Lexi Grant: Can You Sell Your 5-Figure Biz?

um [Music] hey what's up everyone welcome to the copy blogger podcast my name is tim stoddard thank you so much for joining us as always i am with my friend and my co-host ethan brooks ethan how are you friend and co-host this week i'm moving up now we're friends and we have a very special guest with us this week we are very excited to have a conversation with lexi grant lexi welcome to the show thank you so much for joining us yeah it's gonna be fun we have a little bit of not not a confession but we were joking a little bit on twitter before you jumped onto zoom we have referenced you so many times over the last couple episodes that i feel like finally having you on here we've been like fangirling about your work for a couple weeks i'm like i need to just start off with a compliment that um that we love what you're doing and it's great and it's inspiring and we're excited to have you here thanks well i i love what you guys covered too so some good synergies okay so we're gonna get right to it we listened to a podcast interview that you did recently and you talked about that it's with ryan tansem the intentional podcast i thought it was fascinating because in there you mentioned that so many founders don't even know that exiting is an option exiting their company their media brand their website i am one of these people like i've been spending the last 10 years of my life building these brands and i've built this this portfolio of these media companies and and i'm at the point now where i start thinking to myself like where does this go how do i start the process of maybe exiting some of these companies and uh you've been working the last couple months or maybe even years on your podcast that they got acquired all about this concept of taking a media brand understanding that it doesn't have to be some giant like billion dollar company and that there are possibilities to exit so the first question is is pretty open-ended like what are some examples that you've seen of this and if i'm somebody that has you know maybe a 20 000 person email subscriber list and i'm i'm thinking about like how how do i exit this company what are some examples that you've seen here yeah i mean you're not alone because i think once you go through it once you kind of have an eye on an exit later but a lot of entrepreneurs who haven't sold before first of all often people will get get an opportunity like they'll get approached and then suddenly like they're on this like learning curve i have to figure out what the heck i'm doing and how do i do it well so in terms of examples it's funny because they got acquired also media company and we're about we're working on our first paid product which is going to be a list of content companies that have sold so that people like you who want to be able to sell yours can look at it for inspiration or even for examples of like what other metrics of these other companies were they putting up when they when they sold well beyond like how much do they sell for which is one metric one piece of data but you know what other metrics are they sorry before you get into it i just add a little bit more context to this yeah because when you set this on the podcast it absolutely hooked me and by the way anybody we'll link to that episode in the show notes because everybody should go listen to it it was a great interview and we want to we're going to skip some of the background on who you are just because we've covered you a few times and people can hear that on other shows but inside that interview you had said something to the effect of like oh there's a whole bunch of founders like one of the reasons you started tga or they got acquired is because there's so many founders who they don't even realize they can exit so they just shut these companies down and i think you had maybe mentioned uh an example somebody had sold for like 180 grand but selling wasn't even on her radar before a certain point i think there's a lot of people listening to this who may be in that boat as well so could you maybe yeah maybe talk us through what was that what was that example and yes what are some other examples you've seen of people who have gone through this yeah so that one is top of mind for me because it's our podcast that comes out on monday so we're just putting the finishing touches on it now it's an amazing story i think it's our best episode yet the woman her name is lauren gagioli which i had to pronounce properly on the podcast myself and she ran a company called higher scores test prep she wasn't sure that she kind of assumed she would be able to sell it partly because it was based around her personal brand and then secondly because she wasn't she thought she wasn't making that much money from it she was bringing in like 60 000 in revenue each year and she was only working on this about six hours a week she started out with more with more hours but she ended up she ended up systemizing it pretty well that it was more like a passive income stream for her and she she has young children so she during the pandemic you know she wasn't working at all really and she she figured out how to make this engine work on six six hours a week she and i actually connected in the early days when i was trying to get they got acquired going and we connected in a facebook group and she said she said something like you know someone's put a bug in my ear that i might be able to sell this does anyone know anything about like household company so i put my hand up and i'm like hey find me on boxer or whatsapp or something so we can we can talk about it i think she'd been so heads down building the business that she didn't recognize the value that she created and she was caught up in the idea that since it revolved around her personal brand she couldn't sell it which which can be tricky but she once she decided to sell it she sold it quickly she approached a few people in her space she was super well networked because this is just a good story one of the one of the ways she built the brand was through a podcast and she did a podcast about her site is it's a it's a course business which is another thing that's interesting like people are wondering how do you sell course businesses it was a course business for teaching um helping kids get higher scores on the act and then sat so it's a test prep course business and she was very well networked because she had used she had grown her audience through a podcast and she interviewed tons of guests and she ended up reaching out to a few people to say is anyone interested in buying this brand and the second person she reached out to bought it for 100 180 000 which you know some people would kind of shook their shoulders at that but compare that to shutting down a business that you know that that has also brought you money over the years i i mean it's a huge win so i thought that was a great example both of a much smaller exit than because you know we cover six seven and eight figure exits and this is really on the small end of of our scope and i thought it was just such a great example of the whole ethos that i want my company to stand for which is like how can you think about growing things differently you don't have to work yourself into the ground you don't have to do take the silicon valley route and even if you're you you grow something that has less than a six-figure revenue you can still sell it for meaningful money i think that's the perfect example because so many of the people that we talked to our coffee blogger are in that space where they're making a living sixty thousand seventy thousand dollars a year doing what they want you know like have the lifestyle that they dream of but there's a weird disconnect there between that type of brand that may be tied to a personal brand and selling digital products that may also be tied to like the the person teaching in like their particular matter so it is connected to them personally but i i think there are probably so many examples thousands of them of people that are in that space thinking like where do i go from here and to hear that story is really it gives me hope but also makes me excited because i just think that's that's a conversation that hasn't been had yet yeah yes she's never been on a podcast telling your story you know before like this it's it's funny because when you when you're hosting a podcast it's like you want some guests who are sort of well-known because they tend to bring more downloads and more listeners but then the stuff that gets me excited is like telling a story that's never been told before that's one of the things that i love about your site too is when you look through the case studies everything feels very reachable and approachable in a way that i think startup media has not achieved because i mean the whole big idea and everybody can go back and listen to our past episodes we've talked about they got acquired several times the big idea is to profile companies that have made exits for six seven and eight figures life-changing money but not your typical like 200 million dollar sale and so you go back to the site you read these stories and it's all people who like hey took a ten thousand person list and ended up selling for six or seven figures or whatever it feels very approachable i'm so curious when you sat down to talk with her could you talk us through uh some of the traits that made the company sellable like if somebody's sitting here with a company of their own that's maybe making sixty thousand dollars and wondering if it's sellable what are some of the boxes they would have to check in order to come up with a yes on that yeah it's funny because i asked her once we went through her whole story i said so logistically like what did you have to do to get your site your company in shape for a sale and she's like nothing really i really had done most of it you know i think she just hadn't even given herself credit for it but one of the pieces is just boxing it up so you can hand it over to someone else so some of that is about you know creating processes so that they can follow them if they want to being really organized so that you can hand everything over to that person while she she had to have you know numbers to share with a buyer so all the finances had to be squared away and i think for people like this like often entrepreneurs in this the range that we cover people who play in that space they often tend to have more than one business not always but a lot of times we do and i think one mistake a lot of founders make is lumping all of their financials into one bucket which it doesn't matter if you do that like it can it can be that way in your bank account as long as on paper you've really well tracked what are your expenses and your what revenue you bring in for each business each line of business needs to be checked separately so that you can you can share those those numbers with a potential buyer this might be a broad question but are there any traits that would have made it an automatic no like when people sit down to look at a business it sounds like as long as there's revenue and you can kind of hand over the assets and hand over the financials you have a sellable asset is that accurate or is there like a certain thing where you're like ah sorry even though you're making money that's just not going to sell good question and i say that because it's not easy to answer i thought usually when i say good questions because it's hard to answer bad questions i mean i think some people would say personal brand makes it hard to sell but she sold a personal brand so it's obviously not impossible i think you have to think about how does your personal brand affect the business like if your personal brand is what's doing the selling then that that can be hard to pass off to someone else so that's almost like yeah you have revenue but will that continue after i acquire this yes and also like the biggest question is how how can the buyer benefit from what you're what you're passing over to them because they're not necessarily going to use it in the same way that you did in fact they probably won't they're going to change it in some ways and sometimes if you have a strategic buyer they might use it a totally different way so like i was talking earlier today with a woman who's thinking about how to position her media company for sale and she was asking me all about like how do you value it what are the multiples and i said the thing that really matters is like what will the the person who buys this what are they going to do with it and they're going to use your audience to sell their product to those people and how much money can they make by selling their product to your list so that that's that is answers a question of like what is it worth to them is what can they do with your list what can they accomplish with that and how much is that list worth if they can market exclusively to it what i like about your answer is that it highlights how much of a gray area there is in business sales and this comes around to another philosophy of yours that i'd really like to dig into this is something that you talked about with ryan which is not relying on standard multiples when you price out a business for sale so the idea that you'd shared was it's very common for people to go to sell a business and then they kind of just say okay well ecom stores sell for x multiple and so that's i'm doing this much revenue i'm doing this much profit therefore my business is worth this much and it sounds like your position is well actually if you focus too much on the multiple you could under price yourself you need to be a little bit more strategic and intentional when pricing your company can you talk us through your ideas there a little more and just how do you price a business when you're getting ready to sell it how do you think about price yeah i mean exactly what i just said which is you've got to think about what is it worth to the other person so i compare this and by the way i'm not an m a expert so when ryan and i were talking about this he was like i kind of take issue with some of the things you're saying like we didn't totally see eye on everything here this is my personal experience from selling small companies and also from seeing other people do it which is i think there's too much talk around multiples like it's a nice guiding point and it gives you a sense of what it might be worth but you know if i had focused on multiples in the content industry i would have drastically undersold myself on my last sale like that doesn't that's not always that's not the be all end all so think about what is it worth to someone else and if you're gonna go sell your house in the neighborhood you might look at comps of what other houses in the neighborhood sold for but in the end none of that really matters it doesn't directly affect the cost of your house what matters is how much you're willing to park for when you sell your house like how much you're willing to sell it for whatever feels good to you and how much someone else is willing to pay for it and if there's someone who really wants your house for some crazy reason they you know their best friend lives next door and they're just dying to have their house it might be worth two times as much as as as you know the ones in your neighborhood so i i think like just thinking about it that way it's really they call it a strategic buyer who is going to buy your business who is going to do something strategically with it and i the point is like instead of it being one plus one equals two that's one plus one equals three or four or five how can you find a buyer who's gonna do something with your business that's gonna give them so much more value that they're willing to pay beyond the traditional multiple this is perfect timing for this because as you've been talking i've been taking notes for a very specific reason believe it or not i own a test prep yeah company and we have a brand called lsat outside clarity there's a test called the lsat for attorneys in the states i know i don't know if it's in other countries as well um but it's a very very difficult test to pass and so people take practice tests and courses to learn how to pass the lsat so that they can more or less pass the bar and we've been working on this company for a while and it's where you mentioned you know i personally put 25 grand into it to get it started got the boost the seo is is there's a couple brands that actually sell the courses that rank ahead of us in in organic search and it's difficult to beat them for like their own product you know but we're always right underneath them so other than those examples we're we're number one across the board and we're to the point where we're like unless we start marketing in other ways how can we possibly get this thing any bigger like we own the search and we know that for some of these these test prep companies that actually selling the product that we're essentially selling through affiliate there's nowhere else for us to go and so we've been having this conversation for for the last month thinking well we go on flippa and you know it's like times x multiple you can get four and then i say to myself yeah but you have to have like the one person that strategic buyer like you said that would actually do that and i see that i think it's a little bit overwhelming for like we're talking about before so somebody has got a newsletter like 20 000 subscribers somebody that has been writing on a blog and posting on twitter for the past couple years about like their gardening brand or whatever the case is so i know we've been on this like m a topic for a little bit i want to i want to transition a little to them well let me hold on let me give you a tiny bit of advice because this has been really interesting to me and since we started they got acquired you know we're building this database we have about 1200 entries so far of deals that fit our criteria wow and one thing that's been really interesting to me is you know when someone goes to sell a business obviously there's there's the marketplace route you can list it somewhere you can get a broker who might help you connect to the buyer but there's tons of companies that where the founder finds someone in their own network and often it's through a cold pitch and this is one of the products that i want us to do we're getting there which is like just profiling some of the companies that have have cold pitched their buyer their cold pitched their way to an acquisition and we have a number of stories like that on the website already but i want to bundle them together and get specific on how to do that but it's it's just basically like researching who might be interested in this and who who's a bigger in the industry or competitor who might want this and cool pitching them and asking them and sometimes you can get a better deal doing that even than going some of the other routes um even more so if you can get i mean the best case scenario is you get several people interested yeah and that's when you can really leverage that interest to get a higher price uh before we move on real quick could we we've talked a little bit about how to dis or how to think about whether or not your business is sellable how to think about who might want to buy it you've mentioned a few actionable steps like you need to make sure that you have your finances available that those can be shared and ideally that the business is set up in such a way that the functional or like operational aspects can be passed off but if i decide that i'm going to sell something like what are the first two or three things that i do from there is it just cove outreach and be like find those potential buyers and say hey i think i want to sell this so you're interested in buying it or do i go out and find an attorney first what is and i know you're not an m a expert but yeah being somebody who's been through this a couple of times what what advice would you share to somebody in that position well i take this one step back and say think about why do you want to sell and have you maximize revenue because even though you know i don't think multiples are everything your revenue was going to play a big role in how much somebody else wants to pay for your company so if you're thinking about like do i want to sell in a year or two like if you don't need to sell tomorrow and you have a little time i would think about is there a way to maximize revenue i mean that's always the goal of a business but for some reason sometimes when someone knows that you're doing it to prepare for a sale it's like more of a motivating factor to say oh we should do this we've been thinking about forever that's an easy win like let's get that in shape before we sell it so thinking about have you maximized your revenue before you pass it off to someone is a good like do that ahead of time there's a couple of things you can do if you're in a bigger business like say uh seven figures in revenue i would recommend you know finding some sort of mma advisor who can help you prepare for the sale and they'll probably eventually help you find a buyer too but they will suggest things you can do now to prepare ahead of time and maximize the value of your business when you do so and then in terms of like looking for a buyer yeah i think i think thinking about starting to do some cold outreach and just getting those conversations started if you're at that point where you want to move you want to move on it i think that makes sense especially because i would do that before getting a broker and i think a broker can be a great example and are great resource in some situations like they kind of get a bad rap but they also often can help you find the right people and they might even like help you sell it for more than you could sell it yourself because they're incentivized because they get a commission right so it can definitely be a good route but i usually suggest if you have the time and the ambition to think about first about how you would directly work with a buyer and then yeah you need to get a lawyer in place but you don't you don't really need a lawyer until you figure out if you actually have a buyer that's great advice and i also love what you so people thinking about this can combine some of the things we've talked about here so far if you are one to two years out from an acquisition maybe that's a good time to start that podcast on the side where you start talking to people or potential acquirers as well put yourself in a good position to create that bidding war when you do go to sell i'm interested in tgi itself because we've we've mentioned a few times how much you have done in such a short amount of time with like a relatively small list i mean that as a compliment in every which way you're a pro with this sometimes when i see your past successes i think to myself like why she even bothers starting another brand and that's how i know that we have so much in common because i would i would do the same thing right so i want to hear about how they got acquired went from idea to we got something and and we're doing it did you have like a white light moment where you thought this would be a good idea is this something that you kind of slowly worked yourself into how did the brand take shape yeah it was definitely more of a slow working into it partly because i was forced to take to do that because when i sold my last company during the pandemic and you know my kids were home a lot i didn't have a lot of work time and then we went into the summer and my husband and i looked at each other and were like we just didn't want to do that thing again where you're having to juggle trying to work and also trying to watch the kids we knew they're gonna be off for a bunch of time for a bunch of times so we ended up just taking a road trip and just both taking off for a while so all this to say like i would have probably in my ideal world jumped right into a new project and i was forced to take a lot more time and more solely but i think in retrospect it was a good thing because it gave me a lot of time to think about whether this is really what i wanted to do and then i just jumped into it once my kids went back to school in september or last year i knew i wanted to do something that used my skills which is really in media the question was like what was the best way to do that and i experimented with a bunch of things in the year prior to to starting this for example i tried i did some consulting like helping some some other companies grow their writing teams to see if i enjoyed doing that and i just like batted around a lot of ideas i put a lot of ideas up on colonel k-e-r-n-a-l that's a place for startup ideas um i'm not as active now anymore there because i'm working on one idea but when i was thinking about ideas i used to put a lot up there so i did a lot of thinking about like what would what would be exciting to me because the truth is like i am really passionate about this idea but i don't believe that there's only like i'm passionate about the building process like i'm not the kind of person where i can only do one company and i that's like i'm gonna give my whole soul to that that's all i'm doing for the rest of my life like i know i'm not gonna probably do this one forever it's really fun and i i love doing it right now but i i think of the the process of the building is the part that i enjoy and i'm passionate about our mission too but it's it's not like this is the only product i could ever build so i wanted to pick something and actually acknowledging that was like helpful for me because it didn't have to be like the perfect choice whatever i did next because there's a lot of pressure especially after you sell a business it's like what do you do next and you have to make a decision and it feels like oh i'm putting all my effort into something i really wanted to challenge myself because i knew if i was already if i was using my skills in media there's got to be something new to it that seems like fun and i can i can learn and the two things that were new to me here are m a like i am our target market because i've gone through this myself and i know the pain points but i'm not an expert in m a and through this project i get to learn a lot about it and surrounding myself people who are experts and then secondly we're monetizing through a database and i hadn't done that before so for me it's a new way to monetize as well you said this a couple of times in different interviews too which is a large part of the reason for this project is that you've gone through several exits you know some of the pain points i'm really curious is there anything that you're doing differently as you're building this in order to sidestep some of those pain points in the future so like what what are some of the biggest pain points that you've run into that really led to the creation of this and are you doing anything different as you build this in order to sidestep those in the case that one day you eventually sell it i think any business i built i would i think i'm process oriented now but i don't plan to sell like what i'm pulling i'm not building this to sell it i'm building it because i enjoy building it but i mean any business i would always from the beginning just the same things we talked about really track finances really well and document processes really well those are the two things and have a good brand a strong brand but ironically all the things you need to do to sell a business are the same things you need to do to build the business that you want to actually keep so it all works towards the goal anyways and your first question was just related to what what are some of those pain points yes so one of them was finding professionals who could help me because i found it difficult and mind you there's tons of them but i didn't know where to look people who would who were happy to help with a six or seven figure deal so i'm talking about like a lawyer like a lot of the lawyers they do they might do bigger deals or an m adviser um any of these folks say a lot of them prefer to do bigger deals because they make more money and i didn't know how to find people who would do this size of a deal and i were in the very early stages of this but we're slowly putting together you know lists of different types of professionals who could help somebody so that if when you are ready you're like oh here's i know i can go to this lawyer or for example you know i'm starting to get a handle on certain m a firms that specialize in in different types of sales like there's one that i can think of that sells digital agencies and i had a friend of mine who was thinking about selling his agency and he was asking me for rex and i said oh yeah actually there's a firm that specializes in that exact thing and it's just like you have to you have to know the space you know and and someone who's been building their business for all those years is not going to know the m a space yeah like once again that's that's why i'm in this podcast to ask you questions for our audience but also like for me because i'm at this like really interesting point in my life where i think do i just ride these out into the sunset forever you know or do i because it's like emotional too i don't think that gets talked about enough like i dedicated my life to building my agency and my employees and all that and so it gets to the point where you think i do this rest of my life or do i make a big change which ties into my next question because my agency is very very mission driven we work in a specific specific field which i'm very very passionate about and it helps a lot of people and it does a lot of really good work and you had mentioned earlier that you want to do something that's specific to your mission and and what is that mission have you defined it is there like a tagline that you've come up with that you keep in the forefront of your mind what's what's the point i guess yeah yeah i mean i need to work on my elevator pitch to my tagline to be totally honest i've been trying out three times it's hard in the beginning it's hard but i mean the mission is pretty clear to me which is i want to lift up underrepresented founders and i consider the definition of that to be pretty broad so it's you know definitely women i am like one of my personal missions is to lift up other women in business and so we go out of our way like we are hustling hard to try and find female founders who have sold their business which is a challenge because i have found that women aren't as eager or willing to share that big success as men are so you know my goal with the content is i try to have at least one female founder on the site every week and you know we're mostly hitting that but it's it's hard and it requires like really distinct focus to get there but i think there are other ways to think about unrepresented founders too like even bootstrap founders to me that hits the mark because they're not talked about as much and they're certainly not featured as much and older founders so anyone who's just doing things a little bit differently like founders who are like me working 30 hours a week or 20 hours a week or 10 hours a week so just people who are doing it differently so that our mission is pretty clear is lifting up unrepresented founders but yeah i gotta the tagline still working on it and here's what will happen as soon as you think about it you'll put it on the website and then like a month later you'll look at it again and you're like oh i think i need to change it you know so i i feel your pain and underrepresented founders i think is so important because as is the case in in like most things in life that's most of the people right like the stories that you hear on bloomberg or whatever like those are anomalies that's like the very very very what's it called like long tail end of what we see and hear about and like the the bell curve the 80 of the people that are building businesses that are looking for this solution that's that's like everybody yeah right and so that's why i'm excited to talk about this but like i'm excited for you because i really really feel like you're on to something that like i said in the beginning like the conversation hasn't really been had and i think there's a lot of people that their ears are going to perk up to this you'd be like wait a minute you're like i can sell my business i do 90 grand a year in revenue like i can cash out on this thing and put like 300 grand in my pocket like hell yeah that's awesome you know yeah no you're right and i think like part of it is normalizing building a little bit differently because the truth is yeah lots of us fall into this bucket but because we're not featured as much sometimes you feel like you're building on your own when you're doing that you know you don't really know how to reach out or find other people who are thinking about it in this way even just like the bootstrap community you know it's sometimes like the only person bootstrapping because you read tons of stories about all these phrases and it's just the truth is that lots of people are bootstrapping i think there's also like a big education component and like cutting through the component too which is another reason that i'm so glad to see you guys building what you're building because like anybody who's behind the scenes or even just in it knows that like actually raising millions of dollars isn't always that desirable uh because of the way that it can change like your goals and the culture inside the company or you know even just simple things like when people say oh we did 20 million dollars last year great what does that actually mean like how much did you actually take home because you can work 80 hours a week to make 20 million dollars and be broke and like people who are in it know it but there's this story that's just projected and so many people who are just kind of getting into entrepreneurship or thinking of making the leap i think are unfairly given a version of this world that's just not really that accurate and so it's nice to see yeah it's nice to see that changing yeah i mean the truth is there's also tons of companies out there that are bootstrapping and super profitable and will never sell um and you know i hope eventually down the line i could see a world where we cover those types of companies too because the acquisition is just one point in time and it's a starting point for us but i don't want to over glamorize that either because that and there's for a lot of people like the selling process doesn't go great and it's hard to tell those stories because it's tricky you know yeah people ask us about this at trends too we're trying to figure out a good path into this like instead of telling success stories all the time can you can you tell me some failure stories because that's kind of the funny thing is like everybody who's got that win has way more failure stories then success stories how can we start mining some of those you know and like sharing sharing those lessons with people you mentioned something really interesting where i keyed in on just one thing you said the uh acquisition aspect is just a starting point and it's an important i guess note because you guys are still in the very early phases of this i'm really curious about how you're thinking about certain types of growth early on here you've been vocal about one thing which is like i i find you to be incredibly thoughtful about kpis you choose your kpis very well thoughtfully you don't just kind of absentmindedly pick revenue growth or something like that so i would love for you to talk us through a little bit of how you're thinking about choosing those kpis right now and then after i'd like to get into seo specifically because this is one area where i'm very curious to get your thoughts you're kind of an expert there and i'm i'm keen to know how you're setting up they got acquired for like long-term seo success but before that what how are you thinking about kpis right now what are you tracking yeah we're pretty much tracking email subscribers which is my like always on my list and i feel like i i really i need to hire someone at this point to help with it because it's not growing as fast as i would like we're still growing but we haven't done paid media yet so um yeah we definitely put more money and and more time and effort into it but yeah that's the number one thing we're tracking i really i never look at website traffic i think eventually that might become important but we're so early right now that all that really matters to me is you know our email list is growing you know we also have a podcast and this is the first time i've ever been in charge of a podcast uh and and we have a producer who's created it like i haven't created it she's done it but we looked at the metrics for that and again i i it's so early days that especially with the podcast i don't consider i don't care about downloads i really care about the quality in the early days because my goal with the podcast is to use it to garner trust in the brand and so what i consider success is when we get notes of people saying this was so great like the quality of this is great i learned something i'm going to keep listening and to me that that brings someone loyal like it turned someone who might have been a casual reader into a loyal listener and that's the goal so i kind of feel like right now it's just like it's so early that yeah the things that matter are basically email subscribers and and revenue too but right now we're not bringing enough money to cover our expenses so like i'm watching that in terms of like when can we when will we start covering expenses when we start breaking even fascinating yeah i think that's so important and again it kind of comes back to this idea that we talked about about like reconsidering the narratives that you get just by default if you pay too much attention to mainstream storytelling in the startup space you'll learn that like oh well you know it's revenue growth is number one or maybe users or something like that and i just like how you're thoughtful about that i admire your seo knowledge and i'd be curious to know how you what are you looking at in order to set this new site up for like seo success yeah i love this stuff and i think it's really fun i don't really consider myself an expert in seo i have a guy who does who does seo stuff for you when i when i need help planning who's really great and he's he is my north star for this stuff but i like executing it and so what we're doing before they got acquired this is the first time that i've thought about seo for a brand from the very beginning the right life which i sold last year did really well in seo we did a few things in the early days but it was mostly just because we put out great content over the years and so much of it yeah and then in the later years we started optimizing which helped and we had we had you know great um an age domain which helped well we have we have an seo strategy so we have two types of content on the site one type is deal stories so there's stories of companies that have sold and for those we're doing kind of the basic for seo in terms of we basically just we figure that what it's most likely to rank for is the name of the company or the company that sold or the company that bought or the founder of the company that's sold so we we do a little bit to optimize for those keywords and just some best practices like we try to throw an h2 in with the keyword even though it's um they're often pretty short so my my belief with seo is like 80 20 is the way to go there's a million things that you can do there's it's never ending the amount of things you can do but you're never going to get them all done and it just doesn't make sense right now so do the low hanging fruit and see where that gets you and then you can take the posts that have done well and make them do even better so the second type of content on our site are advice and resource posts so these are posts about like how to navigate a sale and all the aspects of it and those are the ones where we're heavily going after different keywords some of them are writing just because we want to cover the topic on the site but then some of them are writing because the seo expert that i work with pulled a list and said hey you could try to write for these different keywords and here's how we try to do it but they're all really small volume keywords they're not huge in this space and it just takes a long time to to do well with seo it's like really a long a long term game the other important piece is well backlinks and i mean i think the best thing that we're doing right now is i've had so many podcast interview requests yeah and i really don't consider myself a great speaker i'm much more of a writer and i prefer to write but i've been trying to say yes to them i've been doing like one a week and i think that will help us get these backlinks in the early days and i mean having a few we had a uh like we got covered in the new york times after our launch which was really nice so that was a high dr backlink so we really need to get more of those but you know we'll get there eventually you and i have such a similar approach on anything there's two silos to your site basically there's like personal stories which you could pick up keywords for names and companies and like probably secondary keywords about who it's sold to and and that's cool and the intent for those will probably like sign up for an email list or listen to your podcast and that's really awesome but then there's a separate silo which is like how-to posts and questions really and although they're a little bit long tail and the keyword search volume is like relatively low like what i always tell people is if you bang out one of those like even every month you know you look down a year later and suddenly you got 12 different keywords of like 30 searches a month that compound on on itself and they just stack in their stack and they stack so if you got like the guts for it seo is is such a cool play but it's hard because everybody wants to turn on the faucet and throw some facebook ads and look at their google analytics numbers and be like whoa i'm going viral you know but but it's that kind of traffic which especially your product which i think is really brilliant is it's it's a database really like you're selling access to premiere contacts i suppose is the way to do it this can be super super profitable i knew an esports newsletter that that did the same thing they built a list of like 300 really high-profile people that owned like some of these gaming teams and they they sold that list for a bunch of money and it was it was very successful so i i think you're totally totally on the right track and i i co-sign you thanks well i am very curious to hear from you lexi because yes tim mentioned a couple of times you guys have very similar ways of looking at the world similar backgrounds well similar i don't know similar backgrounds before we hit record you had mentioned that you had some questions about copy blogger and i'd be curious to hear what some of those are just to hear youtube jam on that for a while yeah well i really just wanted to know where copy bloggers at now because i mean i used to read it years and years and years ago and i wondered what the business model is now and what your what your main products are well i did the same thing uh the i've told my story on on the podcast a few times mostly on my blog i wrote about it but coffee blogger was where i learned everything i am very much like you you put me on a blank page and i can just be myself and somehow what i'm trying to say just comes out but like you put me in front of a microphone and i'm like rambling and i'm nervous and and so i just i like the writing and it really spoke to me and so copy blogger is how i learned how to do everything is how i learned how to write on the internet and tell stories and build email lists and and it was really like my education so a couple years ago i worked really hard the last 10 years and was in a position to basically acquire the majority ownership of it so now me and brian clark are still partners and it was really interesting i think you'll appreciate this because i i assumed wrongfully that the game had changed and people are going to be more interested in like twitter threads and tick tock and even podcasts and stuff but i was really pleased to learn that writing is still like the rainmakers are still writers you know that's that's always said you can write and you can be persuasive and especially if you can write copy through emails and you know how to build funnels and autoresponders it's just in my view the most valuable skill that there really is right now and so for context to answer your question it's twofold really we have a membership site which is is going great and that was really hard because i'm not a product guy i'm a lead gen guy i make the phone ring and that's why i like seo so much you know and so building a product was super hard and super uncomfortable but i'm really proud of what we did but on this on the higher end side we have our certification which we're going to publish in a couple months but then on top of that the real sleeper move that we did is we created a copywriting agency called digitalcommerce.com and since so much of the traffic that comes to coffee blogger is so like reputational and the brand is still like really really polished we will do a million bucks this year and for an agency within 11 months to get to you know 83 monthly recurring revenue there's a ton of work it was really really hard but uh it's it's really really worked out and it's been a hell of an adventure i'm ready for a break i'll tell you that much how many times i love this podcast how many people do you have working yeah working for you well how do you run an agency do you know johnny master i recognize the name you might in copywriter's heyday when rainmaker fm was the podcast network he was one of the podcasters owner that i used to listen to and he just had a boutique agency and i followed him a lot because it's pretty easy to start an seo agency it's pretty difficult to build like a good one that actually generates results to know what they're doing and so i i followed this guy and when i bought copyblogger i bought like a couple assets and digital commerce was actually the website they used to host all the courses and like copyright was kind of the media that sent that to digital commerce and i thought damn that's a really great name for an agency digital commerce partners and so i just approached johnny and i said hey let's turn copy vlogger into a legion and let's partner on an agency and um and so he runs that whole thing i i have my own agency i i can't do two that's that's madness cool that's really cool yeah it's cool to see the brand still around yeah it was very scary and i'm happy that people like you are are still doing great work and and showing examples that we can tap into i'm very happy that ethan is on this ride with me because i i couldn't do it without him and it's going strong i mean it's like a da 80 something website yeah that's so you know like we're at 14 right now so yeah so you can only go up from there it takes time for sure but yeah i'm i'm flattered thank you so much for the compliment i like to keep it about the guests but even still i'm i'm grateful that you're paying attention thank you well this was great lexi thank you so much for joining us for the people who are interested we'll link up to all this in the show notes but obviously they can check out they got acquired.com um they can follow you is it alexisprant on twitter anything else they should oh they should definitely check out the pod because i'm listening to it yeah and uh we gotta we got a a little hint there's another episode dropping soon but yup i've obviously listened to all the episodes so far the one with sampara fantastic i've really enjoyed it so far thank you it's been super fun yeah yeah they got acquired just on your podcast player yep and anything else uh people should know about those are the most important ones thank you all right thanks guys this is fun and thanks to everybody who listened we'll see you all next week [Music] you