a lot easier. I think you can get away with just AI-generated content, programmatic SEO, and stuff like that. So building an editorial board, I think, is super important, and you either have people write it and review it, or you just generate content with AI; youI and you have people review it at least.

And what really helps is to insert something of their personal experience in the content. So you can literally have them, like, audio review the content, create a transcript or something, and insert a couple of quotes or snippets of, like, " Hey, in my practice or in my experience, I've seen a lot of this. That makes the content more human, and it adds a lot of value to the content. And have them just do an overall review, make sure that there's nothing in there that's wrong.

That's factually incorrect, or that's just hallucinated or something like that. And then update the content based on that.

Yeah, it's a really good idea is is is going to a a PhD, somebody with a PhD or an MD or somebody with some level of experience and if they're not an actual writer or don't want to write, you could just have them record their voice by answering a couple of questions and then adding a couple of stories in and showcasing some of their experience and expertise with stories.

And then you can take that transcript, and then you can have AI word it into, you know, a great piece, edited by a human. And then for the EAT piece for the site is you can have those PhD or D-qualified, experienced people on the site as on your editorial team and your content creation team that showcases that.

And then also you have each piece of content that shows up for L L traffic and for Google traffic as well.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. So that's how we do it, and it's kind of hard to do. But also the decision, you do have to offer these people something, right? It can be quite a lot of effort, especially if you have hundreds or thousands, or with one website we even have tens of thousands of pieces of content.

Like, how are you gonna do this, right? If you per article, the economics are just not gonna gonna work out there. So you have to get a little creative and offer these people something more than just a per-article price for review.

And I think having an authoritative brand and building an authoritative brand and a website really helps with that because there's the legitimacy that comes with that, right? The reviewer that's involved with us at psychology.com, it also looks good for them. Looks good on their LinkedIn, looks good on their website. They can get some referral traffic for their own private practice. So there's more in it for them than just, you know, twenty-five dollars per piece of content.

Yeah, for a doctor and a salary in the States. So do you provide links to their practice and their LinkedIn to help them build their brand? 'Cause that's essentially your USP for getting them, right? Is showing, hey, this is I've got a pretty good, solid brand. Yeah, this would be quite beneficial for your brand.

Exactly, exactly.

Yeah, absolutely. And that's good; that's a win-win because that's also good for the EAT, of course, to link out to their practice and, you know, maybe even the university where they studied that or where they got their specialization and stuff like that. You want all those links on those author pages anyway. So yeah, that's a big win.

So thanks for sharing all that. Aside from building a business and a specific online business, knowing that you're likely going to exit, other than creating a business that has mostly organic traffic, what are some of the other things that you do to build the business, knowing that you're going to set it up for an exit? Like how do you what are some of the things you think about or structure?

And get ready for an exit. Or is it just you just build it how you build it and then you think, maybe we can exit it now or I'm not gonna take it further? Yeah. Through your head.

Yeah. Exactly. So I've only done that once, of course, because I've only sold one business, but yeah, I start with the end in mind for the others as well. And one of the things that I do is I make sure that it's not a personal brand or that it's not a combination of like an authority niche site and a personal brand.

Like I will be there on the team page. Maybe I'll sign off on the marketing emails with my name and picture, but it's not a it's not about me. It's really about you know, psychology.com, regenerate.com. That is the brand; that is the authority. And I'm just the person, you know, getting the team together and b and building it and orchestrating everything.

But I never want to be, you know, like the talking head of the YouTube videos, and that's one of the most important channels. And that if we end up selling, it's like, yeah, but you're gonna stay on because we actually need you for the traffic here, you know, or for the brand. So I'm really mindful of that. Not just because, you know, I like being a background builder more than, you know, doing talking at videos, but also because of, you know, a potential exit strategy.

Yeah, yeah. Are there any other things that you think about as well? When you're building, and I mean documentation, OPs, of course, all the standard advice, super important. My business partner was always really, really good at that, luckily.

Because I kind of led the process of the sale, he made sure that all of the documentation was there, and he collected like fifteen thousand PDF files for us for us to to send them. Yeah, so yeah, th th those are those are the basics, of course. Yeah, I think the more you can build an asset.

That kind of like runs itself. And now with AI though, it's of course easier to automate a lot of these things; the easier it is for buyers to decide to acquire it, right? That's super simple. Yeah. So organic to mailing list, two automated email sequences that sell info products that automatically get delivered. Yeah, it's a super clean business model, right? There's no people there, yeah, it's maybe a small support team to help people over email, but that's it.

What about email marketing and email lists? Like, is that a big part of those businesses for you as well?

Yeah, yeah, that's been, I mean, the classical saying that I've grown up with in the online marketing world is the money's in the list, right? And I think it's still largely the case. I always like owning the reach more. So that with SEO that's partly the case, of course. It's not really owned, but it's definitely earned. But with the mailing list that's completely that's completely owned. And the more you can own the reach, the better.

That's just I'm convinced of that. And email and SEO really go hand in hand. I think. Yeah, just building, just the stupid, you know, traditional way of doing it. It still works; that's still, you know.

It's a boring way. Somebody finds out about you, they discover you, they get more interested, they get on your email list, you build the trust, the relationship, they end up buying from you. And the customer lifetime value only increases the more value you can continue to provide even after they purchase something from you. It's like it's the long game, right? And it seems like you're building these businesses for the long game, and that's what helps you get and if you're looking at exiting these, then good exits, really.

Exactly.

Right. Yeah, well, yeah, hopefully so. But I'm still here first, gonna enjoy the process of building them again. Especially with this one with psychology.com. I'm just really excited to build. But yeah, a lot of it is just do the stupid work, right? You know, you know what works, just do the basics right, and you're eighty percent there. And people get distracted by tools and by all these new methods, and I'm like, yeah, okay.

It's like somebody that's building an app on Claude to sell to the world, and they've got no audience. You're like, dude, what are you doing? Like you can build this thing, but they're not gonna come as they say. Like it's, and it's I I think it's a massive distraction and it's a massive business model for them, and it's really sticky and it's great for them for for L L Ms as a business model and but yeah.

Yeah.

Exactly.

Like the basic thing is like you need an audience to sell to, and if you don't have that, like your product doesn't- you don't have a product to sell doesn't matter 'cause you got nobody to sell to.

Yeah, a hundred percent. I'm convinced of that as well. I'm always like, if you generate the reach, you know, and build a relationship where you offer a lot of value to people, you can always plug in a business model, right? You can do ads, you can do affiliate, you can build your own products, you can do dropshipping, whatever it is, right? But it's first about establishing the brand and the reach.

So I always say, like, as a rule, in the first two years, you just focus on that; you don't worry about monetizing it at all. Of course, that requires you to be in a luxury position to be able to do that, right? To not immediately need to generate income from what you're creating.

But I like it because that way you're just focused on the value, and in the end it's the value that's gonna make sure that that you that there's something that ensues from the value, right? But to pursue it directly, the monetary gain, I don't think makes any sense. And especially not within those first two years.

Yeah, you've got to have, as you said, you're building brands, you're building relationships, and you're building trust, and that's the more somebody has, the bigger the brand is, and the more trust they have, the more money they make.

Yeah. Because whatever they sell, you know, it's gonna speak to the audience and help them solve their problems. So yeah, Seph, it's it's really cool to see what you've been building, and congrats on your exit, and I'm sure you're gonna continue building these things to be awesome, awesome products and yeah.

What do you think you would do you think if you were to sell outside psychology, if you were to remove yourself from Cleanser or Regenerated? Would you go and start something again, or would you would you think consider acquiring something?

I would consider acquiring something that I can roll up into one of these brands. Yeah. Definitely. That would be interesting. Like maybe smaller sites in the psychology, mental health space or health.

That's definitely interesting to me at this moment already. A lot of the websites that I'm looking at, though, have a very declining traffic profile, of course, because organic search has taken such a hit. So it's interesting to go about, yeah, how do you value that with like a probe?

With a graph that's going like this, you know? I'm not sure. Yeah, sorry you were like closing, but have you experienced that actually lately?

Yeah, no, it's a good question. Happy to chat on that. I've definitely experienced I've seen seen traffic trends go crazy with them posting or publishing hundreds of pieces of content, you know? Two hundred a month or whatever is something stupid. Look, the scalability of that is not evergreen. And it's if it's like, if you just look at the content and the brand, like it's not really.

I mean, you could do that at scale with like a lot of doctors and PhDs and stuff like that. You can get a lot going and spend a lot of money on building that out, but you're just going the volume route over quality then. I'm more about quality over quantity.

Yeah.

And then you see businesses that are diving off a cliff. Like what I think is a good strategy now is those businesses that have been massively hit by Google two, three years ago, and you see the last twelve to twenty four months, they're stable, they've stabilized, and you could value it based on the last twelve months and still, you know, roll in the link juice and the authority into the main the main domain, I guess.

And yeah, as yeah, but the SEO is around. Sorry.

I'm just wondering, like a lot of these sellers must not fully accept the fact that the valuation of their website or business has basically been, you know, like a third or something of what it was a couple of years ago, right? Have you experienced this? Because that's a hard thing to admit.

Yeah, I haven't experienced them not accepting the valuation because by the time they're ready to sell is when I'm I they I'm there, right? That's they're where they're at. They've already come to the conclusion that they can sell it and it will be a lower valuation. So I personally haven't come across that. I'm sure there are people out there that are still maybe holding on, but I think as the narrative continues with AI and search, and if you are seriously thinking that your s business is more valuable based on what it was two, three years ago, you've got bigger issues than your business.

Yeah, and good luck, good luck finding a buyer.

Yeah, yeah. Exactly. For sure.

But yeah, it's, but that's a strategy that could be worthy is looking at what is what sort of content is missing in your content structure in say psychology dot com or whatever business you have, and then go out and acquire those types of sites that are being hit, but you can buy the content that's got good EAT still.

Yeah, and the domain rank as well. Because for this strategy that we discussed, of course it's still super important, right? Like if you start with what two of the websites I'm starting with, starting from scratch, it's super hard because now you have to start building backlinks again like you would tw twenty years ago, right?

Yeah.

And then it's good to have something to invest and s some funding to get, like, great publications and spread the word and stuff, but bootstrapping is not my game. That's why I have a whole business around acquisitions. I mean, it's just a different strategy. You know, some people are better at bootstrapping and love it too, so yeah.

Smart man.

Yeah, I mean, and sometimes you have no choice when really starting out, you know, especially if you don't live in the US and it's not that common or easy to get funding, you know. Yeah. In the US people take that for granted. You can just get funding.

Well yeah, in Australia you can't do it. Yeah. Well, it's very rare. But yeah, Seph, it's been so good to chat. Thanks for coming on. I'm looking forward to seeing how the rest of your journey unfolds and how you scale out these new ones, and yeah, really stoked for you with your new domain. And thanks, man. Yeah, thanks for coming on, appreciate it.

Yeah, exactly.

Absolutely, and if you see anything combine any of these spaces do give me a note.

Yeah, absolutely. I'll just send them over. Yeah. What's where do you want me to link? I mean, we've mentioned so many businesses. Where should I just send people to your LinkedIn?

Awesome. Thank you so much. This has been fun.

LinkedIn and psychology.com or something; that's the main project for now.

Awesome. Thanks again, Seph. Everybody is listening. Thank you for listening, and I'll see you in the next one.

Awesome. Cheers.