Why would you build me a site that makes 2k/mo for less 1k. Why wouldn't you just build these sites and sell them 10-20x what your asking for to build them in 6-12mos. Unless 9 out 10 of these don't work out.
8
Hey Bob,
That question makes sense, but it's a simple answer.
To make a site like this succeed, you need to work at it. If it was a case of us building them and then they would automatically rank and make money without us doing further work to them, then of course we would keep 100% of them for ourselves.
That's what was so ironic about the scams I used to see on flippa, they were promising autopilot millions. Why not just keep the site?
Now, my team actually do build and run and then flip many sites ourselves, we have a portfolio making five figures per month right now, and we are always actively building, buying and selling more.
But we have a capacity for how many sites we can run at any given time. Let's say we can manage 20 sites ourselves, but we have researched hundreds of niches, and we have another part of our team which can build out sites easily (to get them to a certain point of "readiness") and then there is also a huge demand from our audience, it just makes sense that we handle the supply to meet that demand.
In this aspect of our business, we're taking the short-term win over the long-term win of building and keeping them, but you have to do a bit of everything in order to not miss out on opportunities.
So, your conclusion that only 9 out of 10 of them work isn't accurate here, although I should definitely stress that the success of one of our websites comes down to the new owners ability to make it work, which is why we have created so much training over the years too.
1
But the whole process could be outsourced with your services.
SEO
Article writing
PR
Link building
2
True but it's the management and the strategy and the focus that is not outsourceable. Each site works differently and if we just mass built out these sites and automated all of the above then we'd a.) Need a lot of capital to make it work and b.) A lot of sites wouldn't succeed. What sets successful sites apart is having someone focused on them in the driving seat. This is not something you can just set and forget.
1
Btw, I'm not trying to give you hard time. Just trying to understand.
1
Thanks! I didn't think you were, but appreciate the clarification. It's always good to get some of the harder questions so I can understand how people perceive the offer etc.
4
congratulations on great business! Would you please share which tools you use to manage your very large team of freelancers?
2
Hey Eugene,
We've found the system to be more important than the tools themselves. We've played around with various different management tools and what works best for us right now is keeping it simple. We use a combination of Slack, Trello, and Google Docs/sheets.
If a team is trained well and operates well, then everything works fine with those tools.
I also have a lot of SOPs and a full time COO who keeps things running well, because personally I am not very good at that side of things.
3
I like the simple as possible approach. I set up systems for businesses like yours and a good set of SOPs with basic systems will beat a complex sets of systems where people only use 25% of the features.
4
Touching 1M revenue is no less feat, congrats!
1
Thanks!
3
One part that stuck out to me is the education piece. If you're going to hand over the keys, it's good to teach people how to drive.
2
Yep absolutely. I think whether people prefer to buy a site or build one themselves, they will need to learn how to use the site, so we want to give them that skill regardless.
3
This was an absolutely cracking read. Blows my mind to read about people running highly successful businesses in such niche and lucrative areas. Great story and thanks for sharing.
2
Thanks! Happy to hear this.
2
Great interview! Thanks for going into such detail.
Question about Amazon affiliates: Don't you have to hit a certain website traffic threshold in order to quality for Amazon associates? How do you do this when the site is brand new?
1
You can sign up for Amazon with a brand new site, and then you have 180 days to earn your first three sales, at which point they review your site to make sure it is compliant. So no you don't need a certain traffic threshold.
1
Great, that makes sense. How do you think about affiliate networks or individual affiliate programs?
1
I don't really have a preference. I mostly look at it the other way around anyway. What problems do my audience have? Is there an existing product with an affiliate program which will solve those problems? Great! I don't really worry whether it's individual or a network at this point, so long as I trust the vendor.
2
Hey Dominic, Great interview! Congrats on your success so far. We are focusing on SEO currently to grow our business - what tools would you recommend?
2
If I had to pick just one tool it would be Ahrefs, but there are lots of other tools too. It depends on your goal. For example, if you want to do an onpage SEO audit, I'd recommend something else.
If you let me know more, I can recommend something more specific.
I already know something about you and Humanproofdsigns thorugh facebook groups like nichehacks and nichesiteproject with Doug.
.
And I am also in amazon affiliate niche business so I was wondering if you can help me in choosing the links package on your site.
Currently i haave some medium search volume keyword which are ranking on 2nd and 3rd page.
So which PBN link package should I buy on Humanproofdesigns in order to rank them on first page?
Thanks!
1
Hey Mike,
It's really difficult to know for sure without more details about your site, so if you send an email to dom@humanproofdesigns.com we can take a look in more detail.
1
Hey Dom,
What's your view on sites listed on Flippa ? Most are crap / fake ?
PS : I'll test one of your article packages in the coming 2 months. Curious to see about the quality - not easy to find on UpWork.
1
Not all junk, but most of the turnkey ones are. There are definitely some good sites on there but it's very much a needle/haystack thing going through them all. I prefer just paying slightly more and getting them off EmpireFlippers or FE International
1
Hey,
Long term follower of your site.
What is your overall profit %?
What is a healthy profit % that you should target for service based business model?
1
Our services range from 10% profit to about 50%, so there's a large difference depending which ones sell. I would say 30% is really the minimum overall so that you have plenty of of funds available for other things like advertising, management costs etc
1
Thx for the article, its motivating and feels real/achievable :)
1
Great, glad you enjoyed it.
1
Dominic, this was a great interview! Hugely helpful. Myself and a fellow indiehacker are currently building out an affiliate site so this is very timely. What do you think is the biggest hurdle we should watch out for?
1
Hmm, tough to say any one thing. I think the biggest hurdle will be when you reach a point where you feel like nothing is working and you can't figure out what you should do next. When this happens, it's usually just a case of soldiering on until your site finally pops up to page 1, but it can be a killer to get through.
1
Dominic, this was a great interview! Hugely helpful. Myself and a fellow indiehacker are currently building out an affiliate site so this is very timely. What do you think is the biggest hurdle we should watch out for?
1
Great interview and info!
Sorry if may ask an off topic question but as a someone who has done alot of work in Taiwan (Taichung) and thinking of moving there permanently how hwas doing business there been? Feel free to move to PMs as not to distract from your great product.
Thanks!
1
Yeah you can PM me with any questions you have. Essentially though since my business is 100% online it hasn't made a difference where I am. I have a spouse visa so I can work here without an ARC.
1
Congrats on the $1MM ARR, but I’m curious why so little growth in the year? I don’t mean that to sound insulting, but rather I’m curious as to what scaling challenges you’re currently facing. I also might be used to seeing VC funded growth numbers, because 30% annual is not bad at all.
2
The big growth took place in 2017 when we went from around $600k in 2016 to $1.1 MM in 2017. When making our goals for 2018, we didn't want to arbitrarily raise revenue for the sake of it, so we set 30% as a realistic growth goal, and then decided to focus on profit, and type of income too. Some of our services like article creation are less profitable than website creation..and also revenue isn't a true metric of profit, since you could achieve 100% revenue growth by spending 200% more on paid ads..so it wouldn't really be a good yardstick to always use.
There are definitely challenges to growing though. For example, maybe we reach a ceiling in terms of demand for our products, or the more sites we sell, the less profitable we become since we need to hire middle level managers to cope with the increased number of freelancers, and so on.
Also, recurring revenue is an important target for us this year too. So it's more a case of 2017 was incredible growth, and 2018 is realigning the focus, so that in 2019 we can scale faster again.
I'll be honest this makes no sense to me:
Why would you build me a site that makes 2k/mo for less 1k. Why wouldn't you just build these sites and sell them 10-20x what your asking for to build them in 6-12mos. Unless 9 out 10 of these don't work out.
Hey Bob,
That question makes sense, but it's a simple answer.
To make a site like this succeed, you need to work at it. If it was a case of us building them and then they would automatically rank and make money without us doing further work to them, then of course we would keep 100% of them for ourselves.
That's what was so ironic about the scams I used to see on flippa, they were promising autopilot millions. Why not just keep the site?
Now, my team actually do build and run and then flip many sites ourselves, we have a portfolio making five figures per month right now, and we are always actively building, buying and selling more.
But we have a capacity for how many sites we can run at any given time. Let's say we can manage 20 sites ourselves, but we have researched hundreds of niches, and we have another part of our team which can build out sites easily (to get them to a certain point of "readiness") and then there is also a huge demand from our audience, it just makes sense that we handle the supply to meet that demand.
In this aspect of our business, we're taking the short-term win over the long-term win of building and keeping them, but you have to do a bit of everything in order to not miss out on opportunities.
So, your conclusion that only 9 out of 10 of them work isn't accurate here, although I should definitely stress that the success of one of our websites comes down to the new owners ability to make it work, which is why we have created so much training over the years too.
But the whole process could be outsourced with your services.
SEO
Article writing
PR
Link building
True but it's the management and the strategy and the focus that is not outsourceable. Each site works differently and if we just mass built out these sites and automated all of the above then we'd a.) Need a lot of capital to make it work and b.) A lot of sites wouldn't succeed. What sets successful sites apart is having someone focused on them in the driving seat. This is not something you can just set and forget.
Btw, I'm not trying to give you hard time. Just trying to understand.
Thanks! I didn't think you were, but appreciate the clarification. It's always good to get some of the harder questions so I can understand how people perceive the offer etc.
congratulations on great business! Would you please share which tools you use to manage your very large team of freelancers?
Hey Eugene,
We've found the system to be more important than the tools themselves. We've played around with various different management tools and what works best for us right now is keeping it simple. We use a combination of Slack, Trello, and Google Docs/sheets.
If a team is trained well and operates well, then everything works fine with those tools.
I also have a lot of SOPs and a full time COO who keeps things running well, because personally I am not very good at that side of things.
I like the simple as possible approach. I set up systems for businesses like yours and a good set of SOPs with basic systems will beat a complex sets of systems where people only use 25% of the features.
Touching 1M revenue is no less feat, congrats!
Thanks!
One part that stuck out to me is the education piece. If you're going to hand over the keys, it's good to teach people how to drive.
Yep absolutely. I think whether people prefer to buy a site or build one themselves, they will need to learn how to use the site, so we want to give them that skill regardless.
This was an absolutely cracking read. Blows my mind to read about people running highly successful businesses in such niche and lucrative areas. Great story and thanks for sharing.
Thanks! Happy to hear this.
Great interview! Thanks for going into such detail.
Question about Amazon affiliates: Don't you have to hit a certain website traffic threshold in order to quality for Amazon associates? How do you do this when the site is brand new?
You can sign up for Amazon with a brand new site, and then you have 180 days to earn your first three sales, at which point they review your site to make sure it is compliant. So no you don't need a certain traffic threshold.
Great, that makes sense. How do you think about affiliate networks or individual affiliate programs?
I don't really have a preference. I mostly look at it the other way around anyway. What problems do my audience have? Is there an existing product with an affiliate program which will solve those problems? Great! I don't really worry whether it's individual or a network at this point, so long as I trust the vendor.
Hey Dominic, Great interview! Congrats on your success so far. We are focusing on SEO currently to grow our business - what tools would you recommend?
If I had to pick just one tool it would be Ahrefs, but there are lots of other tools too. It depends on your goal. For example, if you want to do an onpage SEO audit, I'd recommend something else.
If you let me know more, I can recommend something more specific.
I highly recommend https://seodity.com for on-page audit.
Nice work Dominic!
Thanks!
hey @HumanProofDesigns,
I already know something about you and Humanproofdsigns thorugh facebook groups like nichehacks and nichesiteproject with Doug.
.
And I am also in amazon affiliate niche business so I was wondering if you can help me in choosing the links package on your site.
Currently i haave some medium search volume keyword which are ranking on 2nd and 3rd page.
So which PBN link package should I buy on Humanproofdesigns in order to rank them on first page?
Thanks!
Hey Mike,
It's really difficult to know for sure without more details about your site, so if you send an email to dom@humanproofdesigns.com we can take a look in more detail.
Hey Dom,
What's your view on sites listed on Flippa ? Most are crap / fake ?
PS : I'll test one of your article packages in the coming 2 months. Curious to see about the quality - not easy to find on UpWork.
Not all junk, but most of the turnkey ones are. There are definitely some good sites on there but it's very much a needle/haystack thing going through them all. I prefer just paying slightly more and getting them off EmpireFlippers or FE International
Hey,
Long term follower of your site.
What is your overall profit %?
What is a healthy profit % that you should target for service based business model?
Our services range from 10% profit to about 50%, so there's a large difference depending which ones sell. I would say 30% is really the minimum overall so that you have plenty of of funds available for other things like advertising, management costs etc
Thx for the article, its motivating and feels real/achievable :)
Great, glad you enjoyed it.
Dominic, this was a great interview! Hugely helpful. Myself and a fellow indiehacker are currently building out an affiliate site so this is very timely. What do you think is the biggest hurdle we should watch out for?
Hmm, tough to say any one thing. I think the biggest hurdle will be when you reach a point where you feel like nothing is working and you can't figure out what you should do next. When this happens, it's usually just a case of soldiering on until your site finally pops up to page 1, but it can be a killer to get through.
Dominic, this was a great interview! Hugely helpful. Myself and a fellow indiehacker are currently building out an affiliate site so this is very timely. What do you think is the biggest hurdle we should watch out for?
Great interview and info!
Sorry if may ask an off topic question but as a someone who has done alot of work in Taiwan (Taichung) and thinking of moving there permanently how hwas doing business there been? Feel free to move to PMs as not to distract from your great product.
Thanks!
Yeah you can PM me with any questions you have. Essentially though since my business is 100% online it hasn't made a difference where I am. I have a spouse visa so I can work here without an ARC.
Congrats on the $1MM ARR, but I’m curious why so little growth in the year? I don’t mean that to sound insulting, but rather I’m curious as to what scaling challenges you’re currently facing. I also might be used to seeing VC funded growth numbers, because 30% annual is not bad at all.
The big growth took place in 2017 when we went from around $600k in 2016 to $1.1 MM in 2017. When making our goals for 2018, we didn't want to arbitrarily raise revenue for the sake of it, so we set 30% as a realistic growth goal, and then decided to focus on profit, and type of income too. Some of our services like article creation are less profitable than website creation..and also revenue isn't a true metric of profit, since you could achieve 100% revenue growth by spending 200% more on paid ads..so it wouldn't really be a good yardstick to always use.
There are definitely challenges to growing though. For example, maybe we reach a ceiling in terms of demand for our products, or the more sites we sell, the less profitable we become since we need to hire middle level managers to cope with the increased number of freelancers, and so on.
Also, recurring revenue is an important target for us this year too. So it's more a case of 2017 was incredible growth, and 2018 is realigning the focus, so that in 2019 we can scale faster again.
Fascinating. Thanks for the reply.