Ep 156: [Case Study] What It Takes To Buy A Content Website In 3 Months (whilst eating a sandwich) with William

Jaryd Krause:

William, welcome to the BOB Podcast.

William:

What's up? Yeah, thanks for having me.

Jaryd Krause:

Man, it's so good to have this chat. I'm really excited for it. First and foremost, congratulations. Four more congratulations on buying your first site. How does it feel?

William:

Feels incredible.

Jaryd Krause:

Yeah. Yeah.

I want to open that up. I want to talk about the work you do. How much work did you do? How hard was it and all that sort of stuff? What should people be looking out for if they're first time buyers? But first and foremost, I want to ask, Why bother buying an online business?

William:

I mean, I love how, if you work an hourly job, even if you're a lawyer, your income is tied to your hours.

William:

I love the idea of putting in some effort, and the effort can scale for how much money you make. So if we, you know, scale this website well, then I can be not working and look at my AdSense account and there's money just coming in. We've put it in, and we've worked. but it's not tied to, like, how effective it is or how many hours my back is in a chair.

Jaryd Krause:

Yeah, cool. That's really good. Not how many hours you're behind in the share.

William:

Yeah. And the thing is, once we know something's working, we can just scale it. Like, there's no... If we can make something work, and it's making 100 grand a year, and we take it to 10 million, it's similar. It's different, but it's something similar. It's not like, if my job was to crack rocks every day, I couldn't crack 10 times as many rocks.

Jaryd Krause:

Yeah.

So, you're letting some of the secret sources out here. In terms of scaling. No, I'm joking. I'm joking. There are no holds barred here.

William:

Yeah.

Jaryd Krause:

You wanted to scale your income. You want to be able to scale your income, right?

William:

I want the chance to, Yeah.

Jaryd Krause:

Yeah, the chance to Okay, cool. And why? I'm going to keep asking the why, why, why question. I'm really curious. People will come to this space and be like, I want to buy a website or I want an online business, and they'll go away and try it, and their foundation of why they want something isn't rock solid or isn't like, I'm going to do this no matter what, like there's nothing getting in my way, which is what you really kind of need to have. Otherwise, when it's that, you know, when you get to a point where you're just like, I can't find something. too much due diligence. It's easy to just say, this doesn't work, and throw the towel in.

William:

Yeah.

Jaryd Krause:

So I want to ask, like, what's the core driver? Was it, A, that you wanted to make money online? Was it purely to be able to have the opportunity to scale? Was it a lifestyle or a future thing that you wanted? What was the main reason that you said to yourself, I'm going to make this work no matter what?

William:

Yeah. I guess at different levels, we could take this. I think one level is like, I love the idea that... If I can effectively acquire, manage, and grow a website, that means internally I'm becoming a more effective human.

Jaryd Krause:

Mm-hmm.

William:

Whatever you want to do in life, whatever good you want to see in the world, you can more effectively do it, whether it's using the 80-20 principle or seeing what needs to be done and breaking it down, whatever goes into being effective.

Jaryd Krause:

Mm-mmm.

William:

And the other one was that this can make a lot of money. You can internally change to be effective. And there's no reason this can't scale. or the skill set, or the character. And then also the business. I feel like, to me, the internal is the most important because if everything blows up or a war happens, I can still have my internal character and work ethic.

Jaryd Krause:

Yeah.

William:

Yeah, so I want to grow that and then put it into practice. I want to be internally effective and then externally pick something where it's really rewarded. And there is no reason for it not to be 100 times where it is now, except your working time.

Jaryd Krause:

Yeah, yeah, cool. So it sounds.

William:

I have big projects in the future. I have one or two big things, and those things will take someone who's incredibly effective and someone who has a lot of cash.

Jaryd Krause:

Yep.

William:

Projects in the future require that I become effective now, get more cash now, and keep going, and then I can execute on much bigger problems.

Jaryd Krause:

That's a really good mindset to have. I don't think that too many people answer it in the sense that you have a goal in the future, and to achieve that goal, you need to be a certain type of person, and you're working on yourself to become that certain type of person and using this as a vehicle and a tool, right? That's great.

William:

I could go make more money. If it were about the money, especially in the short term, I could go do something super tracked, but I don't like it. I could be a successful corporate lawyer after three years of school. But I don't think it's going to scale. I wouldn't really enjoy it anyway, and that's fine.

Jaryd Krause:

Hmm. Hmm.

William:

Like it's all useful across your whole life. Like focusing on what's working, doing less of what's not working. I mean, that right there is like gold.

Jaryd Krause:

Yeah.

William:

On the ocean of like, go to what's working, don't get bogged down in the weeds of what's not working, and be effective. I'm telling you, I'm 31. I can get so lost in the weeds, but if I had this rough North Star, like a ship on the ocean, I'd go to what's working.

Jaryd Krause:

Remember when I first started working with you, I remember having our first chat and just laughing. We just pulled so much because you're just a funny human being. And I was like, You have the best energy, and it sounds like you're doing a gazillion different things, and I want to take that energy. And if that energy gets pointed in the right direction, freaking look out.

William:

Good.

Jaryd Krause:

Yes, exactly. So let's talk about the challenges, I guess, that popped up for you. Oh, first and foremost, how long ago did you start on this journey? And then, yeah, how long did it take you to start researching it and then find me? And then when did you start working with us?

William:

I'm in it. Trying to be an effective human my whole life, being super interested in business, or wanting to start a business for at least 10 years.

Jaryd Krause:

Thank you.

William:

With that, for all 10 years, I became interested in this space. I mean, I was at the airport at LAX going to work on something else. And I saw this book about how to make money with no money. And it was really good. And one of the ideas was to buy something like Chrome Store apps or something. And like, I started trying to, like, buy these things, make them better, and then resell them or make money every month. and it was super difficult. So the idea was cool, but I was totally bogged down, and how do I execute on this?

Jaryd Krause:

Yeah.

William:

And then you popped up, I think on my YouTube, and I was like, This dude has the idea, the scalable thing. The thing that I find exciting is the scalability of it, not based on your hourly earnings from it.

Jaryd Krause:

Exactly.

William:

I had to do this, so you had the right place, the scalable place, like the right industry you were interested in, and then you had the way to do it, so I was like, yeah, and that was two months ago, two and a half months ago, I didn't know, three months ago, I don't know.

Jaryd Krause:

I think it was a bit longer. It might have been about three months, yeah.

William:

Okay. Yeah, I mean it is.

Jaryd Krause:

It was just around three months—maybe just like three and a half months, to be honest. But yeah, so.

William:

Yeah.

Jaryd Krause:

All right, cool. And then, basically, we just rolled out our sleeves and went to work, right? What, yeah. What was that like?

William:

I was going through those, and then I finished those, and I was like, Man, I need this to happen really fast. We need to get going. And I thought of you as someone who'd be really great to work with long term. So I was just like, Let's just go ahead and fully work together. It's been awesome.

Jaryd Krause:

So yeah, you join the Bob community, right?

William:

Mm-mmm.

Jaryd Krause:

And then you're like, All right, let's go fast, and you want some one-on-one help.

William:

Yeah, yeah, because if I didn't have one-on-one help from you, I would just go away slower and I wouldn't have confidence. And when you don't have confidence, every step you take is like, I don't know, I don't know. And then I'm like, I'd rather have confidence and quick action, and then we get stuff done, versus like slow, slow, slow.

Jaryd Krause:

Yeah. Just because I want to make it, I want to put a bit of a bookmark here for everybody listening. A lot of people join the, like, if you're thinking about buying a business and you're listening to this right now, and you're like, oh, let's just get, like, let's just buy, let's just call up Jared and or email Jared and just get, you know, do some one-on-one work with me. It doesn't traditionally work like that, does it, William?

I'm very selective with who I work with, which is not to say that I'm not going to work with everyone and a lot of people, but if you're interested in doing the one-on-one work, email me, but I need to pre-qualify you as well. You need to be right for the group; you need to be right for me; we need to be right together; we need to have a good relationship; and you also need to be in a financial position to be able to train.

Yeah, so you started, so you went through the course training, and this is what I suggest most people do is like go through the course training, learn it all, and then if you want the extra help, I'm there if it's the right fit in this space. What was the court like? Did you like the course training? What was that like? Did you have any big ah ha's or takeaways from that? Or was a lot of it from the one on one stuff and working together, I guess?

William:

I mean, I think the course training enables me; they give me the minimum vocabulary to interact with so that it saves us both time. If I don't know what you're saying, if I don't know the words you're using because I haven't done the simple but powerful, clear, and powerful course training, I won't know the words that you're using, and I'll just get bogged down and frustrated. So it's better to kind of do it, I think, and then it's valuable between us.

Jaryd Krause:

Cool. So what was the biggest challenge on the journey, do you think?

William:

I tend to think that the biggest challenge is internal. Everything's internal. If I let negative talk stop me from taking good actions, that bogs down everything. If I'm like, Oh, I'll, I forgot what I'm working on, I forgot why I was doing this website thing, I'm going to goof around with my friends for three days. So that's like, you're thinking something that's taking you away from the actions that lead to what? You really know what you want.

So that can mean getting distracted, being negative, or walking away from it. And you have to be like, Well, why am I doing this? Why, why, why? Let's go back and continue working on this. So I think it's all internal. I could say technical things, but the technical problems, issues, or all that can be overcome if your internals are good. But if your internal energy is lacking, then everything will stop you. You'll be like, Oh, the Ozarks are on. I can go watch Netflix. I'd rather look at Netflix than websites.

Jaryd Krause:

Who wouldn't? Yeah, who wouldn't? It's so easy and entertaining to watch Netflix.

William:

Yeah. I mean, Jared's great. But Ozark. I mean, Far more entertaining. Yeah. I think it's just internal. Whatever is going on internally that stops you from doing the right things, It's not good. Like, like, oh, I don't want to look at this website. I'm gonna go. I'm going to go drink a beer with friends instead.

If you do that 50 times, you've just killed yourself because, like I wanted my identity, I want to be like a business owner as somewhat part of it, and if I'm not doing the actions of who I want to be, then you feel terrible with that gap.

Jaryd Krause:

Yeah, for sure. And there's also this other thing, this complex thing that happens with us, of wanting to be entrepreneurs and wanting to get a result, and we'll do anything we can to get that, which is like what you've got that you spoke about is like you can do everything over time, right? The more times you go away and watch Netflix, you know, that compounds into a thing that it's like easier and easier and easier to watch Netflix and it's harder and harder and harder When you've got so much good energy like yourself and you want a result so bad, You want to better yourself and you want to do multiple different things.

What I noticed, and this happens to myself and so many other people, is that you will do the work, and then you'll go right. What else can I do? What else can I stack on top and do on the side, other than this? That's the worst thing that we can do, not the worst thing. It's probably the second worst thing that we could do after going away, after, you know, alcohol and all that sort of stuff. But it's still a bad thing to go away and work on something else because we derail our focus, which then takes us away from the result that we want.

And then, as I've talked about this with you and a couple of the other guys, the energy that we expend on these other things when we come back to the core important thing of buying a site, if that's our real goal and our main focus, we don't have the good energy to put into that. So we do it, in a sloppy way, and we're tired. So I remember talking to you and going, Do this work and then turn the internet off and leave the house. You said you were going to leave the house.

William:

You said something really smart, something else smart that, like, I now totally, or I more appreciate now, it'll take a lifetime, but I appreciate it like, you were like, in my mind, I'll be like, oh, I'm going to do 10 due diligence a day. And if we don't meet, then you're not having any fun with anybody. And like you said, what you do is set up this really high, hard thing, you don't meet it, and then you don't see people or do the healthy things you should in your life, and then you have this downward spiral.

And it's crazy because if you read any book, like Atomic Habits, we talked about this as one of the important things to do if you want this action to be repeated. If I wanted a dog to find something, I would give him a treat after he found it.

Jaryd Krause:

Mm-hmm.

William:

But when I'm like, I'm going to do 10 minutes of due diligence, that's like a bunch of treats; that's like hitting the dog a bunch. The dog doesn't even meet the goal, and then you don't let the dog sleep or have a toy. And it's terrible.

Jaryd Krause:

It's so terrible.

William:

So, yeah.

Jaryd Krause:

Yeah. And think about it. If you do one due diligence check a day and you're sending me five a week, that's ridiculous. That's a lot. Right. Like, that's still so much. And all you need to do is spend however long it takes you to do that due diligence. At the start, it takes a long time, right? Let's be real.

William:

Yeah.

Jaryd Krause:

How long do you reckon it took you to do your first due diligence?

William: Oh, my first one. I probably did it for like two hours, walked away and then the next day came back to it for like another hour.

Jaryd Krause: Good. Yeah. So sometimes people will take like three days and that's okay.

William:

Yeah.

Jaryd Krause:

You know, it's brand new people, and people are like, Oh, this is way too hard. But how long did it take you to do vigilance after, say, a month or two?

William:

Yeah, after a month or two of doing due diligence, you'll not only do the due diligence itself way faster, but because you've done semi-due diligence, you'll be able to look through 20 websites and know not to do due diligence on 19 of them.

And then quickly do that 20th website's due diligence in under two hours. I go slow because I'm like, I'm just gonna get it done. I go, I do it in like two hours. I've seen you do it in like 30 minutes an hour. I don't know. two hours but I like it was good.

Jaryd Krause:

It is good. And you know, the important things to look at. Um, and eventually you knew what you like, eventually you're getting close to be like, I know how to do this. Like you knew a good business without me needing to look at it, right? Which is so, so bad. And then that's the most important thing is like teaching you to fish rather than just going, here's the website.

William:

Yeah, and I mean, it was cool because, like, because we did the same thing every time together, the same due diligence framework, like I would start, I would make sure, like, okay, what did Jared say about the last thing, the last website? Okay, I will now look at those on the new website.

So I was able to absorb your thinking, and that way I wouldn't waste your time. And that's another great incentive. Like when I worked with you, I was like, I don't want to waste Jared's time. He's a guy; he's trying to go surfing and, like, grow his business. So, elements too. It's like having a coach.

Jaryd Krause:

Yeah, yeah. Well, and also, you know, those sessions that you're paying for, you don't want to just bring things to the sessions. Like, is this something that I really need to work on? What's the most important thing that I should be working on?

William:

Yeah, yeah.

Jaryd Krause:

So you mentioned AdSense before. I want to ask you, what type of business did you buy? Like, tell us about the business itself. Yeah, what sort of business do you buy, and then, yeah, go through anything that you're open to sharing about it?

William:

Yeah, yeah. I bought a content website. So the ad has articles on recipes for people to make. And then traffic comes to the website, and I have ads like Google AdSense. And I make money from those ads.

Jaryd Krause:

Cool. And so is it just ads on the site? And what did you like about this site versus other ones? And so is it just ads on the site?

William:

Is the revenue just from ads? Is that what you're asking?

Jaryd Krause:

Discharge, yeah.

William:

Okay, yeah, the revenue is overwhelmingly from ads. It's like 96% from ads and maybe 4% from Amazon affiliates or something.

Jaryd Krause:

Okay, and so tell me about why you like this website over some of the others. This will be very valuable for listeners.

William:

Yeah, why did I like it?

Jaryd Krause:

Why did you exclude so many other sites along your journey?

William:

Oh yeah, that's a good way to put it. Yeah, I mean, it wasn't at a high level. It wasn't trash. Like when you read through the website, when you click on it, you need to read through it. And if it's like... You know, really poor content has really low value if it's generic or copied, and if there's no traffic, I think that's another reason. If there's not a lot of traffic, It's not cool. Oh, we want to see upward trends. I like that about this website. It had a nice positive trend, and because I don't want to fix something that has a negative trend and has problems, I don't want to have to fight against the river. I'd rather have something that's working better and better, and then we just make it work.

Jaryd Krause:

I like the way you put it. I don't want to have to fight against the river. That's really good. Yeah, yeah, cool.

William:

And I think the price, like, I feel like, a lot of it is like, how much traffic or revenue can I get for how much, you know, for a dollar? And so I feel like this one had a good value to price ratio. I felt like I was getting a good deal. Yeah.

Jaryd Krause:

Yeah, excellent. Excellent.

William:

Thank you. Thank you.

Jaryd Krause:

What do you think was your favorite part of the journey? Or what did you say? I mean, we've talked about so many things that you've learned. But what was one of your favorite things, I guess?

William:

I think it's just satisfying. It's satisfying to have a goal and then work on it. It's really, really difficult at first, but you stick with it, and then you find yourself getting better and getting better results. I'll tell you specifically about the time when I sent you a good website because I would send you some trash websites and you'd be like, You don't want these websites for these reasons. And then I was like, Ah, okay, but then when I finally sent you something, you were like, Pretty good. I felt good because I felt like I was learning and growing in my ability to recognize a good website. So it's satisfying.

Jaryd Krause:

Yeah, that's really cool. Now, you know what? There's this whole bank of information that you've got in your head now from looking at bad and good websites, and all of the bad websites that you looked at were not a waste of time. It's actually bad value because you're looking at that and saying, This is what I don't want my website to have or be, and you know how you can avoid that now.

But also, the other thing is that when you look at a good site, it's like, Oh, what are these websites doing that makes them so good? And when you ask someone, like on your site, why the traffic's turning up, just go, Why is the traffic turning up? What did you do? They'll tell you exactly what you need to do to continue growing it, which is just, you know, there's so much value in the whole process of looking at those sites. And, yes, it's work; it is work, but it's an education at the same time. What do you think?

William:

Yeah.

Jaryd Krause:

What was your mindset around that?

William:

I mean, I think you're hitting the nail on the head. I mean, you just have to do... A wood carver has to carve 100 doors before he knows how to carve a really good door. Like everything, it will take volume to get really good. There's no way to know how to look at a website unless you've looked at hundreds or many hundreds of websites.

Jaryd Krause:

Hmmmm.

William:

I don't know another way to.

Jaryd Krause:

It's spot on. It's a site.

William:

I've got to do something a lot. Ha ha ha.

Jaryd Krause:

Yeah. Repetition, repetition.

William:

Yeah.

Jaryd Krause:

So congrats on buying a site!

William:

Thank you. Thank you.

Jaryd Krause:

what next? Like, what's the next step for William?

William:

To grow it. And I think you and I will get into the specific goals, but it's just to scale it. So that was the whole reason we liked the website model, or business model, or whatever, because it's scalable. So now we want to scale it. And it kind of goes back to what you were saying earlier. Like if you always flick between 50 different things, another way of saying it is, You never maximize anything that you have. So you're always trying to grab something, but you're never maximizing what you already have. So now I want what we have.

Jaryd Krause:

Yeah, awesome.

William:

Yeah.

Jaryd Krause:

And off the top of your head, and maybe something we've talked about before with this site, what are some of the things that you envision doing to grow this site? What do you think is going to help it grow?

William:

I think it's really great content. And I'm going through your growing your business training, and I'm like, Right, great content. That's a good idea.

Jaryd Krause:

Thank you.

William:

I think the danger is that you'll get stuck in the weeds. You're like, I'm going to work on this 10th most important thing. I'm going to optimize before I have a reason for people to come.

Jaryd Krause:

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

William:

It's like trying to build the dam before the river is big enough. Like, why would you have a huge dam on this little creek? You need to first make the creek huge and then try to capture more of that energy. But if there's nothing to capture, then you're just losing money and wasting time.

Jaryd Krause:

Yeah, yeah, that's a good point. So I wanted to ask you if somebody, one of your friends, said to you, William, listen to this podcast, and they were like, William, let's do it. I got to buy a website. What advice would you give them? If they were going to go through the same journey that you've just gone through? What would you give them? wisdom that you'd give them to look out for or be ready for.

William:

This is already happening. like adult friends, actually. I mean, yeah, I don't know why I said adult friends. I like one, and I think I'm an adult. I don't know why I said it like that. So one, two, or three people have literally asked me what you've asked and are asking about this, like actively interested in it.

Jaryd Krause:

Cool.

William:

Because they see the power of it. They're like, Oh, I can have my own business. I don't have to start my own business—this whole risky, huge black hole, or I can go ahead and get this business and then keep maximizing.

Jaryd Krause:

What advice would you give them, or what advice are you already giving them?

William:

I think, why is this going well, and why are these 50 other things that I've done in my life not going well? And I think it's one level it's having... I'm not trying to plug you too much, but literally having one person explain what needs to happen and teach you is huge. Like if I was trying to learn tennis, I could go read 50 tennis books, but if I have a tennis coach, you intuitively know you would do better with my roommates at tennis coach.

He's like, If you found a tennis coach, you just found it for business instead. And I'm like, yeah, that's, I mean, that's, that's the difference for me. And then from that will come 1000 other learnings, techniques, and ideas. But I feel like if I had to pick one thing to tell somebody to be fine, I'd find someone who's really excellent at doing that already and learn from them, whether it's in a religious setting, a business setting, or a sports setting. Like, just go to the best and learn from them. tell you what's up very quickly and swat away distractions.

Jaryd Krause:

I love it. Yeah, because it's not about me, it's just finding somebody who's done what you need to do and has done it for themselves and so many other people. I've been surfing for like 20 years, probably longer—maybe 25—I don't know. I've been surfing for a long time—almost more than two decades. And last year, I met a guy in the surf who was a surf coach. He was on a world tour. I taught some pros that are still on the world tour, and a lot of people had done some surf training with him, and I thought, I'll give this a go.

You know, I got invited to go to his place and learn some stuff, and I was like, Let's give it a go. Last year, my surfing improved much more than my 20 years of surfing in just one year because, just like, when I got there, he was like, This is what you do. I'm like, I'm okay. And now I'm in the IIF,and I'm so grateful that I've worked on it. I've had some foundations before, but I'm so grateful that I'm starting to get more and more compliments on my surfing, my ability, my turns, and stuff like that.

And being recognized as a better surfer. And that's what's happening for you as well, right? People are recognizing, like, Oh, wow, Williams, the smart dude is buying a business and money, and how many hours per week does that mean for G&A to spend on your business to make money without growing it? William:

It's my first week, but I feel like, for now, it's going to be some work. But yeah, long term, there's no. I mean, two hours a week? I don't know. I mean, long term.

Jaryd Krause:

maintain it. Yeah.

William:

So yeah, to maintain it, yeah.

Jaryd Krause:

Yeah. Cool, man.

William:

I mean, I'm so stoked. I really am super excited because it's actually something that's working in business in my life. And I'm like, Oh my gosh. I looked at my AdSense earlier, and I was like, Ah, I just made money, and I wasn't working. I wasn't working. I was eating a sandwich.

Jaryd Krause:

That might be the title of this podcast, How to make money while eating a sandwich.

William:

Yeah, very cool. Now it feels awesome. I appreciate it. And then now I'm like motivated to—I mean, I want to just grow it a ton. That's the goal now.

Jaryd Krause:

Which we will do.

William:

Yeah.

Jaryd Krause:

Thank you so much for coming on. I really appreciate you coming on and sharing your experiences. It's been so valuable for the listeners. I know that much for everybody who is listening. Thank you for listening. If you are about to buy a website, re-listen to this because there may be things that you missed on the first listen.

So you don't need to listen to it right away, but even if you listen to it in two or three days or a week's time, It'll be very, very valuable. And also share this podcast episode with somebody that you know who may be new to this subject and may actually want to start an online business themselves. Thanks again, William, and thanks to everybody for listening. Bye.