Andrew: Hey there, freedom fighters. My name is Andrew Warner. I’m the founder of mixergy, where I interview entrepreneurs about how they built their businesses. And this one’s kind of a new one on me. I built websites forever. They’re fairly easy to do. Today’s guest says, Ah, yeah, but there’s a better way than building your own website. He has realized that there are people who want to make money from affiliate and other types of ads who, if they build their own website, fast will probably make it not work right, not look right, not be optimized for traffic, not be optimized for conversions, and also not rank well in search results. He says, My business is one where we create those sites and make it easy for anyone who wants to have content based businesses that then lead to advertising our affiliates do well, and that’s what he sells. His name is Dominic wells. He is the founder of human proof designs. They create niche websites for people who want to get started in affiliate marketing. We’re gonna find out How he built up his business and how people are using these sites. Thanks to two phenomenal sponsors. I’ll be honest with you Dom I’m supposed to read ads for brand new sponsors, but I don’t have the like the data down on them I want to make sure that I can kill it for those advertisers. So I’m going to do one last ad here for Hostgator and top towel later on in the interview, and then I’m gonna spend some time studying up on my latest advertise I’ve read enough about them but I want to make sure that if I have a sponsor on I freakin kill it for them. Damn you competitive like that. Like if you’re working with someone else, you want to just kill for them more so than for yourself.
Dominic:
Yeah, I mean, I think the more you can give to someone, the more you’re going to get back anyway. So it kind of kind of comes back to you when you kill it for them anyway.
Andrew:
You know what, it’s not even that kind of logic for me. For me, it’s somebody trusted me. They’re paying me money, especially some of the new advertisers, they they are trusting me with their money. I got to make sure that it comes back to them bigger than more money than they spent with me. All right. Speaking of money, Dom I like to ask this as a first question, while people still are like off balance, and and haven’t yet figured out how to say no to me, revenue, where are you right now? How much?
Dominic:
About 1.1 million for the last 12? months? Us?
Andrew:
Yeah. And profit, how much
Dominic:
around 250,000
Andrew:
after you take your own money?
Dominic:
No, that would be like for everything.
Andrew:
That’s what you get to take out of the business yourself. Yeah, exactly. Alright, I asked you before we started, if you can just set this thing up by giving us an example of a site that was listed on your site that somebody bought did something with and you said, Well, actually, that might violate the confidentiality that people expect when they buy sites for me. And then he said, I’ll talk about one of the sites that I have, which is luxury shaves, who created luxury shades.
Dominic:
I created that it was one of the first successful niche sites I started actually back in 2013.
Andrew:
And then when when the person bought it How did it operate? And what did they do with it?
Dominic:
So at the time, it was relatively passive, I was kind of growing a little bit, I was adding new content and finding improvements where I could. And when they took it off me, they basically had more resources than I did. So they were just like, okay, we’re going to build more links for the, the more competitive keywords, we’re going to add a ton more content to it. But I don’t think they fundamentally changed anything in the business model or anything like that. In the music business model was articles about shaving, like how to use a straight razor or why straight razors, good, and then buttons that link to Amazon and if somebody reads one of those articles and decides to go to Amazon to buy straight razor or frankly, if they get diverted and go buy something else, like a drone, the site owner gets a commission from Amazon. That’s the model.
Andrew:
Yeah, exactly. And you know what’s great about Amazon is like you said, if they buy Pretty much anything from Amazon within 24 hours after they says click that link. Amazon is going to give him credit for everything. So at Christmas time, it can be pretty lucrative when people are like, oh, I’ll buy a razor for my nephew, but then I’m going to buy my entire Christmas shopping at the same time.
Dominic:
Yeah.
Andrew:
You know what? You’re in Taiwan right now. Yep. You started out in Taiwan as an English teacher, how did you end up in Taiwan?
Dominic:
Um, so my brother actually married a Taiwanese girl in 2007. And that kind of put Taiwan on the radar for me. We came over to Taiwan for their wedding. And I graduated from university in 2006. So I was kind of thinking, what do I want to do next? Do I want to try and get a proper job or do I want to go teach abroad somewhere. And of course, my brother was like, Oh, you should go to Taiwan. My wife’s family’s there. So if anything happens, you’ve got that kind of safety. You enjoyed it when you were over here? I was like, Yeah, why not? I’ll do it for a year. See what happens 10 years later, I’m still here.
Andrew:
Are you thinking that you teach from there? Or was there a goal of doing something bigger?
Dominic:
No, I was definitely going to teach. I was thinking I do it for one or two years, save up some money, get out of some of my student debt, and then travel, like, just travel somewhere like Australia, America. But then it was 2008. And the economy kind of wasn’t doing so well. And I had a job and my parents were like, if you’re enjoying it, just stay there and come back later. And I had no idea what I was going to do. My major at university was film so I was thinking about going back and maybe doing a Master’s trying to get into cinematography or something. And then my my wife, who was my girlfriend at the time, she Use me to various entrepreneurial books like Rich Dad Poor Dad and stuff. So yeah, I guess she had a grand plan for me before I had
Andrew:
You read the four hour work workweek Tim Ferriss first book. And that’s where you read about affiliate marketing, or that led you to start thinking about affiliate marketing. What is your first foray into affiliate marketing?
Dominic:
Um, my very first site I built was a quit smoking. So I’d literally just stopped smoking. So it kind of made sense. And I didn’t realize at the time that stop smoking is a really competitive niches. I think I could succeed in it today. But I couldn’t succeed back then when I barely even knew how to rank a website. And what was your
Andrew:
idea you were going to publish a site and then go sell advertising? Or did you know from the beginning, it’s going to be affiliate?
Dominic:
Yeah, it was going to be affiliate. I actually, I quit smoking by reading a particular book. And back then I didn’t realize that if you have a niche site, you can To promote multiple products like I did, I kind of thought I have to just promote this one product. So I wrote all these articles saying stuff like, you shouldn’t use an e cigarette, you should read this book or you shouldn’t use that you should read this book, which is kind of silly, really? Because the book was like $10 on Amazon. So my commission was going to be less than $1.
Andrew:
I thought you were gonna at least say that use Clickbank. No, it was just like a regular Amazon book. Got it. So you’re competing in a very competitive environment, the stop smoking environment with a product that was very generic and telling people wanted to buy things that were more interesting and more expensive. No, go back to the cheap generic. That one didn’t work out well for you. But what was it that got you to continue considering the first trip into affiliate revenue was not huge. Not a huge success. Um,
Dominic:
I think maybe because I realized where I’ve gone wrong quite early, you know, it can it can wear you down if you’re like, a year in and you realize whereas I I basically realized after I don’t know, one or two months, I think actually, I got my first Amazon commission, which was great. But I was like, Wait a second, even if I can rank and get traffic, I’m gonna make like 50 cents per sale, what am I doing? But maybe because I had got that first sale and I got a little bit of traffic and realized, Okay, I understand these concepts a bit better. I was like, okay, maybe I just need to choose a different niche. And I can’t really remember how I came up with shaving, but I was doing some research on straight razors. I think I just wanted to get a straight razor and some straight razors on Amazon cost, like 150 bucks, 200 bucks. So I was like, Oh, interesting. This, this could be this could be more lucrative.
Andrew:
Okay, so then you fire up a WordPress site. You start creating some content, you personally write it right. Yep. And you start Linking out how does that one deal
Dominic:
um, it struggled actually, for the first sort of six to seven, six or seven months. And I, I kind of had shiny object syndrome by then. So I’d moved on to another niche site. And I kind of left this one alone. And then around Christmas time, I noticed that started getting a lot of sales, a lot of raises, were showing up in my Amazon reports. And I thought, okay, that’s interesting. And then I came back about two or three months later, when I had another one or two websites worth of experience under me and I looked at it and was like, Hmm, this is getting pretty good traffic. But back when I built it, I didn’t really know about good page structure. I didn’t really know about how to get clicks to Amazon, the most efficient way and blah, blah, blah. And I kind of I think at the time the site was making 3040 bucks a month, so not a lot, but it was getting around 5000 hits a month, which I felt should be enough to get more money. So I did some on page touch ups.
Andrew:
I, I switched out some affiliate programs so that I was just promoting Amazon instead of like specific vendors used to have vintage razors on eBay, Linda, eBay, so you testing out those things. It was Amazon, that was the winner. Okay, what else did you change? Teach me based on what worked for you?
Dominic:
Yeah, so about about switching back to Amazon. So I’m
Andrew:
all about what you did to make Amazon links work better to make the site work.
Dominic:
Um, I basically just did some conversion rate optimization. Like, it’s fairly common in the Amazon affiliate world now, but back then, people didn’t really know much about using comparison tables like above the fold, like at the top of the page, they didn’t know about using buttons that said, check price on Amazon. I realized that people would be reading my article like best straight razor. And I just said this one’s quite good. This one’s quite good. That one’s quite good. But people were like, No, tell me which one to buy. So I added a box. Yeah, I added in like a box at the top of the page saying, this one is our top pick. And this one is our top bit pick if you’re on a budget. So I just did these small things only really took me a few hours. And straightaway the site went from like 50 bucks a month to 500 bucks a month. And then I rinsed and repeated that with the other pages. I reinvested that money, more content, more links. And by the end of the year, it was doing about $2,000 a month. Wow.
Andrew:
And then when you sold it, why would the person buy this site from you? Instead of saying I get it? I see how this works. I just create my own content on shaving. It’s not that hard. It’s not like frankly, you didn’t do this deep dive obsession. into into shaving.
Dominic:
a lot of people do do that. The latter they’re like, Okay, I’m just gonna try and reverse engineer this site and build it for myself. And I think that can work. Not in the shaving niche anymore, because I’ve talked about it so much that that’s way more competitive now than when I first started. But the reason why someone would buy one is because if they have the capital, it just kind of makes sense. websites are priced in the kind of 25 to 30, monthly earnings price range, which means you can get your money back within two and a half years, assuming the it maintains its current earning level. And you don’t have the risk of building a niche site and it never it doesn’t pan out. So you’ve got that. It’s already proven it’s already successful. So like it’s much easier to get a site that’s making 2000 to make 5000 than it is to get a site from zero to say 1000 So it’s just, it’s for people like investors, people that have capital, it just makes more sense to buy an existing site and grow.
Andrew:
Okay. So, you, you start to figure this out, you start to create a bunch of different sites. Why not stick with that? At what point did you say I want to move beyond doing my own site? Was it flipper experiencing out there?
Dominic:
Yeah, absolutely. So one of the first sites I built was getting a ton of traffic but it wasn’t I just didn’t make any money from it. It was a I guess it was an example of the wrong niche. And I was going crazy like kind of mental bandwidth was being used up thinking what can I do with the site and eventually I just went I’m gonna go sell it. sold it on flipper for the small sum of $1,000 but that was huge to me at the time. And that kind of started my my love affair with slipper and I was on there quite often. Part of what I was doing was looking to see if there are any good sites to buy. But part of it was also I was figuring out what people were buying to see if they were I could sell more of that. And I noticed a ton of people were buying these kind of scammy junk starter sites, flipper has a lot of starter sites. And over the past five years, they’ve improved a lot. But there were these people who were like, buy this website. It’s gonna make you like a million dollars a year with no work. And it costs 500 bucks. And to me, I was like, come on, that’s obviously Bs, but people were buying them and I couldn’t understand it. And I said to a friend, it’ll be so easy to just build a legit site with some static content. And some, you know, just like good research, something that someone can take and grow into a real site and put that on there for $500. And my friend said, Well, why don’t you do that? And I was like, Yeah, why don’t I do Do that. So that’s kind of how the idea was born.
Andrew:
Okay, and so what do you do next?
Dominic:
I researched some niches. I think I started with five or 10. I built some sites. I got some content written for them on, I think it was iwriter. And, yeah, I created these sites, created some Flippa listings and listed the sites. And it was pretty much crickets. Because I was competing with these people that were promising millions without any work. And I was like, Oh, yeah, here’s a site. It’s been well researched. If you work a few hours every day for six months, you might make 100 bucks. And then you can grow from there. And so I realized it was impossible for me to kind of compete with scammers that were promising the moon.
Andrew:
Okay. By the way, what do you think of the work that you got from iwriter?
Dominic:
Well, I haven’t used them for a few years. So okay, you know, take that but um, It was okay, like for what you pay, it was pretty good. I found it was it required a lot of effort from you like you had to like if someone went to iwriter today and just requested some content, they might be disappointed. Whereas I had learned how to give the right instructions and how to, you know, give templates and structure stuff so that you know, I could get the best out of the riders.
Andrew:
That makes sense. I’m kind of curious about these sites that that will let you hire writers on the cheap. And I wonder whether it works well or not. I remember talking to the founder of flipper one some. You know, we’re walking through Santa Monica together and I said do you think your model for he also 99 designs Do you think it would work for other other areas and he said, I’m intrigued by writing but writing is so hard to judge it’s so hard to give feedback and adjust and since then, I’ve seen some people take some make some attempts but been wondering how well it works. All right, so let me take a moment talk about my first sponsor, then we’re gonna come back into the story. My first sponsor is a company called top towel. Well, someone in my audience, longtime mixergy premium member named Michael seiger, founded a media company and he actually someone who bought who created the company that he sold the company that he bought it back. Anyway, as he was running in his longtime CTO decided, I’m gonna just leave the country and go be a volunteer. And so Michael was stuck yet to find another person to be his developer. He started looking in other places, but since he’s a mixergy fan, he heard me talk about top down said, let’s just give Andrew a shot. He called up top towel top towel, asked him about his publishing platform about the technology uses about what his needs are really, frankly, be prepared for top towel to be curious about your business. They asked him things beyond the technology, but also how does he prefer to work with a CTO caliber developer, how much time is he looking for etc, etc, etc. And then they went to work and they put a couple of options in front of him. You He hired the person that he wanted to work with. And he’s saying right now he just sent me an email out of the blue, no unsolicited, no request from me saying they’re working together doing some serious work in record time. That’s what happens. If you need the best of the best, someone who’s like at the level where your whole business depends on them. You don’t just want a cheapo Freelancer online, you want someone who’s phenomenal, that type of hire can take a long time and frankly, if you make a mistake, it could be incredibly painful. Which is why many people who’ve known me forever hear me talk about top down then decided that they’re going to give it a shot if you want to give it a shot to go to top towel comm slash mixergy Yes, you will get 80 hours of top towel developer credit when you pay for 80 hours. But if you’re looking for top caliber people that’s not what you’re gonna be excited about. What you’re gonna be excited about is the fact that they will talk to you and help connect you with the right person and they’ve got a no risk trial period. I want you to go read more about it i t o p@aol.com slash mixergy Top towel.com slash mixer to really be prepared. Not for the cheapest people. Not super expensive but for the best people You’re ready to hire the best top towel coms got you covered top towel.com slash mixergy actually,
Andrew:
damn did I see you Google or go to that site as I was saying it?
Dominic:
I’ve actually heard of it already. I’ve heard a lot of good things. So you know what we were. We were signing them up again to sponsor in 2019. And I thought about going and hiring somebody to go through all my old videos and pull video of my guest writing down or typing down top Cal’s website as I talked about it, just to kind of show it to top towel as a joke, and I realized, or to show them how impactful it is, but also make them laugh. And I realized Yeah, it’s gonna take a lot of money and a lot of time it’s not it’s not worth it. It’s not worth the effort. When what they really care about is am I sending quality people and they see that all the time quality people going over. All right, you said this thing is not working for me or you try to baby basically outsmart the this to scammers, but the people who are selling the dream on Flippa That didn’t work. What do you do next? Well, I realized I was probably going to have to educate my potential buyers a bit about why you know why this kind of site is a legit opportunity compared with the thing that they will find and have a friends that I was speaking to about it had the same advice. So that’s when I decided to actually start blogging more human proof designs and creating training and sharing case studies like the one was my shaving site. And basically building an audience who understood what I was offering so that then they could decide whether they wanted to use my services or not. How
Andrew:
did you come up with a name for your business human proof designs,
Dominic:
again, a friend so when I was at university I had to come up with the name of my my kind of mini films production company so my my final piece of work. And somewhere I came up with tested on humans. You know, as a teenager, I thought it was super clever. But tested on humans.com was and still is owned by someone like a domain squatter. And my friend was like, how about human proof designs? And, and I was like, I don’t know, it’s a bit long. It’s a bit of a mouthful, but I couldn’t think of anything better. And a few weeks later, I was like, You know what, it kind of works because these designs, they’re not the robots that humans like. I’m just going to go with it. And yeah, it’s one of those things where, you know, everyone thinks someone else’s names better. So I don’t even know what I think of it. But yeah, I think it works.
Dominic:
Blogging leji to have people buy the sites that you put together with writers from a writer. And then people would come to your site, look at your directory and buy them
Andrew:
and then you’d have to go and create More sites at that point. So every time you get a purchase, you’d have to sit down and start coding up another site, another WordPress site.
Dominic:
That’s what I did at first year. And I had a lot of people who would come to me with custom custom requests as well. So they would just say, Hey, can you build me a site in this niche? Do you think it’s a good idea? So those ones obviously, I didn’t create until someone had had like, hired me. And then
Andrew:
and then you realize why Sorry, I want to interrupt but now she’s like,
Dominic:
well, I realized I could do the same thing with the ready made niches. So instead of building the site, first, I would just list the niche. And then someone would pay me and then we built the site offers.
Andrew:
Don’t you don’t charge that much. Why would somebody use you though, instead of just going to any old WordPress person saying install this nice theme for me, write a couple of articles and be done.
Dominic:
Well, we have the all the knowledge and the training and The average WordPress developer is very good at developing WordPress, but they might not know much about SEO.
Andrew:
Tell me some of the things that you do that I wouldn’t see a friendly when I’m on your site, I can’t see much. I can’t see a sample of the site that you’re selling. Because what you do is just give me a description of it. And then you give me the site afterwards. So I’m trying to understand what you do. That’s especially good.
Dominic:
We have the
Andrew:
Sorry, I know you’ve written about this, so I’m not fronting you. I’m, I’m really trying to understand this.
Dominic:
Yeah, no, it’s a good question. We have the knowledge of what makes a good keyword versus a bad keyword. We know how to structure an article so that not only is it going to be friendly to Google, but customers, people who view that article unlikely to me Give me more specifics like I get the you know, the knowledge that you have that you know how to write better articles and how to do the URLs give me more specifics so that I know what it takes to write a better article that convert what topics and keywords work well how
Andrew:
Yes, Pacific can you get here Teach me.
Dominic:
Okay, so you’ve got to understand the intent of the keyword, a lot of beginners, one mistake they make is they’ll just see a keyword and write for it. So for example, a classic one as people might see a keyword like Gillette razor Best Buy, and then that person just thinks someone wants to know what the best razor is to buy. And I’ll write an article about, oh, yeah, the best buy out there is this one, when really what that person is really searching for and what Google knows that business searching for is bestbuy.com. And what raises the list? So if you write that article, you’re not going to rank for it, because Google’s like, No, that’s not what the person searching for. And even if you were able to rank for it, that person would probably not click on it because they want to click on Best Buy. So that’s, that’s one example of like, you know, experience and knowledge that we have. And then if someone does come to your article A lot of people, they just they write an article about a razor, for example. And they just put maybe one link in a small text link to Amazon. And they’re like, hey, this article gets 1000 views a month, Why is no one buying anything? And it’s like, well, because you haven’t given them anywhere to click really. So we’ve got the knowledge to put buttons on the page saying, you know, like, check this on Amazon and, and create tables that are mobile responsive, so mobile viewers can click the buttons easily. And we just know the kind of on page SEO best practices like how to make your article, Google friendly, but without being too Google friendly, because then you run into over optimization issues.
Andrew:
Okay, and so you’d start to write articles, create these sites, sell them and then one of the issues that you had was, you’d have to sit down and create another site, and then that would take you away from promotion mode. And then once you finish from Creating it, you go to promotion mode. Talk about that issue and how you resolve that because you told our producer that that was an issue for you.
Dominic:
Yeah, I think a lot of service businesses, particularly when they’re trying to scale run into this issue, because, yeah, like you say, you, if you’re busy fulfilling all of the stuff that you’ve just sold for one or two weeks, you’re not going to do any more selling. So you’re, you’re going to finish that work. And then you’ll be like, oh, I’ve got nothing to do. So what I did was, well, I basically just hired people to build the sites for me, so that I could just focus on promotion, and training and all of the other stuff like that. So that took took a while. But yeah, it was one of those things where I was like, Well, if I hire someone, I’ll make less profit per site. But maybe I could make more sales. You know, and of course figure yeah, of course. All that happened when I heard someone was like, I spent more money and I made more money. So
Andrew:
let’s talk about the CEO. You’re featured in entrepreneur.com. Back in 2015, what was the article? Do you remember?
Dominic:
Yeah, it was eight online entrepreneurs worth following.
Andrew:
Okay. Yeah.
Dominic:
And so you’re in there and then what happened that led you to finding the clo that you’re working with?
Andrew:
Yeah. So my, my then future CEO read the article, he started following, I presume the following all eight people. And he, within a few months, he became a customer of mine. And I can actually remember some of his his early interactions with me, like, I was like, Okay, this guy seems more like he gets it. He’s, he doesn’t need as much hand holding. And he came back to me after a month or two and was like, hey, I’ve already made money with my site. Should we do a guest post, like a case study on your site and I was like, absolutely. And then a few months later, he reached out to me. And I think he’d seen that we were growing. And he basically said, Are you hiring right now? Because if you are, here’s where I think you might need help. And here’s how I could help you. And here’s my experience. It was a really long email. And, you know, for anyone that’s wondering if that kind of email works like it does work, because I wasn’t hiring at the time. But when I read his his email and what he had done, I was just like, Oh, yeah, actually, I could really help you. You’ve got all these skills that I don’t have. So he may have been a beginner in our particular niche like affiliate marketing, but he understood how to how to run a team. He understood operations. He understood hiring and nurturing employees all of the stuff that I was either terrible at or just like petrified of doing
Dominic:
How does he have all that experience? I don’t know who he is I wasn’t able to look them up.
Andrew:
Okay. So his name is Brad. And he dropped out of university when he was whatever University age and built a company with his dad and two of his brothers. And that company was a kind of trucking top holding company in Ontario. And over the course of however many years, I guess, around 10 years, they became the largest top holding company in Ontario, which is like the third or fourth largest economy in North America. What What, what is this tar pulling? This is tarps, the stuff that you put on stuff to keep water from from destroying it.
Dominic:
Yeah, so like in the trucking industry, they need tarps to put on their trucks and on stuff inside the trucks. I don’t know about in the States but in Canada A lot of truckers are independent. And they all just need to find like contractors to look after their trucks when they when they need whatever. Okay.
And basically, that site with his dad back in, I found I found him once he gave me his name, I found a couple of things. First, I found that article that you wrote about him how Brad made his first sale after only eight weeks, is back in 2016. And then I found the business that he created, I guess, with his dad, and then he stopped working there. 2016 I’m guessing he stopped working there. Because actually, why Why did you stop working with his dad? Because he started working for me.
Dominic:
That’s the reason. Yeah, the reason for that is Yeah, yeah. So he, he, I guess, essentially, he was an entrepreneur at the time. And he said to me, I want to become an intrapreneur. And I don’t know if that’s a real word, but I like to. I like the sound of it. And basically, he has, well, I think he just had his sick child. At the time, he had four And they’re all homeschooled. So basically, he just wanted to be able to have the freedom to be around at meal time to look, you know, look after the kids while his wife was preparing meal time. And I don’t know whether he was also kind of sick of working for his dad or anything like that. Like, you know, people usually have a few reasons and they give you more. But it ended very amicable, amicable. He told me like, Yeah, he spoke to his dad, his dad said, Good luck and everything. But yeah, I think that the biggest thing for him was he wanted to be able to work from home rather than have to go to an office every day and,
Andrew:
and all of that, I wouldn’t call that I don’t think that’s an intrapreneur. And intrapreneur is someone who creates a new product or a new business actually, within another company, but what he was looking for was more of an entrepreneurial experience while still working in a safer environment. And that’s how we found you and it’s a good thing that you guys connected because you told our producer look my my work was just getting To be a mess, and we’ll talk about that in a moment and then talk about what happened after you and Dom started working together how you guys grew. And then I want to find out about this new business that you that you’ve got on folio, and what your connection is to ace Chapman and a couple of other things. But my second sponsor is a company called hostgator. In fact, let me ask you this, let’s suppose Dom that someone says, Ah, I don’t want to buy one of Dom sites, I just want to start my own thing. I’ll just fire up WordPress, I’ll put it on hostgator. I’ll understand the business and then maybe I’ll go to Dom’s business to human proof designs and buy something. What’s a good niche for them to create a content site on and then what’s a good affiliate partner for them to promote? Let’s use that as part of my ad for hostgator.
Dominic:
Okay, sure. So, I mean, you can create a content site on almost anything but let’s let’s do something easy like fishing, fishing, fishing.
Andrew:
Yeah. Okay. And you could either partner with specific fish suppliers like, I guess Bass Pro or any of the fishing rod suppliers or anything or you could just go with a network like Amazon that sells a bunch of fishing goods.
Dominic:
Okay? And so what I would do is write about fishing, top review different fishing equipment, different fishing poles and then link over to Amazon. Exactly like stuff like best fishing kayak or best bait for, you know, whatever fish dump. I’m going to start a site for my running because I got this big running goal for 2019. Do you think I should be writing about different running equipment and then linking to Amazon? How do I know if that’s too competitive or not? Generally, if you start googling those keywords and you see some like what I would consider big players, that it might be too competitive, so a big player could be like a massive magazine style site. Like in running you might find Runner’s world or men’s health.
Andrew:
Runner’s world comes up and Dick’s Sporting Goods calm comes up, but then after them, I don’t know Road Runner sports calm, they’re not that big running warehouse, the wire cutter comes up a lot further down than I expected, Rei. Okay, so your question is can I compete with those guys? That’s one thing, right? Yeah. And then the other thing that I see runner, Road Runner sports comm is just a site that sells stuff. Okay. And then the other thing I would want to do is, see how many people are searching for these words, right?
Dominic:
Yeah, that’s always a good a good way of judging the popularity of the particular niche, obviously running, you know, running is going to be huge, right? So you don’t necessarily need to verify that but with a lot of other niches you want to check. Are people actually interested in this? Or is it just me?
Andrew:
I wonder, actually, I every time I tell people I love running, they’ll feel like Ah, that sounds so disgusting. I would never want to do it. No one ever says oh, that’s actually there’s one person Brad. He No, just texting before we started says, Hey, I think I want to fly out with you. And he wants to do some running, but it’s rare. All right, that gives me a good sense of it. Guys, if you want to go start your WordPress site or frankly, there’s so many other platforms you can create sites on. Whether you’re starting a brand new thing or switching from a hosting company that you don’t love, go to hostgator.com slash mixergy. That’s hostgator.com slash MIZ. RG why, when you get there, you’re going to get an unbelievable low price, unbelievably low price. They’re going to give you a bunch of things like unmetered disk space, unmetered bandwidth, tons of email address all this stuff that you need except more of it than you could ever, ever used very much like the American system for feeding you. They’re going to over over feed you so that you have everything you need to build your website, right. And I really like that middle package because anytime you have a new idea, you just go in and you host another site, they give you unlimited domain hosting there, go to hostgator.com slash mixergy to read more and I’d love it if you signed up using my my URL Hostgator dot Calm slash mixergy grateful to them for sponsoring one of your issues was around 2016 you got married and you found yourself on a honeymoon? And how is the honeymoon?
Dominic:
Um, well, it should have been awesome. And it was, we were in Maui. So, you know, you can’t really go wrong there. But I found myself being pulled into the business. Like, I would be replying to customer emails, I was just putting out fires. And someone I was using as a project manager was kind of not very good. Like, I’d email him say on a Monday and say, Hey, can you get this done? And he’d reply on Thursday, like, Oh, yeah, sure. I’ll get it done in a couple of days. And I’d be like, No, you should have replied that on Monday. So customers were not happy. I was starting to have to give refunds. You know, and it’s my honeymoon. My wife is like, hey, do you want to go to the beach? And I’m like, yeah, just in in, in five hours when, when it’s dark, and I finally finished So it was very much a wake up call for me though.
Andrew:
Yeah, you know what, and it’s the guilt of while you’re working feeling like you have to apologize to someone feeling like you’re missing out on on the things that you’re supposed to do. I always feel like also when I when I work too much, like I’m building up debt, like suddenly I have to owe my wife Oh, someone else more of my time. It’s really painful. Alright, and that was the point where you said, You know what, I really need a coo and and that’s where you and Brad hooked up. Am I right?
Dominic:
Yeah, I’ve actually been speaking with Brad’s for one or two months prior. And he was saying maybe in May, I’ll start working for you part time with a goal to by the end of the year. Come on full time if everything works out, and I was like, Yeah, that sounds great. And then I emailed him in March, or April and was like, Hey, you know, you’re going to start part time in May. Would it be possible to start full time? And he was Yeah. Like it was possible, he just accelerated things. You know, he had dinner with his dad and was like, I’m gonna do this thing. And he came on right at the end of May. And within say five or six months, the business transformed. It went from operations being the, by far the weakest point in the business and having to give refunds not being able to sell more, having customers coming back with a bad experience just because they’d had to wait too long. Where then the next thing it became operations was our strongest point. It was a huge asset. We started getting a lot of brand evangelists because they were having such a good experience. They would post in Facebook groups saying Yeah, those guys are great. Go with them. And two years later, that’s that’s even more the case.
Andrew:
Tell me about get down out of operations that campaign internally.
Dominic:
Yeah, I didn’t know if anyone else knew it was called that except for me and Brad, but it turns out I’m not necessarily good at operations in case you hadn’t got that from the honeymoon story. And I get a bit emotional and if customers complain, I might be like, I don’t know. So we would, we would launch new websites. And I might get an email from a customer saying, hey, how can you launch new websites when you haven’t finished mine yet?
Andrew:
And it was a legit point, obviously. Yeah.
Dominic:
Well, I would just kind of get grumpy about it and being like, Look, we finished writing the articles for your site, we just need to construct it. So I should be able to sell more more sites because the writers need work and was really I should have just First of all, delivered that person site on time in the first place. And second of all, just said, Yeah, really sorry. We’re gonna get your site sorted. You know, and some people ended up giving them a discount, like, you know, like a partial refunds and stuff. So, Operation get done out of operations was not only am I bad at operations, but I I get emotional about stuff. So whereas Brad was very, he’d make an excellent politician or like Ambassador or bureaucrat, like he’s very good at moving things. What you said was,
Andrew:
I’m gonna focus on what was it? It was on being the face of the company, teaching people what we do and like and how it works and what else and the vision?
Dominic:
Yeah, the vision and networking, like, yeah, there’s a lot of bloggers in kind of affiliate marketing, make money online space, so connecting with them and doing things like this coming on podcasts. So I was more like the CMO slash CEO, I guess.
Andrew:
Okay. And then he would make sure that the websites were built, that the content was created, that you were answering customers and so on. All right, I could see how that would work that would help you organize things. How would you make How did you communicate with him? Or did you have to about how to run the business? Or do you just say, look, you understand the business you go do this. I’ll go do my thing.
Dominic:
Well, I don’t know if this is the common way to do it. But what we decided to do was I just taught him one specific thing about the business first. So for example, let’s say keyword research. So he, I taught him how to do it. I made some videos, I walked him through it on Skype, make some slps and stuff. I was like, this is how we research keywords. He practiced it. I gave him feedback, he got good at it. Then he got comfortable enough at it to train someone. So then he went out and he hired and he did that all by himself. And, and then after about a month, he was like, You know what, this keyword researcher is better than the rest. I want to promote him to a manager, blah, blah, blah, did that and then he’s like, okay, keyword research team is built. What’s next? I’d be like, Okay, this is how we hire writers. And then we systematically went through every kind of stage in the production line, and he made it robust You know what?
Andrew:
I found that out. One of the best tricks that I’ve learned for doing this is I have to keep reminding myself when I’m teaching somebody how to do something, I have to go back to that we don’t call it an SLP. But what is it an SLP? Is something about operations, what is SLP? standard operating procedures are standard operating procedure. All right, all right.
Dominic:
I, we call it a guide. So I go back to the guide, and I just put a bullet point down for what I just told the person so that we know forever. And if there’s something that they followed before that I actually think it’s stupid and execution, I go back and I delete it. But the idea of having the work on one screen, and having the guide on the other screen is really helpful for me. So we go back and forth. When I correct the work I put in the guide. What I find is, we very rarely go back into the guide afterwards. Like after that conversation. Yes, we have it written down it is a set of notes that you can always go back to but for the most part, people just do things by gut anyway. They’ll have learned from the conversation but it’s it’s at that point in their heads and they think they got it they don’t go back.
Andrew:
What is it What have you found about that?
Dominic:
Um, yeah, I think that’s kind of human nature, like people are like, I don’t need to read this guide, because I know everything that’s in it. And then if you actually went back, there’s probably five or six bullet points that you forgot as well as them, right? Yeah. Well, for me, it’s just, that’s why it was a longer process. So he was doing the keyword research. And I was still checking it. And so after say, a few, a few weeks, he got to the point where I could tell that he was using the guide, or he did have the entire thing memorized, because I wasn’t being like, Hey, you made that same mistake, or you know, and then he did the same thing with team members. And, yeah, occasionally, we have a we have a QA person now whose job is to just check everything on sites before we hand it over because people do still make mistakes or they they forget something from a guide. And I don’t know if there’s a better way of doing it, but we just have a process in place just to check And we just hope that the person that checks doesn’t forget to use the code.
Andrew:
So here for that what I find helps is checklist if I need you to check, it’s got to be a checklist so that I can see that you’ve gone through it. And then the other thing that you mentioned is something that I’ve learned to that, yes, you create the guide. But I found myself then just saying, All right, you’ve got the guide, go for it. And what I need to do now is schedule weekly calls, and then monthly calls with each new person and make sure that we’re just repeating, repeating, repeating until we all get it down, right. It sounds like that’s what you guys did. All right, I get how you built up this business. The next thing that you did after that is create a couple of other side businesses including on folio comm.co. Am I right about that?
Dominic:
Yeah, yeah, on folio.co on folio.co. So it’s pretty recent one that I’ve launched, almost as a response to my human proof designs, customers asking me if this service existed, and there’s a couple of different things we do, but the main thing is if there are People who want to, rather than buy like a starter site, they want to buy an established website, like maybe something that’s making a few grand a month. And they’ve got the money to do it. But they think, you know, there’s no way I’m going to buy an established website because I could lose all my money because the website tanks, I don’t know what website is legit, and what website is a scam. So they would partner up with us, and we would help them make that purchase. We do the due diligence by the site and then operate the site in exchange for a revenue share.
Andrew:
So I would go to like flippa.com and look for businesses, maybe one that like a $2,000 site, what 10,000 to $15,000 site. Should I be looking there?
Dominic:
Yeah, I mean, it depends on budget. We’ve got some people were currently looking for sites for that have a budget of 100,000.
Andrew:
So let’s take a look at 100,000 You know what, actually, that doesn’t seem like it’s typical. So I’m gonna go to 50 to 100,000 on Flippa. Okay, I’m gonna go into business. And can I check a content? I’d look for content for some reason. I don’t see content there. I start, I keep looking until I ended up with content. Oh, there we go. Business Marketing.
Dominic:
Advertising advertising, right.
Andrew:
Alright, so now I see I see Oh, expert. Oh, that’s interesting. All right. So I see oh is one of these like coin initial coin offerings? Right now, nobody’s excited about it, but at some point, they’re gonna get hot again. So if I look at Ico expert dot biz, for $50,000, I might want to buy it, I’d come to you and say, Can you guys take a look at this and see if it makes sense? You help me understand whether it makes sense or not.
Dominic:
Yeah, exactly. And we would do the things like talking to the seller and checking if what they say makes sense. And if it does make sense, does that make sense to buy it or even if someone doesn’t have an idea in the first place, they can just say I want this type of site. Got this this type of budget, we can go out and see what’s available as well.
Andrew:
Okay, so if I were to pick this and you guys were kind of entered into this Ico expert dap is what they’re doing is they’re listing upcoming Icos, except these guys have not updated the site in a very long time. I’m scrolling through it. If you guys helped me run it, aren’t I becoming too dependent on you to run this business? So now this whole $50,000 investment is dependent on your ability to, to run it properly?
Dominic:
Yeah, but a lot of people. I mean, US running is a lot of a smaller dependency than a lot of people running it themselves. Because we’ve got the experience and the team and all of that. Yeah, but then yeah, so one of the things that I say when I when I promote Hostgator is if you don’t like them, you could always take your website and go have it hosted somewhere else. I couldn’t do that with you, right? If I don’t like what you guys are doing, I’m kind of stranded because I couldn’t run the business on my own. So you don’t want to have a major part of your business being run by someone else. Like you don’t want your whole development house being run outside of your company. If you’re if you’re a software company, this is the whole business being run by someone else.
Andrew:
Yeah, well, we wouldn’t tie, we wouldn’t tie anyone into, you know, like, if we weren’t doing a good job, then they’d be able to fire us. And then it would be a case of them being able to find another operator or hiring in house or select the site. Yeah, that is something people need to take into consideration like, are they? Like if the thought of that petrifies them then maybe, yeah, where they should get themselves a bit educated about this more first and you know, then make a decision, then that’s a good point. Actually. These guys have some pretty good subscribers online. I’m kind of into this business 100 10,000 Instagram followers, you know what this Flippa thing does become addictive, doesn’t it? Yeah, right. You’re like looking around. I think I could run this business. What Where’s their money coming from you to me? It’s still course I think we can update the course. What about Ace Chapman? What do you guys doing with him? He did a course for us it mixergy about how to buy a business.
Dominic:
Yeah, this is great. We actually just interviewed him on our podcast. So he reached out to me about a year ago, and then again about six months ago. He found us just through word of mouth, I think and he has a ton of his own sites, access to a lot of money. Buying sites is not a problem for him. But where he struggles is with operations and scaling is is hard for him in that sense. So essentially, he just did the same kind of thing. He said, I’ve got some existing sites. Can you run them Some of them for me. And right now we’re running four sites for him. And then yeah, we just we get a share of the profits. And we he was basically like treat them like these sites of your own. So I give him monthly and weekly reports. I speak to some of his the people like below him who are managing the wider portfolio. But essentially, we have the freedom to do what we what we want. And he just gives me the goal like some sites. They’re doing great already just wants to maintain them, make sure that the investment is sort of protected and the site doesn’t die. Other sites. It’s like yeah, grow it if you can, with content sites with advertising revenue. Yeah. So he has a ton of different stuff. But our strong point is content sites with either advertising or Amazon affiliate, or some private affiliate programs.
Andrew:
Interesting. Huh? So would you be able to do that for like if I needed help running or grow On the mixergy, could I just say, Hey, you guys do that I’m gonna pump out my interviews, obsess on research and obsess on a couple of other things, but you guys promote it and grow it.
Dominic:
Theoretically, yeah, it depends specifically what we would need to do to grow it. You know, some things might be, but obviously, we have our strong points and our weak points. If you just wanted to add more content to or, you know, do SEO, do some conversion rate optimization, maybe do some PPC, that’s what stuff we can do. If you wanted to add some other thing that we weren’t familiar with, then, you know, it would it would really depend on the kind of context but I’m, I’ve learned the hard way that agreeing to stuff that you’re you can’t definitely deliver is is not a good idea. Yeah, it depends would be my answer.
Andrew:
How do you guys charge if I decided to buy this Ico expert site? How would you charge
Dominic:
we would do We’d probably charge a couple of grand just for the initial. Let’s check it out for you do the due diligence thing, like the kind of setup fee. And then what we normally do is we take 20% of the profit for, for running the site. So then you would get all the other 80%.
Andrew:
Right, this is pass the smell test, look at this. I’m going to put in the chat there flip a listing these guys, thousand dollars when I actually checked this listing a couple of days ago, so I’m fairly familiar with it.So what do you what are your thoughts on it?
Dominic:
Well, um, so
Andrew:
the first flag for me and I’m not saying it’s necessarily bad, but the one flag is they’re asking for 50 grand, right and they’re claiming that they’re making 25 grand a month.
Dominic:
So revenue but 23 in profit. Yeah, that’s exactly you know, that slide to two and a half months, like why would anyone sell for that multiple right? Yeah, so normally I would expect
Andrew:
on flipper like 10 to 20 monthly profit would be a asking price. So if they were making 23 per month, they should be asking for at least a quarter to half a million. And probably because it’s a crypto so probably it’s like, back in December last year when crypto was on fire, they were probably making like 50 grand a month, and now they’re making one grand a month. So the average is 23. But so you would really need to be like, what’s it making now? And is that declining? And if it’s not declining, is 50,000 a fair asking price for that? And then you’d have to look at the other you know, the other wider things like is crypto going to bounce back isn’t going to go to zero? Right like yeah, on paper, this the site Seems like a decent site. It’s just that first thing is a bit, you know, like, why you’re only asking for this if you’re making that.
Dominic:
Yeah. Plus, there’s a little bit of a, like a Russian connection to it from what I could see here, and I’m just looking at it really quickly. How does that translate to more of a US expertise, which I’m assuming that’s what you guys have, right? Yeah, it was certainly an English speaking expertise. And obviously, us being the biggest market.
Andrew:
Is it tough that you’re in Taipei in Taiwan, when so many of your clients are in the US?
Dominic:
Not as tough as you would think. Because I’m not involved in the operations and speaking to the customers as often as someone like Brad is and Brad’s in Ontario. My web developers in Finland. One of my marketing team is in Minneapolis and another is in what he’s more of a nomad. So he’s in Chiang Mai right now. And then the content managers in Calgary. So it’s we’ve got, you know, we’ve got presence in every time zone.
Andrew:
All right. All right.
For anyone who wants to go check you out the website is human proof designs.com and of course the other site that we talked about is on folio.co I want to thank my two sponsors who made this interview happen the first we’ll help you hire phenomenally well you guys have seen people I interview write them down. I’m Dom I’m a little upset that you didn’t write them down and go over to them. I feel like that’s, that’s my big way. And I get my guests to go over to them but you’ve seen past guests sign up. You’ve seen past mixergy fans, you’ve seen real entrepreneurs go over and sign up to get new great developers from top towel go to top towel comm slash mixergy and if you want to host a website, right, go to hostgator.com slash mixergy. Dom I’m going to go get a haircut I’m trying to like up my look but I don’t I don’t give a rat’s ass about looks. I should just go the other way. I should just go complete bohemian. Make that my look. Don’t you think?
Dominic:
I think I think what you’ve got going on looks good but um, you can have a nice like a pink Mohawk or something if you wanted to go the other way. Yeah, just
Andrew:
some like outrageous like who is it ninja the fortnight dude. Right? He’s got his green hair. Nobody looks at whether even brushes a hair or not. It’s green. It’s great. It’s easy. All right. Thanks so much for doing this interview. I’m going to go get a haircut look handsome by everyone, by Don. Thanks.
Dominic:
All right.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
