#2 with Ramon Van Meer - Blogging His Way To $9M in Cash

At this point, it's a money printer.

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

We're talking monthly, you're pulling in between $400,000 and $500,000 in revenue. What's up guys, Sean here. I'm doing a special little introduction to this episode from my phone because we got some good news. We broke into the top 10 on the Apple iTunes rankings, which is really crazy. I thank everybody who downloaded the episode. Subscribed, left a review, Venmo'd me a dollar. Everybody who supported the show, thank you very much. You know, the rankings don't really, really mean much. I'm going to do the show anyways because I just like having conversations with smart people. But damn, it does feel good when something actually works and when people like listening to it. And I really appreciate that. So that's good news. The other good news is that we're bringing on our first sponsor. You'll hear me talk about them a little bit midway through the episode, but I just think it's cool. We're the Money Podcast. We talk to people about how they made their money.. And it's only right that we make a little money ourselves. I think that helps keep the show going and makes it sustainable for everybody. So big shout out to monday.com, who's coming on as our first sponsor. I also like that it's actually a product that I use. In fact, like last week I started using monday.com to organize the podcast because there was so much stuff going on. I got to book guests, I got to send stuff to the editor, I got to do this and that. Any project, it just starts getting super busy. And so monday.com was a really good place to just organize everything., have my lists in a good spot, and it's got really nice design, and I'm a sucker for design. And so, uh, this sounds like an ad now. This is not the ad. The ad comes later, but I really do use the product, and I'm glad that the sponsor is something that I actually use and really like. So, uh, shout out to them for coming on board. Um, this week's conversation was with Ramon Van Meer, um, and Ramon is a really interesting dude, and this episode is going to be different than most episodes. I would say that majority of the guests, when I have them on, they are intimidatingly smart. When they're talking to me, it's pretty obvious within 5 minutes that I'm the dumbest person in the room. And I just try to ask questions so that let them talk and let them tell their story. And I just do my best to keep up. But Ramon is not a genius. And that's what I'll say. Our buddy Sam, who introduced us, he says it differently. He calls Ramon like, he just tells him, you're so dumb. You're the dumbest smart guy I know. And he means it with love because what Ramon does is he doesn't overcomplicate things, and you're going to hear that in his story. For example, the essence of his story, and he'll tell you better than I will, but it's he, you know, wanted to start a blog. He just looked at what was already popular, and then he started a blog in that little niche. He bought a $49 WordPress template because he doesn't know how to code. He outsourced the writing to some freelancers because he doesn't know how to write, and somehow, some way, just did those simple things and built the most popular blog about a subject that he doesn't I don't really know. It's a soap opera blog like, you know, Days of Our Lives, Young and the Restless. That's like soap operas. And he's never even seen an episode of a soap opera. And so somehow this guy who can't code, can't write, and never watched soap operas built a blog full of— filled with, you know, daily, daily stories about soap operas. And, you know, the business started printing money, generating hundreds of thousands of dollars a month before selling it for about $9 million. And so Ramon is one of the most humble guys I've ever met in Silicon Valley. Very good at just keeping things simple. And if you take nothing away from this, it's to remember that you don't have to be a genius and you don't have to have some super complicated high-tech business plan to make it work. Sometimes if you just find a niche that has a lot of passion around it, you can build a very simple business, and he's going to tell you about that. So hope you enjoy the episode. If you do, leave a review, shout me out on Twitter, do something so that I hear you guys. That's what gets me excited to keep making the show happen. I don't have to do the show. I do it because I love it, and I really appreciate everything that happened after the first episode. All right, enjoy. Okay, ready to go?

Let's do this.

All right.

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

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

And we're talking like Days of Our Lives, Young and the Restless.

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

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

10, 11 months ago.

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

$8.75 million cash? Cash, yes. And this isn't like a Silicon Valley, like you own 4% of the company. This was your company, you owned— there's no outside investors?

I had no investors. I bootstrapped it. I had some advisors. I think I owned like 98% still. Wow. And then I gave, you know, some shares or some profit to employees, but yeah.

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

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

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

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

take me back. Are you just at home? Yes. Alone in a room thinking about this? You're Just brainstorming on a whiteboard.

Yeah, 800 square feet apartment, me and my son together, and just brainstorming ideas.

And what was your son's ideas? What was he, what was he thinking?

The engagement was probably higher than people get outraged.

Yes, exactly. So I built a simple WordPress site. I bought a theme from ThemeForest, put it on WordPress, used photo.

Are you a technical guy? I mean, what's your, cause a lot of people get stuck, right? You know, hey, I wanna build this website.

Yeah.

I can't code. Do I go learn Python the hard way? Do I go buy this course and try to become a developer? Do I try to outsource it? Yeah. Do I try, you know, a WordPress theme?

So this breaks all the rules, by the way.

It's—

yeah, you know, oh, founder market fit, zero.

Passionate, passion, zero.

Exactly. Skill, skill set, zero. Can't write, and I decided to start a blog. Exactly. But You knew one thing. So if we're recapping the kind of what you had, what you didn't have, all right, that's the stuff you didn't have. But sounds like what you had was you knew that at least for this time period, there was a cheap way to buy likes on a Facebook page.

Correct.

And then whatever that Facebook page is, and you try 20 of them, WWE and pets and whatever, and then take that traffic on the— take the likes on the Facebook page, turn it into website traffic. Correct. And so you did your testing period, you decide soaps is the one I'm going to do because the engagement's high using the data. It's all good. And now you got your blog up, but you don't have the content wheel going.

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

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

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

What's like a big magazine that covers soaps?

The biggest one is called Soap Opera Digest.

Okay..

It's been around, I think, 40, 50 years.

Straight to the point.

They have a website, but their main focus up to the last couple of years was always their magazine. Yeah. So it was—

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

Yes, exactly.

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

And so she starts cranking out content. And give me your mindset. I mean, are you, you're pretty certain that this is going to work? How are you paying the bills at this point? Like, take me back to, because I know it works, right? The spoiler of this podcast, shit worked out.

Yeah.

Sold the company, you know, that worked. So, but I think it's important to go back when it wasn't clear that it was going to work. Yeah. You have some belief, but like, again, I want to know, how were you paying the bills? And then what was your certainty level on this, or were you still hedging your bets with other things?

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

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

Yeah, and because, you know, I like to keep trying things until I see it doesn't work, and then I go to the next idea. I saw the engagement, so going back It took 4 or 5 months before I really started seeing good amount of traffic to the site because the problem with content, you need a lot of traffic to really make money. You know, back then I was just using only Google Ads, so the banners on my website. Even after a couple weeks I made like $2 a day and then $4. You know, I couldn't, you know, I paid more for the article than the return. But what kept me going was that the engagement on the fan page, like the fan page I only had to pay the first couple weeks, you know, I think to 20,000 or 30,000 likes. After that, the fan page just grew organically. Whatever I posted got so many shares, and I did see an opportunity. Okay, there's not a lot of competition. The fans are super engaged. It's content that is every day, like soap operas are aired every single day for 52 weeks. Straight. They have some blackout days, but basically it's— these are new episodes, new episodes every Monday, from Monday to Friday. So apparently they record a bunch of them on the same day, like 5, 6. It's very, very basic, meaning like their sets, it's just the actors. Like, I think even the directors are in a booth upstairs, and then they just crank out, you know, you know, with all the respect of the soap opera, you know, actors, it's not like a Hollywood you know, sets.

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

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

And it's done, right? So then 6 Sundays. Yeah, so That's not a lot of content.

To be fair, are you a Game of Thrones fan? No. Okay. So to be fair, you could write an infinite amount of content just complaining now about the ending and the last season.

So start a petition.

Right. Start a petition. Exactly. So soap operas had this unique property, daily content, new content every day. And I mean, what is your article about? Is it, here's the recap of what happened in case you missed it? Was it like speculation of what's going to happen? What was the content like? Or was it just pure clickbait on Facebook of like, see which character you are on this quiz.

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

So like a theory or a spoiler?

Yeah, really spoilers.

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

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

Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So we're talking like you spent hundreds, in the hundreds of dollars. My math's not great, but I think that one penny, something like that. You spent under $1,000 total. Yeah, unpaid for this website. Built that asset up into something that you were able to sell for almost $9 million. So that's a tremendous, tremendous type of return. Is that what you thought was possible, or were you thinking, this will make me $10K a month, then I'll figure something else out?

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

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Well, yeah.

How did you celebrate? And then I also want to know, how did you get your ideas of, hey, I should do push notifications, I should do these next things. So tell me a little bit about both of those.

So once we started making money, I, you know, one thing that I learned is that reinvesting right away back in the business, like I was only making maybe $5,000 a month and then I hired a full-time person because I knew, okay, even though business-wise it's probably not smart, like you don't make enough to afford that. But I just did it because I knew I can then focus on growth and then that person can focus on the day-to-day things. So after probably 6 to 9 months, you know, I got a small office and then got first employee. I got some freelance remote people, uh, writing and helping out, some freelancers. The audience is so passionate that it was very easy for me to find, you know, uh, people that just want to work for free. Yeah, like, you know, help post stuff on Facebook and things like that. But that's, that's the journey of the entrepreneur. It is often like lonely, especially if you're still in the phase of working from home, because yeah, you have no people around to celebrate. Ideas I got from, you know, because I love doing it. Like, I— it is a super cliché, but you know, I don't see it as work, right? Like, it's my hobby. If I'm not, you know, I love reading, I love, you know, coming up with growth like hacks and, and, you know, ideas on how to drive more traffic And this might be the entrepreneur test, right?

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

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

Like, you're not a great date.

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

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

And then you're not trying to be a genius, you're trying to get the result.

Yes.

If somebody else has an idea that's getting good results, yeah, you'll try it.

Yeah, reverse engineer.

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

So still to now, I always like to look at these marketplaces where people buy and sell websites. I think you can learn a lot. They write a whole summary and give access to the P&Ls.

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

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

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

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

Yeah.

What was that turning point?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don't put all your eggs in one basket. And, and, and still to today, like, when I buy or sell or, or buy, start a site, it's like I, I want a diverse traffic, traffic. Yeah, I don't want to be 100% depending on Google, 100% even email, or 100%, you know, a push notification. From all these, the email is still the, the best bet, but, you know, even Google can make any change tomorrow, and then, you know, you don't get the traffic you used to get, right?

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

I think you'd never lose that as an entrepreneur, is that you don't know what's gonna happen, right? Like, what is the right decision? So several times I was thinking, okay, should I sell now or should I wait? If I don't want to wait too long because maybe things change and then my traffic goes down and then the value of my company is much less, I cannot sell it anymore, or nobody wants to buy it, right? Or I was also— because I was only writing about soap operas, and soap operas are— there are only 4 airing, like only 4 in the United States. 10, 12 years ago, there were like 12 or 13, like, you know, the soap operas get cancelled. So I was also, you know, thinking, oh man, what happens if 2 soap operas get cancelled? Then I don't have content to write about, or less content, and then nobody will buy it. So I was— that was like, you know, when, for example, the soap operas would re-sign the contracts with the networks, those were the times, man, shit, should I sell it? Should I not? Like, trying to get information, you know, trying to get inside information from the networks, you know.

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

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

Like, you wouldn't have pretended.

You would have told him, hey, yeah, like, I never watched an episode. I don't watch it. You know, I'm sorry. It's— but, you know, I love the audience. I love, you know, the traffic. Yeah, I love the traffic. So the fan base is amazing.

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

Yeah. So, that's also I think one thing why I don't really like— because nowadays in the news, in your Facebook, you see so many of these so-called gurus and then the 6 steps to this and the 4 steps to that. You know, it makes me cringe because what works for me doesn't work for somebody else. I think you really, you know, every person is different. I think what worked for me would not work for a lot of other people. It's— but in my case, I think my passion is not so much the content, doesn't really matter. My passion is the entrepreneurship, the, you know, the journey of starting something, not knowing what the outcome is, and trying to find creative ways to, to make it happen. So for me I like— you have a product, a service, or content, soap opera content site, whatever it is, and then you have traffic that you need to drive there. So for me, it's like figuring out, okay, how can we get as much traffic for as cheap as possible from point A to point B, right? And that's for me the game that I like to—

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

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

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

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

Because you don't get often, you know, multi-million dollar offerings, you know, like—

so I thought it's, it's a life-changing So somebody just came to you, or did you go out and market it?

So first I wanted to see, hey, can I even sell it? So initially I went to ask one of the advisors, Dave Nemitz, one of the founders of Bleacher Report. I asked him, hey, how much do you think I could sell this, right? Like, and he brought me in touch with a merchant acquisition person, or guy, however you say it, and I hired him and he shopped it around and, you know, I got some meetings with some companies that were interested in buying it. I got horrible offers, like, you know, like one time my revenue, for example, and 1x revenue, 1x revenue, and then maybe with a little bit of cash, and then the rest of the money I had to wait like, you know, 4 years.

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

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

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

Yeah.

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

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

I said, hope that guy's not listening. Yeah.

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

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

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

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

Ramon's, uh, lab of of experiments were all on one book.

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

All the adventures. Okay, so it ends up closing. Does your life change? Wait, this podcast is called My First Million.

Yeah.

I think I remember, you know, thinking, hey, if I had a million bucks in the bank, then my life would be so different. Then I would feel this way, I would act this way, I would spend this, I would do this. In reality, from doing this podcast, talking to people, that doesn't seem to be the case. What was the— what was day one? It's—

yeah, that life for you, it's super— and I always screw up this word— it's anticlimaxal.

Anticlimactic.

Answering emails. Yeah. Yeah.

Like it was. And the next day, you know, at night, I just, I had to pick up my son. Cook dinner, you know, it's just normal life. And then the next day went back to the office and just work.

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

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

And so we got about 10 minutes before they kick us out of here, but the questions, you know, what happens then? So you, since then, you've bought You bought a handful of other websites.

Yes.

Again, like a real estate guy, you sort of buy it, you try to build it up, you either run it or you sell it from there. Was that a good idea or bad idea? Are you happy with how you parlayed one thing into the next or would you do it differently? I can see that look on your face.

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

Or one business model, right? Because you have a SaaS company. Yeah, it's like a— that's a B2B company. Yeah. And then you have a content site. Yeah. You have an e-commerce, you know, a pet site.

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

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

Yes.

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

Yeah.

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

Yeah, my mom has read, I think, like 55 Danielle Steele books.

Yes, exactly.

I think some article came out saying she's written more novels than anyone. Like, she's got like 300 days on the, you know, 300 weeks straight on the bestseller list or something crazy with different books. As she, you know, she's a machine. Yes. And then there's, you know, obviously Fifty Shades of Grey, there's Twilight, there's all these kind of franchises that have been built in this same kind of, you know, romantic fiction genre. And so you see something there, you think that romp— that this romantic stories or romantic fiction is is big.

I remember as a kid, I used to read every sports fiction book I could get my hands on. Yeah. And I think one day I crossed over into that. And one of the books in the sports fiction was like a sports romantic fiction or something. I remember taking it home, reading it first 10 pages. I was like, what is this?

Yeah.

By the 15th page, I was like, all right, I'm finishing this book. This is a great book. As an 8th grader, I remember that. So yeah, there are all these subgenres just within it. And so, you know, what, what does success look like? What do you think? Where do you want to be with this project, with Novely, you know, 6 months from now?

6 months? Well, 6 months is—

okay, maybe 12 months.

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

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

Yeah.

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

Yeah.

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

Yeah, we're excited Awesome.

All right.

Great.

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

Self-promotion.

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

If somebody has— like I always like to help and advise or, you know, if people have a specific question, they can find me on LinkedIn. If you look Ramon Vanmeer, then you can shoot me a message.

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

All right, awesome. Thank you so much, buddy.