Steve: You are listening to the Mywifequiteherjob podcast, where I bring in successful bootstrapped business owners to teach us what strategies are working and what strategies are not. Now, this isn’t one of those podcasts where I bring on famous Entrepreneurs simply to celebrate their success, instead I have them take us back to the beginning, and dwell deeply into the exact strategies they used earlier on to gain traction for their businesses.

Now before we begin, I just wanted to share a quote from Ken Schneider who was the winner of a free E-commerce consult. Here’s what Ken had to say: It is very apparent to me, that Steve has built a wealth of the E-commerce information in a way of offering ideas and needed insight that are very encouraging. After discussing an array of different ideas and possible options, he was able to provide me with the tools and information that would help me find my own niche online and for Steve’s help and information, I am most grateful. Now, if you would like a free E-commerce consult from myself, enter my free podcast contest, where I’m giving away free one on one business consultations every single month.

For more information about this consult go to www.mywifequiteherjob.com/contest. And if you are interested in starting your own online business, be sure to sign up for my free six-day mini-course where I show you how my wife and I manage to make over 100K in profit in our first year of business; go to www.mywifequiteherjob.com for more information, now onto the show.
Welcome to the, mywifequiteherjob podcast. We will teach you how to create a business that suites your lifestyle, so you can spend more time with your family and focus on doing the things that you love. Here’s your host, Steve Chou!

Steve: Welcome to the mywifequiteherjob podcast. Today, I’m thrilled to have a friend of mine on the show, Viet Do. Now, I met Viet at Fincon and I know, I know I meet a lot of people at Fincon, which is why you should go. Anyways, you know Viet runs Dealzon.com which is a coupon sight for electronics and gadgets. Now, have you ever wondered how sites like TechBargains, FatWallet and other coupon based sites stay in business? Well, Viet does very well with Dealzon and hopefully today we’ll learn exactly how Dealzon works and how it makes its money. So, just a quick note about Viet; he’s probably one of the nicest guys you’ll ever meet and his deal sight is a business model that we actually haven’t covered yet in this podcast. So, welcome to the show Viet, really glad to have you.

Viet: Hey Steve, yeah, thanks a lot for having me on the programme. I hope I can shed some light on – for those people that might be interested to the field or the kind of like how coupon sites work and maybe give them some insights on how the industry works.

Steve: Yes, so, give us a brief description of your specific coupon site and exactly which products you focus on, and how you make money online.

Viet: Yea sure! So, Dealzon.com is very much a deal site– a deal aggregate site for gamers and techies, and that’s our focus. We– you won’t find like you know, Wall mart deals in terms of like, you know, groceries and what not or like target deals on any of that kind of stuff here, so you’re not going to find shoes or clothing, that’s very rarely, when I start giving away free shoes then I guess we don’t have a choice, we had to like, let people know about this right? But we mostly focus on technologies and gaming. And we have a very core set of users that pretty much just care about these so, mostly the people that visit our sites are gamers and then –

Steve: Okay –

Viet: They rate our stuff. So, if they are a gamer, they want to buy games and maybe like a computer hardware that relates to the game right, to learn the game faster. So, how DealZon works is pretty simple as any other of those deal sites that you mentioned actually.

Steve: Just pretend that none of the listeners know anything about how anything works.

Viet: Okay.

Steve: So…

Viet: Okay, that might be a good way to go with them. So, I mean, if you come to DealZon, you’ll see a list of the best deals of the day right, and if you’re a gamer, you can see right around on the first page – oh, okay, well, this game is on sale today. So, the front page will basically show you what’s hot for the day. Now, if you want to drill it down a little more, there’ll be different categories and you can go to different categories with the type of products that you’re interested in. So, as mentioned, we’re mostly focused on gaming and technology so gaming and laptops is kind of what we focus on lately.

Steve: Okay and bottom line I when someone clicks on your link and makes a purchase, you get a cut of that transaction.

Viet: Yes.

Steve: Is that correct?

Viet: Exactly.

Steve: Okay.

Viet: So this a commission based model, it’s basically lichen – an affiliate lichen, so you know, we use very typical networks such as commission junction, link share and various other networks.

Steve: So, but is that for physical products primarily then?

Viet: it’s half-half actually. So, these days, in terms of gaming – and especially if you’re not into the norm of it and I know that different industries are like this; it’s actually a lot of digital products now, so you know, well, these days when you buy a game, it could just be a CD key of a game key that you receive, and you plug into your like a DRM platform – you know, a digital rights management platform – and you’re going to receive the game that way. And you know, since it’s a digital product, you know, is actually a very little hassle involved for everyone involved, where you pay the money and you get your keys and you get the game and that’s it, and you know, there’s no shipping time or whatever right, so –

Steve: Okay.

Viet: It’s actually a pretty good way to go to– about getting a game these days, and it’s expanding lately, yeah.

Steve: Are the pay outs higher for those type of deals as opposed to the physical products because –

Viet: Yeah, I don’t think so, it’s typically higher. It’s not necessary like 2X or whatever, or like 3X or whatever, just, but by virtue of the merchant not having to store anything beyond like a digital code right, that they can e-mail out right away through the system. They’re just more willing to- there’s just more margin and leeways there, in terms of a commission split.

Steve: So, can you give us an idea of what some of the commissions look like on a physical product verses you know, a code for example?

Viet: Yeah, sure! I’m going to be very general here, in the sense that you know, some of our stuff there’s you know, different rates, so for those that aren’t familiar with affiliate models, what you make them the bulk of your money, is how you negotiate these rates with merchants actually…

Steve: Okay.

Viet: And maybe we’ll talk more about it in a little bit, but– so let’s say for physical stuff, something you can buy at BestLife.com or Walmart.com in chance of the TV or a laptop or computer. The commission rate is actually pretty low; it’s like 1-2% –

Steve: Okay –

Viet: Maybe as high as 3% if you have like the right volume and the right, you know like the right partnership going– deal going on here so, but it’s usually about 2% – I want to say and lower. Surprisingly some other sites like let’s say, a pretty big retailer, Newegg. Newegg is based in California and they mostly sell computer electronics. They can get-they can start as low as 0.5% or 0.25%…

Steve: That is really low!

Viet: That is very low so you’re really not going to make that much money there unless you’re established, you have volume and you’ve been doing well with them for a long time, right-

Steve: Okay.

Viet: So, in that sense there’s a sum bared of entry you know, because once you get in there are-you list this deals great, someone bought like a 100$ thing, but you’re only getting like 0.5% all of that right, that’s like nothing –

Steve: Yeah, that’s like nothing.

Viet: Right, so that’s tough right. Conversely, so physical products want a cheaper set right, usually. For digital products, I want to say you know, maybe anywhere– actually it might be actually 2X now, so think about so 4-5 %, I want to say…

Steve: Okay.

Viet: And then maybe…

Steve: All right.

Viet: Maybe, for some very lucrative, high margin stuff, let’s say there’s something like, like a 100$ special, super limited edition game you know, so the margins might be a little bit higher where they’ll give you some as high as 8%.

Steve: Okay, so the margins aren’t still as high as for something I might push on my say like web services where the pay-out is much higher.

Viet: Right. It very much is a volume game for deals and coupon site, where each have to make it up in terms of volume – you have to make your site, your usability, the information you present as easy as possible to convert these sales you get these commissions.

Steve: Okay.

Viet: So –

Steve: Okay.

Viet: So you can’t rely on like two or maybe a 10 or 20 sales per month right, we’re doing around about like thousands of transactions on a monthly basis or even on a daily basis, right, so-

Steve: Okay.

Viet: Yeah.

Steve: So when someone buys something through you, you don’t have to provide any sort of support or anything like that?

Viet: Right. I think that’s the beauty of most affiliate and [Indiscernible] [00:08:36] business, so I mean, obviously we have to give some kind of support if the transactions or the deals we listed fell through in the sense that – oh, we show a coupon like this and it doesn’t work, you know, so we need to tell them– oh, did the coupon expire or is there a new coupon, or is there a different better deal, you know so –

Steve: Okay.

Viet: So there’s some amount of support, but after they buy you know, the products, obviously everything else is on the merchant, right –

Steve: Okay.

Viet: So –

Steve: So, there’s a lot of these tech deal sites out there, how the heck do you differentiate yourself and compete with the rest of them?

Viet: Yeah, I mean that’s a good question, I mean, that’s something we constantly think about on a daily basis too actually [chuckles]. So, I hope to see like some comments where you guys can give us tips to – I’ll be honest – that’s pretty funny that I’m asking that, but [chuckles]. But, how we kind of differentiate ourselves is, what I imagine is, straight from the start, we focus on what we do good at – what we do well at, actually, which is gamers, right—we focus on it, we have a cool audience of gamers, we kind of know what they like, we get a pretty good feel of what they like in terms of products, so we serve that particular niche.

So, instead of doing like all these different types of coupons for everything under the sun, we focus on what we do well at, and we try to provide a better service in that sense of better updated deals, more timely updates, stuff that you might actually, not so– I’m pretty confident that some of the games that we list, maybe it’s only going to give us like 10 sales, and these are pennies on our dollars, but these aren’t stuff that other sites will focus on whatsoever like, you won’t find it there on these other deal sites. So, the comprehensiveness for a gamer, in the sense that, if I’m a gamer and I want to make sure I don’t miss the hot deals, then I can go to Dealzon and I can pretty be– rest assured that maybe I’ll catch like 90% of the deals.

Steve: I see so by focusing on something you actually will probably get the deals listed first because the other sites don’t care as much and then as a result gamers will learn this overtime and then come to you first.

Viet: Right, exactly, I mean that’s basically our hope and I think it’s been doing pretty well actually.

Steve: So okay yeah. So there’s a couple of questions I have now. So one; how do you actually get the deals on your site?

Viet: Yeah, so it’s actually very similar format all across the board. It’s a very chaotic thing in terms of the coupon space in the sense that you know there’s 1000s of merchants and there’s 1000s of deals right hunches of 1000s of deals even. Most of the merchants actually– you will be surprised a lot of that stuff deals is in virtual edition now, they plaster our email and no kidding. An email with the list of the top deals for up to the week. So it’s like a feed of emails– you open your inbox it’s like a hunches of emails coming in. Now obviously a lot of the better networks still have a API where they a certain theme where they’ll send out like you know the data, but a lot of them is unnecessary human because some– You can already exactly see the data and then copy and paste to your site basically. You need to able to manipulate this second data essentially.

Steve: Okay.

Viet: So there’s actually a lot of work involved in that, and I think there’s actually a few services that– so because the work looked so much because actually a few services that we don’t actually this but they make the transition easier. So they grab all the fin and all the different coupons for you and then they break it down in like a CSV file for you or what not, based on how you want to export and I think what’s this service called. Let me think, it’s not [Inaudible] [00:12:12]– I think coupon to me, so.

Steve: Okay.

Viet: So that’s one of the services, you know.

Steve: So let me just try to rearrange what you just said, so you’re saying some people email out the deals–

Viet: Yeah so, the merchants would– most merchants, the large merchants don’t have like an account manager of some sort, right and they’ll have like weekly deals right. So they’ll be like hey this is what we are trying to promote on our store– on our online stores this week. Take a look at the list of our deals. And it could be any kind of format it could be just plain text email format, it could be attach excel file, you know could be just a bunch of bullet points, could be a strayed out HTML files encoding of the deal in question right.

Steve: Okay and how do you get that on to your site is that then manual then?

Viet: Yeah, so there is quite a bit of manual work involved but we build our own tool. There’s actually– so I’m not in the coupon safe spacing internet buying. I’m pretty sure there are word press plug-ins that make your life a lot easier to get e-step in but at some point you’ll still need a manual, human editor involved to like either copy and paste or make sense of these data you know like here’s some because some bit of words that come in might not– might truncate a little bit, might not that you know just spread properly. So we build our own tool we have our own platform that grabs all these feeds, whether it’s email or data you know straight from the API or our feed or X amount feed from the merchant and it’s mostly XML feed actually.

Steve: Okay.

Viet: Yeah and you know we make sense of this data on our back editor, human editor kind of adviser and properly in all that great stuff.

Steve: So what you are saying you’ll receive list of these deals in all sorts of different formats depending on the person – depending on the business and then you have tools in the backend that kind of code in all these information?

Viet: Yup, exactly so in that sense yeah there’s definitely a lot of work and then that’s kind of why we focus on what we do while we’re out too because if you expand too much more retailers it just really becomes like a major headache right?

Steve: Yeah, by the way.

Viet: And then I think for those people that aren’t aware like you know Slickdeals which is one of the larger you know deal website right, they have a massive community forum you know they have the human resources and the human you know the mob power – the social power right there in terms of users pushing up– posting audio’s in different deals on their message board right?

Steve: Mm-huh.

Viet: But even – even having all those community they still have like analogue 10, 20, 30 editors, you know working on posting deals and that’s quite a bit, right? So…

Steve: Yeah, that’s crazy and that can be fun and it’s kind of manual, right?

Viet: Right, right yeah. I won’t necessarily call it fun, but you know it really depends on how you take a look at it you know our editors and myself included, we try to– maybe that’s so much these days but we try to be able make it a game out of there like say, who can post you know the best deal the fastest in that sense right.

Steve: Okay.

Viet: So you know if there’s got very hot game coming out and we know everyone wants this game, you know we would love to be the first to find this deal and post it everywhere you know, in terms of our own site…

Steve: Sure.

Viet: On our day Face book feed or you know our Tweeter feed or what not, right.

Steve: Aha.

Viet: So.

Steve: So on the flip side also there’s a bunch of deals that expire everyday too. So how do the heck do you know when to take these things off and that stuff?

Viet: Right, so that’s half– that’s so another [inaudible] [00:15:31] right in there too like a lot of this is actually manual, but most of these thankfully the merchants themselves will let you know the expiration day in advance, so–

Steve: Okay.

Viet: We just simply send them on our backend and it’ll automatically expire mostly, and if we don’t capture you know usually a user we’ll comment and let us know that hey this deal is expired, then we know we just go out– head out there and expire that deal.

Steve: Okay, so certain services like I use commission junction you mentioned that earlier…

Viet: Sure.

Steve: And they actually have an API where you can just grab everything kind of automatically into your platform with a little bit of programming.

Viet: Yeah.

Steve: Do you guys have a preference or do you just kind of go with where the deals are at?

Viet: We kind of go with where the deals are at actually, but we definitely do utilize that you know obviously you want to make the manual work load as low as possible. So if you have the resources you get a developer to you know work out your own– what does your own platform of grabbing these things in properly to fit your– to fulfill your needs, that’s way better right than doing it manual, but on other times the ones that already make money is actually stuff that’s happening in right traditionally in email actually you know where a manager– a store manager might have– and a fully account manager actually let me correct myself– will be very in tune with what we need or what those were with our audience and they gave us a head start hey this deal is happening next week if you have some details in the email right.

Steve: I see.

Viet: We just watch out for that deal you know and yeah we can of course we can always grab it automatically whenever you know from the API or from XML deal but that’s always depending on like you know whenever we set these automatic data grab to happen right, so we very well might miss that X– the actual hour where the deal goes live right.

Steve: Aha.

Viet: So a lot of the more exclusives or the deal that people actually deal one actually happens lot in email so.

Steve: Interesting email, wow that’s horrible.

Viet: Yeah that’s horrible actually. When you even think about it and you know there’s pros and cons in there you have the good communication channel with – and you work with these people and you do good large volume with them. So there is a need for the– an open communication channel but there’s– I won’t be surprised you know if there is a better service in the next few you know whenever actually to make the job easier and you know the space is right for some sort of disruption that’s for sure.

Steve: Okay, so what you – what I’m trying to gleam off you know is, you know essentially all the sites have access to the same coupons essentially right?

Viet: Yeah, I mean you’re not going to really get like all these unique stuff I’ll be honest. If you find like a deal site you like and you use allegory you know, hey more power to you keep using, you don’t really need to come to DealZon and that sounds so bad actually.

Steve: Yeah.

Viet: But I feel like you know a lot of times unless, unless all you care about is gaming. So yeah you should actually come to us.

Steve: So I mean so each, each text like kind of has its own focus right because you said it’s kind of manual. You kind of have to pick and choose what you want to focus on right?

Viet: Sure, sure that’s for me. So but you definitely want see some of those the same stuff on most sites but the difference is may be what they highlight isn’t what’s the hottest latest right now. A lot of these stuff especially front page is very much click carried and right by the editors, right.

Steve: Right.

Viet: And some of these actually might be paid place material too and which we can talk about in a little bit–

Steve: Yeah.

Viet: So and you know so you needed to juggle between like hey is this guy really –is this really a good deal or is it just something that’s pushing you to sell because it gets in the most commission right?

Steve: Right, right okay.

Viet: So, and so it’s mostly that I think and I think because of human automatic coration [phonetic], if you start you know agreeing with what the editor puts on and chances are that’s a great deal then yes you should be comfortable with that site in the sense that they are pushing stuff that they know people like and want and not just because what’s you know shows the bottom line or converts better or what not right.

Steve: Okay, okay so that kind of actually leads to my next my question is, which is you know how do you actually get people to come to your coupon site in the first place right?

Viet: Yeah so I mean obviously marketing is like such a broad and you know broad discipline right but how we did it initially and this is actually quite a while ago, I want to say like three years back, is we started like you know so for any kind of hot products and this is kind of go back to email once again. We just email blogs these new steps you know on like called latest products to like tracking gadget size like tracking gadget blog basically news blogs–

Steve: Like in gadget?

Viet: Yeah exactly, you know like hey you know may be the latest Mark book Pro just slashed the price by 100 bucks and that’s actually very rare for Apple products, right?

Steve: Right.

Viet: And you know stuff like that basically and then you slowly and surely you build some links you know you send some else – some good new steps and you build an audience that way. And another method that we kind of use is we partner with a few different sites and if they have the right community and then if the fit is good, we post regular deals on their site and if in terms of – in the format of a blog post or a news stead or and stuff like that and that’s how we kind of like funnel trafficking sometimes.

Steve: What do they get in return for the blog?

Viet: You know the page views you know they – sometimes we have very rarely do we have like revenue share agreements you know and then when we have that obviously we have to disclose it carefully. So that works out when it fits with in terms of the community and audience right. We do this with may be like with individual sites, where, maybe some guy runs a gaming blog, right, and he knows that people like these kind of deal posts, and it helps support the website, helps support the community, you know, so it’s a win-win for everyone involved.

Steve: I see. But let’s say, I run a really popular gaming site; why wouldn’t I just put my own coupon codes on there?

Viet: Yeah, I think you should, actually, but we go back to all those hassle, all those manual stuff you know, you really have to be on the know, in terms of like what’s going on this week and what’s going on next week, to properly do something like this, I feel. So, I think, if you run a gaming blog, you should definitely do this, or use DealZon, basically, and we will be happy to help you out, and work out an arrangement that makes sense. But yes, I think, if you run a gaming blog, and your only revenue source is like the very typical display ads and stuff like that, you should start considering an affiliated model; there’s certain ways you can do this balance without coming across as if trying to sell all these games to visitors, right?

Steve: Right.

Viet: Because this really is a value in the sense that, hey you know, ‘buy this game because it’s cheap– I mean, we’re not telling you to buy it, but we’re telling you what is cheap right now, whether you buy or not it’s up to you, right?

Steve: Uh-huh.

Viet: So there’s some actually a value in terms of that service.

Steve: Okay. The other thing I did notice, when I went to your site, was you actually do advertizing also. And when I saw that, I was somewhat conflicted because, shouldn’t the goal be to have someone click on your affiliate link and buy something?

Viet: Yeah, actually, you are correct about that; for a very long time, DealZon had zero display ads. You can make the argument that the entire site’s being advertised now, because every click will generate a commission sale for us, right?

Steve: Sure, sure.

Viet: But, yes, for a long time, we don’t have any display ads, but we actually test this, a little bit. It didn’t really hurt conversion one way or another, and it’s just basically more money in the revenue so that we can keep the servers up and what not, so…

Steve: I see. So you just add them on, just to see if it’s going to affect your affiliate revenue; it didn’t affect it, brought in more money, so you decided to keep it on.

Viet: Yeah, we kept it on. We can probably do with two more banners– I mean, two three banners, to be safe, but at some point, you’re it’s just you’re clouding your site with a bunch of banners, so we’re okay with just one. And here’s the thing about this– and this is a tip for anyone that runs anything– any similar or is interested in affiliate space; When you have inventory, in the sense of like banner ads, or whatever slots, when you create inventory, that gives you the ability to sell these slots to advertisers, when the right time comes along– you know that might be a seasonal thing. I mean, in holiday seasons, all the merchants have the right budgets to work with, like promotions, so if your site’s the right fit, they might throw you a bone, give you a little bit more money, just to put a banner on your site to your [indiscernible][00:23:55] and you know whatever the heck that you might be getting from, whatever display network you use, you know whether it’s something like adsense or whatever else, right. So, by the virtue of having a banner, it gives you the ability, in the future to sell that slot, does that kind of make sense? So…

Steve: Yeah so, sell it privately to an advertiser.

Viet: Right, exactly. You know if you never have that in the first place, it’ll be a hard pitch to tell people, ‘hey, I’ll put you here’, while you didn’t have that before, so…

Steve: Okay, so what percent– is the breakdown heavily skewed towards affiliate revenue, or what’s the breakdown, between advertizing…

Viet: Oh yeah, by far, by far. The advertizing is just there really, because it pays for the server bills I want to say, so it’s not– it’s not exactly like zero dollars, but it’s also not something that we really stress about or focus on a lot, so…

Steve: Okay, so in terms of getting traffic, you mentioned working with other bloggers; are there any other traffic sources that you use?

Viet: Yeah. So, eventually, you know, we still get plenty of Google traffic – we try to rely less on Google these days, in the sense that we don’t really bother with optimizing that much anymore, in terms of SEO. If we have Google traffic, great, it’s because we have the right information and the right value, if not, whatever, right?

Steve: So, by information sorry– is this your blog post, or are these the deal pages themselves?

Viet: Both, actually, but mostly the deal pages themselves. We try to provide as much information as we can on a deal post, especially on the hot stuff — on the stuff that’s trending. So if there’s like a super old laptop, you know, two years old, obviously you’re not going to find the latest information there, right, because at this point, no one is going to buy that kind of particular laptop anymore. But for the latest stuff, yeah, I think so, we might have like hey more information on a particular computer model, hey maybe you should buy X over this because of these features, so stuff like that, basically.

Steve: So do you guys have that sort of content on your site where you’re comparing different items, and that sort of thing, or…

Viet: It’s mostly in the edited notes; we have a lot of it back in the days, but, like I said, we try to rely less on Google in a sense, so we only provide those information that is useful to our users. I suppose you can make the argument that what’s good for the users is good for Google too, but that’s always a bonus in the sense that I mean, there’s a lot of sites that bounce just a lot of key words in content, and by the virtue of their domain authority, they will rank for it, right?

Steve: Sure.

Viet: The coupon space is kind of iffy that way in the sense that sometimes and I’m sure a lot of users will know this– they search for a particular coupon in the other site, and there’s really no coupon!

Steve: It happens to me all the time, it’s very annoying.

Viet: It’s very annoying! We try to stray away from that as much as possible. Yeah, it makes us a little bit less money, but I’m a little bit more happy about it – I sleep a little bit better at night, you know. Yeah some people can say that you’re throwing away money, but if the coupon doesn’t exist, we say so; it’s expired. You can still click through it if you want to, you know, if you want to check if there’s something new, but there’s no coupon, so that’s that.

Steve: Okay. And I would imagine you don’t do any paid advertising, because the price just doesn’t work out economically, right?

Viet: I think it does, actually, but we don’t do that. I’m not sure if I’m giving too much information in that sense, but [Inaudible] [00:27:03] pretty much all of our revenue in a sense, is very much organic, it’s very much the users on DealZon, and some portion of it for our partner blogs.

Steve: How would pay traffic work? I mean, you’re paying an amount that seems like it’s a lot higher than your affiliate products.

Viet: It’s tough, right? I mean we’ve dabbled in it, and I can see it can work, but I’m not a PPC expert in the sense that, I can’t juggle that on a daily basis, and it’s very much average where you have to make sure whatever you bid is obviously a lot less than the commission you get. And it actually does still work well; you’d be surprised like how some of these large retailers just don’t do a good job advertising their own products or their own stores. So, there’s still a lot of space for the middle man, in a sense, the whole system still works. Instead of having their own internal team, they just pay it out by the affiliate model that way. So it’s kind of funny, I think going to change in the future, especially– if I run any one of these– If I’m like the business guy, or the revenue guy at one of these larger companies, I will think strongly about having my own PPC team to do the– and they do have them, don’t get me wrong, but between them and the affiliates, it’s an interesting space where you’re just throwing a lot of money, to try to break even, or to try to make like, the actual dollar out of your 50 cents spent– ask them.

Steve: Sure, sure. Do you guys do a lot of email marketing?

Viet: Lightly. We have our email list that’s fairly large, in a sense that I’m planning to trim it down to the guys that don’t really open our emails anymore, to save our costs. We do email marketing, we send out daily emails, and we’re starting to do a better job segmenting these. Some people actually only want to see video game deals, some people only want to see computer deals, some people only want to see HD TV deals. We find that that helps conversion a little bit more. So if you can segment it and if you have the volume that justifies it, you should definitely do it. And, hopefully the whatever email service provider that you sign up for has the segment ability.

Steve: How do you get people to sign up for your email list?

Viet: I think it’s very similar to what a lot of sites employ, so you know, there will be a pop up overlay, telling you to sign up. We try to be less– we try to balance between being annoying about sign-up and trying to make sure we convert these sign-ups, because if you’re just having a side-bar box, I’ll be honest, a lot of people aren’t going to see this thing, right?

Steve: Right.

Viet: The conversion difference there is like astronomic– could be something like 0.1% versus 3%, so that’s a big difference.

Steve: So I see. I would imagine that your sign-up rate would be kind of high– everyone wants to get good deals on stuff, right? I would imagine it’s pretty attractive.

Viet: Yeah, I can make the argument that’s okay. I really don’t know what it looks like on the other sites, I try to take a look at what the industry averages, but it’s kind of hard to guess that right in terms of…

Steve: Sure. Yes.

Viet: But you know I think when you do an overlay like this, if you provide good value, you should– for a long time we actually were very hesitant in having an overlay pop-up for email grab. But after a while we– again, just like the banner ad, we did an epic test; it didn’t affect the sales, and it didn’t affect any other noticeable matrix, so we kept it on. And, to be honest, when we axed it out, we still ended up cooking we don’t bother you for quite a good amount of time too, so…

Steve: Yeah, I know from my site I mean the pop-up is what actually converts the best.

Viet: Okay yeah, exactly.

Steve: Okay so, towards the beginning of the interview, you mentioned that sometimes you can get exclusive deals from affiliates, and it’s all about negotiation. So how does all that work, exactly?

Viet: Yeah, so I mean this is very much about chicken and [indiscernible][00:30:59] right, in the sense that, an exclusive is great – you get like an exclusive that people can only come to your site to get it, right or it might leak out get it elsewhere, but mostly people will come to your site to get this exclusive deal. But if you don’t– in order to get the exclusive, you need to have the right volume, to start negotiating with these partners, right and to introduce these merchants. You can see the dilemma here, in the sense that if you don’t get the exclusives, you won’t have the volume, and if you don’t have the volume, you won’t get the exclusives.

Steve: Right.

Viet: So I would definitely start– for anyone that’s inc. like a region space– my recommendation is basically just ask outright. Ask them hey what kind of volume we need to get to get some kind of exclusive deal or something that might be– and to be fair some of these exclusives are not exclusive in a sense that they will not happen again but it will be fogging you for that time period basically. Does that kind of make sense?

Steve: Okay, yeah. So how does an exclusive deal work exactly? Is it the pair on hire or is it just by virtue of you being exclusive that’s good enough?

Viet: Oh no I think it depends on how what the — it’s very much merchant dependent so sometimes he has to pay as you higher sometimes they give you a better deal like a better percentage coupon, right.

Steve: I see.

Viet: So you know it converts even better because why use this other coupon this other site if this coupon gives you 25% versus 25% this other side right?

Steve: Right.

Viet: So there is a lot of that– and sometimes it makes them both, sometimes it’s just simply this deal is only offered through this site at during this time frame through this link.

Steve: So walk me through this; let’s say you gain an exclusive, what’s your first course of action. So you email your list, do you also still reach out to bloggers about your deals?

Viet: Yeah definitely. If we manage to snuck an exclusive we want to promote as much as possible simply because we are hoping that’s the best deal right?

Steve: Right.

Viet: So yeah the first course of action is actually you should get your own site, you blast out to the people that convert the best which is usually your email people and sometimes your social people. You know maybe for some people the measures are– it is that’s where your audience lives. And you actually basically mention the full cause of the action and then we blast it out to your partners and then finally you want to blast out to the rest of them. So I think anyone in any kind of space should always have an excel sheet or whatever of regular people to email blast things to and on top of like the new tips sites you know TipsAtWhatever.com right, in whatever industry and category you are in. So that whenever you have something interesting and note worthy you can always rely on the list to get at least a few mentions of whatever you know exclusives or promotions that you have at the time right.

Steve: So what are your top traffic sites right now?– sources of traffic.

Viet: I think I will be mum on that in a sense that…

Steve: Okay no that’s fine.

Viet: Okay yeah, but to be honest most of our traffic is still coming from DealZon actually. We have a very healthy amount of users on DealZon and in terms of revenue numbers a good chunk of it is still coming from DealZon too. So like I said we are doing a very decent job theses days of diversifying our traffic source and income source. Three years ago, I want to say, Google would bring about like 50% of our traffic right, and 70% of our revenue. That’s actually quite a big chunk right.

Steve: Wow.

Viet: Just because it converts better. These days we make way more than we did before and Google is like what, 20% of our traffic visit and, maybe exactly the same amount, 20% of our revenue too. So at some point you already want to move away from a Google mentality and I think you definitely mention this a lot of times you know whether in your podcast or in blog post right.

Steve: Yes.

Viet: Two thirds and you know and email list is one such great revenue source right. These are people that opt in the people that already want the information right. So if you can build a channel like where no one else can mess with, I want to say that’s a good comfortable spot to be at.

Steve: Okay, so if there is someone out there who wanted to start their own coupon site how would you suggest they start. So one thing I forgot to ask you about is that actually what platform you run your site on?

Viet: So we actually– we built our own site. It’s on rails, we’ve been on rails. We built our own platform essentially. We have our own backend and our own frontend. This is actually more household than it’s worth–. Well, okay I think it’s working for us for our own usage but this goes to your question if you are starting a coupon site today, you know to make your life easier you should really just get a word press blog and there are various amounts of coupon plug-ins. I haven’t been keeping up to date on them but I know there’s obviously two, three pretty decent coupon plug-ins and coupon site templates that you can use right. And then really you should just find a specific niche that you do very well at right, and that you are very familiar with, that you are an expert at instead of trying to cover everything under the sun, you know try to cover that one thing that you can do a good job at providing information at. So that’s kind of where I’ll start.

Steve: Okay and then in terms of — you guys have a blog too right. So what use has the blog been in terms of…?

Viet: So for us we’re actually doing not too good of a job in terms of a blog, when you have a blog you really should update it regularly in a sense of like you don’t have to write every day. I’m not a believer in that but you should write consistently like let’s say if you are going to do a post per week, you should do a post per week on x day right–

Steve: Okay.

Viet: And for a blog you already want to do it so you supplement information in terms of deals that you’re– So for the coupons site I feel like the best way to do that is that you do price comparison or price prediction stuff like that basically.

Steve: Okay and one thing I also forgot to ask you is what was the source of your inspiration for even deciding to do a coupon site as opposed to some of the other business models out there?

Viet: So I think there is a lot of different things but I don’t think was ever marrying into the idea of like starting a coupon site and actually I did not start this. There is a different partner that left since then actually but I decided to join DealZon because I thought it’s interesting and there’s all things I can bring to the table in terms of the categories that we are focused on at the time and that was my expertise and this goes back to what I mentioned about how if you have expertise in terms of a particular category you know, I’m a gamer I’m a computer user, I know my computers very well maybe I know less these days than before because I don’t have time to read about this stuff anymore but if you are more comfortable to talk about a particular product and you enjoy talking about that particular product, it’s just a lot easier to try and sell those products too right.

Steve: Yes.

Viet: So it’s mostly that I think and you know I think at a time, you know, it’s kind of like- this goes to what we had mentioned earlier- if you search for coupon you run to your site and it’s just bunch of links but there is no coupon to be found, that’s annoying right. We wanted to try a little bit better than that basically.

Steve: Okay and so you do this full time?

Viet: Yeah I do this full time.

Steve: So were there– what was your source of your inspiration? Was there any books that kind of gave you the inspiration to say,” Look I want to start my own site and run my own business”?

Viet: I will be frank, not really. I think I am one of those few that started their own site back in the 90s right, and they would just miss the bow in terms of like becoming like one of those dotcom millionaires so I– but then we learn a lot in the process and we enjoy working online building websites, interacting with users and readers. So I think it‘s essentially that really verses like any one book or any one particular thing.

Steve: And are there any resources or services out there that you can’t live without with your site?

Viet: Yeah, so let me think about this of the top of my head. I think because we build our own platform a lot of the tools that we need, I have my developer build out the stuff but then there is definitely a few services obviously. We are hosting Heroku, so without Heroku obviously it’s– we used to have our own hosting services our own– and then the system that main portion is very much of a headache right–

Steve: Yes.

Viet: So that did obviously allocated to Heroku now, so that’s good. So we can’t live without Heroku. I guess you can argue that mailchimp is essential for us too in the sense that without mailchimp we don’t have an email list, I mean there is a lot of services out there but we are comfortable with mailchimp so we are sticking with them

Steve: Okay.

Viet: And I guess you know definitely that there are free other networks you know without them obviously that won’t work too right. You know without Commission Junction, without link share, you know, without these larger networks it gets a little bit tough right. So–

Steve: Okay, cool so Viet we’ve already been talking for quite awhile, where can people find you online if they have questions?

Viet: So if you head to dealzon.com there is contact form there but just email me at viet@dealzone.com and I’ll be honest, I mean I don’t mind giving up that, I think it’s a public email actually so yeah viet@dealzon.com and if you have random questions like this I will try to take some time out to try and answer them as best as I can.

Steve: Awesome well thanks a lot for coming on the show Viet.

Viet: Yeah, no problem I will talk to you later Steve.

Steve: All right talk to you later, have a good day.

Hope you found that podcast episode interesting. Now I for one have always wondered what it was like to run a coupon business online and at least at the back of my mind I always pictured a very hands off site that made money on auto pilot by automatically grabbing deals from a feed and displaying them online and as it turns out it’s not that simple and I probably should have known better. Now Viet shared some very useful tips on how to get traffic to a coupon website and I’m very thankful for his candor and revealing how his business works. For more information about this episode go to MyWifeQuitHerJob.com/episode 28 and if you enjoyed listening to this podcast please got to iTunes and leave me a review.

When you write me a review it not only makes me feel proud but also helps keeps this podcast up in the ranks so other people can use this information, find the show more easily and get awesome business advice from my guests. It’s also the best way to support the show and please tell your friends because the greatest compliment you can give me is to provide a referral to someone else either in person or to share it on the web. Now as an added incentive, I’m also giving away free business consultations to one lucky winner every single month. For more information about this please go to mywifequitherjob.com/contest and if you are interested in starting your own online business be sure to sign up for my free six day mini course where I show you how my wife and I managed to make over 100k in profit in our first year of business. Go to www.mywife quitherjob.com for more information and thanks for listening.

Thanks for listening to the Wife Quit Her Job podcast, where we are giving the courage people need to start their own online business. For more information visit Steve’s blog at www.mywifequitherjob.com.

Steve: You’re listening to the My Wife Quit Her Job podcast, where I bring in successful bootstrapped business owners to teach us what strategies are working, and what strategies are not. Now this isn’t one of those podcasts where we bring on famous entrepreneurs simply to celebrate their success. Instead, I have them take us back to the beginning and delve deeply into the exact strategies they used early on to gain traction for their businesses. If you enjoy this podcast, please leave me a review on iTunes, and enter my podcast contest where I’m giving away free one-on-one business consultations every single month. For more information go to www.mywifequitherjob.com/contest. And if you’re interested in starting your own online business, be sure to sign up for my free six day mini-course where I show you how my wife and I managed to make over a 100k in profit in our first year of business. Go to www.mywifequitherjob.com for more information. Now, on to the show.

Welcome to the my My Wife Quit Her Job podcast. We will teach you how to create a business that suits your lifestyle, so you can spend more time with your family and focus on doing the things that you love. Here’s your host Steve Chou.

Steve: Welcome to the My Wife Quit Her Job podcast. Today I’m thrilled to have a good friend of mine on the show Jeff Rose. Now if you don’t know who Jeff is, he blogs at GoodFinnancialCents.com, DollarsAndRoses.com. He’s got like three podcasts, his own financial planning practice and he actually makes a bunch of You Tube videos as well. And out of all the bloggers that I know, I would say that Jeff is probably one of the most charismatic personalities out there, and he’s actually built quite a brand for himself. Not to mention the fact that he also makes a good deal of money with his various businesses, and in fact he puts out all of his income online for everyone to see and I’ll go ahead and link that up with the show notes because it’s quite interesting where all the income sources come from.

Now Jeff is actually a hard man to track down. First of all you have to get past his virtual assistant, but fortunately I know all of his weak points, in and out burger, juicing and crossfits. So, step number one if you want to get a hold Jeff Rose, include in and out burger in the subject line of your email, and I may have also led him to believe that this podcast was about eating burgers. So sorry man no burgers here. Jeff is actually one of the reasons why I started this podcast in the first place. So welcome to the show Jeff. How are you doing man?

Jeff: You’re saying there is no in and out burger with this like– I’m sorry dude I got to go man.

Steve: I got you here, it’s too late, it’s too late we’re already recording.

Jeff : Cool man, thanks for having me on.

Steve : So you got a really interesting story, and I don’t know if a lot of people know about your back story. You kind of came from a poor upbringing. You joined the marines. What kind of made you decide to start your own business online?

Jeff : You know I mean my father struggled with that. I don’t want to make it sound like I was poor, poor but, let’s just say that both my parents they separated when I was a young age. My mom you know she has my step dad– he was pretty successful but, they just– both of them, mom stepdad and dad really did not know how to manage money at all. My dad filed for bankruptcy twice, my mom filed for bankruptcy once. At times, they had– my mom had five mortgages at one time.

Steve: Wow!

Jeff: And which like that’s what the [Inaudible] [00:03:37] but, they actually ended up losing like three of those like five properties because they just didn’t know what they were doing.

Steve: Was that during the craze with the real estate?

Jeff : No, no they– that was well before that. They actually– its funny you mention that because they finally like started doing better, sold their house in LA, moved to Las Vegas before the boom, and then they had cash left over that they actually were sitting pretty but, instead of sitting pretty, they invested it to a Vespa property in Las Vegas. Prior to that, they ended up losing two more houses to foreclosure. So yeah like that’s what I’ve been having to work through growing up, seeing some of those financial shortfalls along the way.

Steve : Man, okay. So you know what’s ironic about all of this, is that my parents, they kind of made their money through real estate, and you know at least that generation– they’ve always advised my brother and I to always buy real estate because that’s something that can never really go down. So it’s just interesting that your parents actually lost money during the boom with real estate so.

Jeff : Yeah, so like and you know my dad dropped out of college. You know when he was younger, he joined the army and after that he just kind of I don’t know he was like a car salesman, just kind of bounced around a lot of end jobs, and he always told me like you know he always wanted me to be– to do better than he is. So he really wanted me to go to college, you know do the whole degree thing, and I ended up dropping out my first semester of college, and started working a dead end job basically. And then I joined the army national guard, not the marines that you mentioned.

Steve: Oh my bad.

Jeff: It’s okay, it’s all good and you know joining the national guard for me was– that was my life savior I mean that, that’s what basically got my butt in gear, got me back on track just career wise and just getting focused again. And– but even still even getting my career back on track I still like knew nothing about investing or financial planning or really even how to manage money, and I end up becoming a finance major. Actually my dad suggested I be a Finance major, and you know I always listen to him so I went that path and ended up getting internship with a brokerage firm that ended up me becoming a financial planner and as they say the rest is history.

Steve: So.

Jeff: Go ahead.

Steve: You broke off from that to start your own practice eventually right?

Jeff: Yeah, so I did I was working for ‘the man’ for about five years building my book of business and probably one of the best things that happened was my old firm got bought out by a bigger firm and had that never happened I don’t know if I would have left, because I really enjoyed the company. That was the only coolade that I had drunk at that time and I liked the coolade I didn’t know any other, I didn’t want to try any other coolade, because I liked it. But, when they got bought out it forced me to kind of look at what other options existed and that’s when I ended up leaving with three others and co-founded our own investment firm, and we’re independent in our space is a common way of hearing that.

And when I went independent that allowed me to market myself a little bit more differently than others. I had a little bit more freedom and that’s really where the blog ended up. That’s where it all came from. With that ability to market myself and just looking for other unique ways to get myself out there and stumbled upon blogging and registered domain GoodFinnancialCents.com and it’s been a blast ever since then. That was back in July– I left December of 07, launched the blog in July of 2008.

Steve: So you actually started good financial cents to help promote your practice is that right or?

Jeff: Yeah, no that was that was basically the only reason. I mean I did have a passion for educating others, that was kind of the other underlying thing to it. But you know it was what it was. It was to market myself being an independent financial planner, and to hopefully get new clients. And along the way I learned more about blogging, about key words, and driving traffic and the fact that you can actually monetize the blog. First I started with Adsense, then eventually grew to using affiliates and other means. So it all– once I started blogging and networking with other bloggers, I just was opened up to an entirely new world that I was completely oblivious to at the time.

Steve: So let’s go in a little bit more depth. So how does JFC make money today?

Jeff: A combination, you know right now I still get the occasional new clients. Actually kind of a cool story I– this is three years in the making, I but I had a guy who I kind of knew here locally and he had seen some of my posts on Facebook where I share some of my blog comments or some of my blog articles and he emailed me. This was three years ago and said “Hey, I really appreciate your willingness to educate people on personal finance and investing. I have a friend that I want to introduce you to.” That was three years ago. Long story short that person just now finally got the money that they’d been waiting on to settle and brought in like 1.5 million dollars all because of my blogging efforts. But, that was like three years in the making, and at this point in time that is not the biggest client that I’ve got from my blog.

Steve: That’s awesome so I’ve been on your blog obviously many times. Is there– there doesn’t seem to be like a funnel that goes directly to your practice and at least as far as I could tell?

Jeff: Yeah, and that– its funny you mention that because we’re going to talk about a pivot here in a little bit, correct?

Steve: That’s correct at the very end. I said it out too early, didn’t I.

Jeff: You did that’s okay. You had an original question I forgot what that was?

Steve: How does it make money and yeah.

Jeff: Oh yeah. That is that is one way getting you know getting new clients that feed in to the practice. The the first way that I used to make money was using just using Google Adsense. Just because I really didn’t know any other way to make money. That was the easiest way, just slap some Adsense code on there, and let the money roll in. From there I started doing affiliates. My– probably my top revenue producers are like brokerage firms, Scottrade, TDAmeritrade, E-trade etcetera. I also do pretty good with the pure and pure lenders like lending club and Prosper and savings accounts like Capital One 360 and a few others. So affiliates are another revenue source and then banner advertising. I got a pretty good ad network where I get a fairly competitive CPM which you know is based on impressions. And those are basically the three ways I guess that bring in revenue.

Steve: So let me ask you this. So you said that you started Good Financial Cents to actually get more clients to you your practice, that was the initial intention. So doesn’t adding ads and you know Adsense and that sort of thing kind of– isn’t that kind of contrary to the kind of goal so to speak because you’re clicking on a banner that takes you off the site, so how does it all work together.

Jeff: That’s a great question. That’s something I had someone ask me the very beginning when I put ads on there, and what I– the logic that I went through to come to the conclusion why I left the ads on there was I cannot be a financial advisor for everybody. People are going to come to my site, they are going to– they’re maybe want to work with me maybe not, but if I can at least monetize that and get a few dollars from all the effort that I put into it, I’m okay with that. And the amount of clients I‘ve been able to get even with having advertising on there I think kind of speaks to that. So I feel like it’s just a nice secondary income that you know comes in and it’s a decent secondary income but…

Steve: Right, yeah, yeah, I’m definitely going to link up you’re your income reports in the show notes because it’s pretty impressive.

Jeff: Yeah, it’s just something that I wrestled with for a long time, but the final concluding factor or the thing I came to was Jeff you cannot be a financial advisor for everybody, and not everybody is going to want to hire you. The people who really want to hire you, they are going to look past the ads, they are going to contact you, ask a question. I get questions all the time, and I think that’s where, that’s where I guess that connection really builds. They contact me via email or contact form and really just share their entire financial history, and if I’m able to provide value you know that’s where there’s going to be– going to build that trust even having ads on the side.

Steve: So are all your clients kind of local to where you live or do you get people from all over the country?

Jeff: Actually majority are local, I do have a few that were not. I’ve got several that are out of state, but not huge. I think the furthest one I ever got which– this still amazes me was I have a client that is in the air force, and at the time of us starting our working relationship, she was stationed in Japan. And she found my blog for whatever reason, and like she wanted to work with me. And we– we’ve never met face-to-face, we’ve chatted on Skype a few times, and that’s it. She’s actually in the states now. I think she’s in Virginia, but she’ll be going to Japan I think in the next year. So that’s like my first international client per se, but I’ve got several on the west coast, and you know several scattered but I mean I’m not in every single state. I think maybe we have clients in about ten different states right now.

Steve: That’s actually really cool that you have clients that you’ve gotten from all over the country through your blog. Just curious, do they ever tell you why they decide to go with you?

Jeff: Yeah, you know there is one lady who recently, this is actually another lady. She is in my state, but she lives five hours from me and she called me, which happens every so often. And she told me she’s like her husband was in a situation where they were in their early 50s, and they were I guess something came up where they thought they needed a financial advisor, and the husband said to the wife “Hey do you know anyone that you feel that you trust.” And she is like, you know she’s like the only guy I know is this guy that I’ve been on his email list for about a year and he’s got a blog FinnancialCents.com, and she told me this when she called me.

She’s like I’ve been on your email list for a year and she’s like either you are super trustworthy or you have the biggest scam going but you know just the content you put out, I feel like that I know you. And I just thought that was funny that she was very candid about contacting me, because I love when people do contact me and want to work with me. I love just finding out how did you find me, and you know and just like with the lady in Japan like you know what was it about me that– because I told her, if I were you, I don’t know I could trust somebody to transfer all of my retirement assets even though I’ve never met that person face to face. I mean that is a huge leap of faith you know I would think, I couldn’t do it but I’ve had people do it.

Steve: It probably has something to do with your dance in You Tube videos. So for everyone listening, Jeff has all these You Tube videos where he’s actually dancing and acting kind of silly on the videos, but it somehow ties that in with personal finance in a very– in a very well done way. I can’t I can’t really describe it, I’ll just have to link up one of these You tube videos in the show notes for you guys to see. So okay, so you’re getting these clients through your blog. How do you actually get traffic to your site?

Jeff: You know, initially it was all just key words, it was– so kind of like my journey of really understanding how a blog works. The first key word that I ever wanted to target was financial planner Illinois. Actually, no correction, the first keyword that I ever wanted to target was my name Jeff Rose because before I started the blog if you goggled Jeff Rose like you didn’t see me. You found Jeff Rose the actor, Jeff Rose the golf polo maker, and Jeff Rose the superintendant in Oregon and you know that was it. So I wanted to own my name you know people wanted to do research on Jeff Rose they would find me, and that wasn’t that hard. After setting up the blog, setting up my LinkedIn profile and all that good stuff. But then I realized you know what, if people needed a financial planner they know, they don’t know Jeff Rose, they are not going to Google Jeff Rose. So I thought okay I’m want to target financial planner Illinois. So I went on this like campaign of guest posting and linking back to a landing page I created you know focusing on those key words, and I was able to do it. And I think it was two or three short months for the most part. And it’s pretty good considering the fact that I live in Illinois which you know I’ve got Chicago which is a pretty big city you know competing with all the financial advisors up there, and I was able to get at the time three listings on the top ten for financial planner Illinois.

Steve: Nice.

Jeff: I think it’s only two but I think I’ve got like three in the top twelve. So for a guy that really knew nothing about blogging, I was pretty impressed with that fete. So when I got that– when I was able to rank for that, then the thought was okay how do I rank for search terms for people that might need my services? Like 401k rollover, how much life insurance do I need to buy, how to do a Roth IRA conversion you know. Just figured basic thinking of key words or relevant search terms that people would need my services. So that’s when I started to write articles that were trying to target those certain key words. And this was all pre panda, pre Google panda which if people don’t know what that was, that was an algorithm update that Google did that just basically wiped out a lot of sites searching new traffic. So I was doing really good pre panda, and then Google for whatever reason didn’t like me, and I promise I wasn’t doing anything that wasn’t legal in Google’s eyes, but I got spanked pretty hard, I lost 70% of my traffic.

Steve: Wow, I didn’t realize it was 70%.

Jeff: 70% over night. April 11 2011[laughter] I actually just thought I looked at the date and I’m like you know what, that was like three years ago.

Steve: 2nd anniversary.

Jeff: Yeah exactly. It was horrible man, I mean I spent two and a half, three years building up this blog that was getting at the time a 100, a 150 unique visitors per month and lost it poo over night. And I just cried and you know kind of looked at myself but… So that was how I initially got traffic and you know since panda you know I’ve done more You tube videos like you’ve mentioned. Just focused on doing You Tube videos good content you know, just really putting out better content and doing like guest posting. I started writing for other major sites just to get more back links back to Good Financial Cents, and here recently here it’s the podcast. Launched the Good Financial Cents podcast earlier this year I think or last year I forget exactly, but you know but just basically doing things outside the box to drive traffic back to the blog. I guess the other major thing I shouldn’t have probably forgot about was my book…

Steve: Oh, yes.

Jeff: That came out last fall soldier sort of finance I released that got published in fall so you know all these different things I was doing all to get people back to my main hub which was my blog.

Steve: So are you still trying to get back in the rankings or is this just kind of your way of driving outside traffic and kind of Google proofing your site?

Jeff: You know, honestly, now like I used to do a lot of keyword research. And occasionally like I’ll start doing keyword research again, and like then I realized I’m never going to write the article to rank that term anyway. So now it’s like I don’t even– I don’t care as much as I used to. Like I think for example a recent post that I did was six things– I forgot things like title you know ‘six ways that retirees screw up their retirement’. That’s actually the worst title ever but, there is nothing about it that was targeting SEO. You know it was just six tips that I just felt that I’ve seen people continually screw up, with a lot of the clients that I’ve worked with. I took that article, I made the six tips, I’ve turned it into a podcast, I had my new assistant create a prezi which is kind of like a really sexy– like PowerPoint 2.0 presentation. So we created a nice prezi which I uploaded to You Tube, and I did a– when I recorded the podcast I also did a presentation with it as well, and I’ve got a nice image that I’ve created for Pinterest, and I’ll pin it on Pinterest. So just what I really want to focus on especially like my really good midi content is just to make it available, and as may [Inaudible] [00:20:19] as possible.

Steve: So out of all your referring traffic sources outside of Google, which ones do the best for you?

Jeff: Right now it’s actually Pinterest that’s actually driving the most referral traffic other than Google.

Steve: Really?

Jeff: Yeah, it’s my wife– she’s helped me a lot with the Pinterest pics and just making me knowledgeable with Pinterest and actually if I could check, let’s see. I mean Pinterest and then I think Facebook would be the next as far as social media referral.

Steve: So I’ve actually never gotten anything really hot on Pinterest and I was just thinking it was because the topic that I write about isn’t really geared towards that audience. Are you trying– are you kind of adjusting your content to appeal more to the Pinterest audience in any way?

Jeff: You know it’s something I go back and forth with, but the I just rebranded Good Financial Cents you know I just came out of doing site design not too long ago, and I started focusing more on the younger investor which is actually totally different than the actual clientele I work with. Most of my clientele probably 85% are of baby boomer age. But I– my wife who also has a blog and she gets a lot of young families to her blog which is kind of her residence because you know we’re a young family, we’ve got three young boys, so it’s just natural that those people kind of are the readers of her blog. And you know she always mentions me in her blog, so I’ve got like carry over traffic. So I just have a lot of people that come over from her blog that are all you know that are all younger they are all you know young families getting started financially. So it just kind of made sense to start devoting more content to that. And that’s kind of what’s been in our focus.

Steve: So I’d be curious, do any of those Pinterest people– have any of them become your clients?

Jeff : I’ve had a few people that we started on that path, but its– I– to protect my time, I don’t have like a minimum of clients like I formally announce you know like on my practice, from my blog anywhere, but I have you know have a mental minimum that I just know like to make it worth my time you know I have to have a minimum as far as working with people especially virtually. So I actually just more enjoy if they contact me, I like to give them the information you know they need, and it’s just kind of like point them in the right direction.

Steve: Okay. So let’s talk about some of your other web properties. So you got Good Financial Cents, you got Dollars and Roses, and you have a secret niche site which we I guess won’t go into too much depth about. But how does everything come together? So what is Dollars and Roses about?

Jeff: So Dollars and Roses was one of my– one of my many brain childs I came up with, but when my wife quit her job back in the fall of 2008…

Steve: Hey that’s already taken man, you can’t use that URL.

Jeff: What’s that?

Steve: You just said my wife quit her job. That’s…

Jeff: Wow, that was like totally, I’m going to actually register mywifequitherjobHq.com. It’s funny I just said that. So when she did quit her job and started helping me with my blog you know her– she didn’t have more time to focus on her blog, and that’s when she became more passionate about it. And I just thought it’d be really cool if we started a blog together that showcased our blogging efforts. And the initial intention of that, I mean it was basically a mirrored kind of a pathlin {phonetic] model, you know smart passive income, but to be more like the couple version.

And in the time, I really had no desire to be another you know Pat Flynn [phonetic] or you know another male in the internet marketing world. But my big vision was I thought you know if Mandy could really become more of a voice of this blog because in her niche I mean in the mommy blogger or lifestyle or whatever you want to call it. There just aren’t many mom bloggers that are very open and transparent with how much traffic they get, how much money they make from their blogs, you know it’s just kind of more of a taboo thing. They all want to pretend like they make money but they are never really open to share what that really is.

So that’s where I kind of– that’s where it all came to be. It was something we could do together, kind of a fun project and from that we started the podcast. But you know we don’t spend a lot of time on it because we’ve got so much other stuff going on that it’s not our main revenue maker so you got to kind of spend the time where you make money. But the same token I think that blog has done– it’s been good for us as far as like social proof like with the online space. You know her and I actually– we got asked to be a– to do a key note talk in San Diego this summer at a conference that you know that wouldn’t have came about if it wasn’t for the Dollars and Rose’s blog.

Steve: Let’s see so the purpose of Dollars and Roses in a way then is to just kind of strengthen your online presence, not necessarily tied to your practice or anything like that?

Jeff: Yeah, I have like this secret I think obsession of– I love being seen as an entrepreneur and you know one day if I ever want to sell the practice and then focus more on the online space you know this is kind of like setting those kind of like those steps to get there. So that’s kind of what the intent is I think.

Steve: I see, that makes sense I mean, I started my blog at the time as my retirement plan as well. So you know even though I’m still working the blog actually makes more than my salary so I could in theory I guess quit at any time. So since were on that topic. I often get asked actually on my blog what the best business model is in terms of making money online. You’ve tried a bunch of things including niche sites, blogging, writing a book, podcasts, You Tube videos. What would you say is you know for someone just starting out at least what should they be focusing on?

Jeff: Yeah, I think when people that are just starting their online business, starting blogging for the first time and they see someone like myself or even like yourself you know that has like the course and all these sites and now a podcast, and it’s very overwhelming. It’s like where do you start, and I think maybe what they realize like for me– for me it was just a blog. I started the blog, I did that for my goodness, I want to say at least a year before I did anything major like with doing any You Tube videos. And I actually think it was longer, I think it was like two years. So I mean it was just like finding that groove and just figure out one if like they even like blogging.

A lot of people– they’ll read the income reports or they’ll see myself like a Pat Flynn and everyone else that is like killing it online, like I want to do that, I can do that, and they’ve never even written a blog post before. And you know it’s like you start that and you realize crap I don’t like to write. And I’ve kind of had that epiphany a few times myself, so probably I’ll do a few more videos. So I think it is just starting, I think it’s just putting it out there, and trying to launch the blog and just seeing if you’ve got the mental fortitude to persevere because there are so many little hang ups that can frustrate you. And you know for me, my hang up like I didn’t even like want to go to word press because I didn’t even know how to install word press, which is kind of funny now, reflecting back for me that was like a big thing for me like I just didn’t know how to do it.

So I didn’t, I was using Jumbo because I was too afraid to go to word press but– and I remember one time the first time I installed my own theme, you know my first thesis theme on word press like I didn’t install right, and didn’t know where to go, had no one to talk to, and it was just frustrating. I spent like a whole freaking weekend trying to figure out how to reinstall a theme, like I’m not exaggerating, like an entire weekend. My mom was actually visiting at the time and so she had our– we just had one son at the time, and I was seriously behind the computer for like 48 hours trying to figure that stupid thing out. And most people don’t do that, like that’s weird.

Steve: It’s not weird. It’s fair to say that you don’t have a technical background is that right, Jeff?

Jeff: Oh my goodness absolutely not. No, I still laugh to this day like how I even have an online business, like how I ever blog because there was like the red button that you press to blow my blog up, like I’m surprised I haven’t pressed it like two, three times.

Steve: But say you got. I’m sorry go on.

Jeff: No, it’s like I think that’s it, I think most people– they have all these big pictures, they get overwhelmed and it’s like just start from beginning, start a blog if that’s what you want to do, and just see if you like it you know try it out for 90 days, and if you realize man this isn’t my thing you know delete and move on.

Steve: What about, you know podcasting? What about You Tube videos? Have you actually monetized any of your podcasts yet?

Jeff: You know actually just– I got my first sponsor that was the route I went. I just tried it, it was just actually more of a test to see if I could actually get somebody to do it. And you know I got a sponsor that is paying 7000 dollars for like a 90 days spot. I don’t know if I’ll continue that route. I don’t know if I like the idea of having sponsors. I guess this was the right fit. This is– I actually approached I think it was three different potential sponsors. So these ones I felt comfortable partnering with. You know one of the said yes, so I may go to the other two and see if they are interested for the nest quarter, but I don’t know, like it wasn’t always about making money. I just wanted to see if I could do it and I did it so.

Steve: So the podcast is again just one of those things just getting your name out there right?

Jeff: Yeah, it is you know and so you know for me and I slightly mentioned this but like with my blog and I know you and I talk about this several times. Writing for me– that’s not my strong point. Yeah I’ve got a blog, got over a thousand articles. Yeah I wrote a book but, [Inaudible] [00:30:11].

Steve: Yeah, and I was just about to say you just wrote a book.

Jeff: It’s like writing still it takes the most like– writing takes more energy than doing a crossfit workout. Like it literally just takes– there are times that I enjoy it but like I have to be in that perfect Zen state, where I’m heavily caffeinated, and it’s like fresh in the morning, I don’t have any kids and I’m not tempted to watch walking dead. I mean I have to be in this perfect state to write. But, you put me in front of a camera or if you put a microphone in front of me like that– those are my unique abilities where I can just do it, and I get jazzed to do it. Like it doesn’t take– it doesn’t require as much brain juice from me.

Steve: I see, so do you still write articles on JSC or?

Jeff: Yeah, and like the strategy that I do now is I use– I have a– what do I call it transcription service that I pay for, its called mobile assistant and I pay its like 50 bucks a month. Where it’s on my cell phone so I can call, and I can talk for how long and right now, I’ve figured out that if I talk for about 12 minutes that’s about a thousand word post .

Steve: Wow, okay.

Jeff: So I’ve got it down to a t man. And actually an article I’ve just written if people want to check it out it’s– it’s kind of boring but it’s how to cash out an annuity. And I– it’s probably not relevant to this podcast, but why I’m so excited about this post is that I’ve got my new headset. Illinois just passed law and now we’re finally hands free if you’re driving finally after I don’t know how California has been like after they applied for it.

Steve: It’s been like that for a long time yeah.

Jeff: Yeah, yeah, you feel like it just passed like two months ago. So I’m on my headset driving to crossfit mind you, and I’m on the phone for 12 minutes to mobile assistant talking out this post. I get the email later on that evening, I forward it to my new office manager who has an English background and she edits the post for me, to make sure I’ve got no comma surprises and everything reads properly and I copy and paste what she’s done, and it was ready to go the next morning. And so I was able to write a 12 minute post or a one thousand word post in approximately about 15 minutes.

Steve: That’s awesome dude.

Jeff: And that was like the fastest turn around post I’ve ever been able to do, and so that’s how I’ve been able to now crank out content so much faster you know I– having an editor you know that’s something that I was trying to find somebody. I tested out a few other people but this one here was by far like amazing.

Steve: So this is a human on the other end right?

Jeff: This is a human yes, with mobile assistant it is. Yes so these are all real people, they are all US based so it’s a phenomenal service that I freaking, I recommend all the time because I use it a lot for client meetings too. I use it for client meetings, detailing client notes, sending letters to clients. I also use it for emails, like any time I want to email somebody, I’m in the car and I want to email somebody, I just call in an email so that when I get that I can just quickly do a scan over an email. One thing I hear– I’ve used lately, how many times have you had to do text interviews Steve?

Steve: I did a bunch of them but they just became too much work, so I started declining them.

Jeff: Yeah, because like they take a lot of time right?

Steve: It’s like writing a blog post.

Jeff: It is, and like then some so this is how I answer like I just had a 12 question text interview that I did via mobile assistant. Had It done in 12 minutes, got it to my assistant just to make sure, and actually lots of times I even tell him hey I used my mobile transcription service you might want to check it for edit, you know when you get a chance to look it over. And so that way I can knock out these interviews and get– because I’m getting links from all these sites and doing all these interviews. I hate to decline them but you know they are, it would take me three hours to answer this interview via text but I can do it now in less than 15 minutes.

Steve: So instantly I would like to let the audience know that Jeff has actually been one of the big proponents in kind of influencing me to start outsourcing some of my activities. Those of you guys who follow my blog know that I pretty much do everything in my business. It’s just recently that I started outsourcing stuff and it’s because of Jeff’s success in kind of outsourcing and making his activities much more efficient so.

Jeff: I tell you what man, if you get Chris Tucker on– if he was here on your show like I think I’m doing pretty good. I have interviewed Chris for my podcast and after talking to him like offline for like 12 minutes like I realized I wasn’t even close.

Steve: Is that right?

Jeff: Yeah I mean he just– he like just he opened my eyes just all these other little things that I’m still doing that I shouldn’t be doing. And it’s just kind of like wow, okay it just opened up the door like how much more I could be outsourcing. I mean I’m doing a pretty big a job, but it can always be improved.

Steve: Well, I’m just glad that you didn’t outsource this interview because if I got your VA, I would have been a little pissed off. All right, so let’s talk about this major pivot that we mentioned earlier on. So what is this major pivot that is going to take your business to the next level?

Jeff: Yeah so you know the funny thing so with me was like– I’ve talked a little bit about the growing a practice, and what not and I really became a little bit more disenchanted from growing the practice. I don’t know what happened I think I just got so infatuated with building this online persona and this online business, and you wind up become more– I didn’t want to be tied to the office. You know I love it when I can go work in a coffee shop, and just be out of the office. I just like I thrive more or even when I work at home, like I’m now actually in my down stairs studio which is basically an unfinished spare bedroom in our basement that is in our recording studio. But I really didn’t want to grow the practice as much so I mean I was growing it just because you know people were referring clients to me. But I think you alluded to it at the beginning of this call where I didn’t really have a clear call to action on how to work with me.

And when I first rebranded Good Financial Cents, like that was actually intentional. I didn’t want people like if people really want to work with me like I always going to make them work for it. So they would have to like figure out how they are going to contact me, or find my contact form or really just like seek me out, and which is kind of cool because those that did really did want to work with me. I was able to talk to another advisor that has grown his practice exponentially, I mean he’s killing it. It’s like ten times the size of my practice, which once again like that has never really been a goal of mine but was really– what I was really impressed with this guy was his practice is like 90% virtual.

You know he actually relocated from Michigan out to the southern California and most of his clients are all virtual, they work basically via Skype or email and that’s it. And he showed me the process he has done to do so, and it really just got me fired up because my– the traffic that I get on my blogs and my online properties dwarf what he’s been able– what he gets. But he’s been able to grow it substantially just because you know clear call to action, and he has a really good process to kind of to streamline it.

So I now have embraced the fact that Jeff I have this digital asset with the blog, I have the financial planning practice. I haven’t really done a good job of processing, building processes it’s something I’ve been wanting to work on, I just haven’t been focused on it because I wanted to build more of a process on the online business. But here recently I finally launched my own unique process for the financial planning practice which is called the financial success blueprint, and it’s just the six step process that people walk through if they want to work with me.

And so now if you go to the blog its fairly prominent, you’ll see they work with me you know and the top navigational bar, and I have other call to actions that I’ will be implementing here soon as soon as my developer can get those going. And just going to have more of a clear hey you want to work with me, here is what it is, here is the type of clients that I work with, you know if you’re the type of person that needs contact from me like needs to talk once a week, like we’re not a good fit. Yes I’m really doing a good job of actually showing people the exact kind I want to work with, and to keep myself honest and fair to myself like I’m going to hold true to that.

Steve: So are the clients that you bring in– is this whole thing kind of scalable? Like can you handle like thousands and thousands of clients?

Jeff: It is, I mean thousands and thousands actually not. Could I handle 5-10 new clients a month? That would be a lot of work for me. My– what I want to do is I want to perfect the process, if we’ve had a few people go through it, they’ve been kind of like our guinea pigs. So just to see what are some of the pinpoints on our end, like what are some of the things that could be– like the stuff that I was doing that my new office manager can be doing, or maybe some of the stuff that the client could be doing more on their end like more home work or filling out more of the spreadsheets and stuff. So we’ve had a few people going through where we’re just trying to streamline it even more. Big picture would be bringing on a junior advisor that could facilitate you know some of the dialogue between going through the process. So, absolutely I think it could be could be streamlined even more. I could bring on other people to kind of walk you through that process once we have it perfected.

Steve: So it could be in many respects kind of almost as scalable as your online income in a way?

Jeff: I firmly believe so, and the guy– and I have my the guy who’s done it already that shown me how he’s done it and like he doesn’t work for people now. He has his initial clients that he’s built up and anybody new that comes in they all get funneled to his team.

Steve: That’s really interesting.

Jeff: So that’s what I’m jazzed about. You know it’s basically, it’s something I’ve been running from for like the last almost two or three years, and now I’ve just finally embraced it. And I’m just kind of excited to see how it can grow.

Steve: Yeah, so let’s talk about this change. So, was it due to any books that you’ve read? Or how do you network? How do you meet these people?

Jeff: You know it’s funny because– so this guy that I’m mentioning I, he’s somebody that I’ve seen online. You know like that’s the beauty of like seeing people online and just kind like social stalk people, but he’s been mentioned in a few trade journals you know that I read, and then I actually got like a sales call for to join some internet marketing company or specific towards financial advisors and once again his name was mentioned. And I thought his name came up like three times over the course of like four weeks and I’m like okay I got to reach out to this guy and see what’s going on. You know Like so I just emailed him like kind of a cold email and he responded immediately, and was like hey its actually funny because I’ve actually kind of like been following you for the last like three or four years.

Steve: Oh, okay.

Jeff: So that’s kind of how that came to be but I think it’s just monitoring your space like my space is financial planning, so anything I– anytime I read anything about anybody that’s marketing online or blogging or using You tube, I mean that immediately catches my interest so I’m always going to read up on it and kind of stay up on it so. I love seeing what other advisors are doing on our space.

Steve: So your blog actually probably got your foot in the door with this guy in a way?

Jeff: Yeah it did, I mean I said that, I mean yeah, I mean he always calls me his blogging superstar you know like he always looks at me like– but you know like I might be the blogging superstar, but he’s been able to grow his practice you know more than I have because you know he’s been more focused on it.

Steve: So any books that have influenced you in any way?

Jeff: Oh, my goodness. You know I think, I mean the usual you know Tim Ferriss’s “4-Hour Work week” you know that’s actually what inspired me to hire my first virtual assistant. You know it’s like that book, no question. I think another book that I love is “built to sell”.

Steve: Built to sell is that John Warrillow?

Jeff: Yes, yes and if your into audio books, I say that is actually probably the worst audio book. Did you– are you– do you do audio books?

Steve: No you know I actually have a copy. He actually sent me a copy for free a while back when he was launching it. I don’t know why he reached out to me. So I kind of wrote a little thing for him to help him promote it.

Jeff: The guy I wish he would have self like read it but he hired another writer and this guy man it’s just, it’s horrible. I mean, but it was good content so I mean I got through it, but I just love that book because it really talks about streamlining your business and having that clear process. And a coaching program that I’m in, they really talk about having a unique process and I’ve never done it. I’ve always wanted to do it you know so for me the financial success blueprint is that and you know kind of like I know this is a big picture, but if I can actually streamline this business to where– I guess I’m never doing it anything with it, I’m just like following lead that’s a good thing, but you know ultimately one day this is an asset I would like to sell, and if I have a streamlined unique process that you know I’ll basically just hand it over to the next person. I mean that makes the practice that much more valuable. Now the multiple becomes much more. I kind of have like a secret, see I’m 36 now, I have like a secret four year exit strategy. So if I can actually build this thing and sell it by the time I’m 40. Not if I want to sell, but if I could sell it I want to see like what I can do over the next four years to build it to make it potentially sellable.

Steve: Yeah I was going to ask you about that because you know for Good Financial Cents at least, your personality is a big part of that blog and likewise with my blog my personality is a big part of it as well. So how do you kind of divorce that to make it sellable?

Jeff: Yeah, so I mean I think that building up the process to where you know eventually I want to– I don’t mind being the face, but I think it’s a matter at that point in time you know I guess having to bring on a co-face, in especially the practice. But if I’m not the main guy dealing with people, that it’s my team that’s working with people, then I don’t think it will be much of an issue with the practice. With the blog, that’s something that I’ve wrestled with, but you know I think if I sell the practice, I don’t know if I could ever sell the blog. It be easier– it be easier actually to sell the practice than the blog even though the practice brings in more revenue. But I don’t know, I just love the blog and I think there is always going to be potential to monetize the online persona. You know I mean there is so many different angles I could go if I really needed to monetize it.

Steve: Right, absolutely.

Jeff: So I think that’s something that would be hard for me to let it go.

Steve: Cool, well Jeff I don’t want to take up too much of your time. If anyone wants to contact you, or give you their money to manage, how can they reach you?

Jeff: Yeah, you know GoodFinnancialCents.com that’s my main hub. You can also track me down on twitter, twitter I go by jjeffrose. There is two j’s cause Jeff Rose in Canada took it. But I’m active twitter, Facebook but also the hub is Good Financial Cents.

Steve: Okay, incidentally, what does that extra J stand for Jeff?

Jeff: You had to bring that up didn’t you dude?

Steve: I can [Inaudible] [00:45:37] this out if you want but.

Jeff: All right if people really want to know, my middle name is Jeff and then for some reason my parents named me Jan. Jan is my legal name, so Jan Jeffery Rose is what I go by, but I never really told anybody, but now your whole podcast community knows.

Steve: Nice, nice maybe I’ll leave this out and use it against you later.

Jeff: How sweet.

Steve: All right man well thanks a lot for your time. This was a really good talk.

Jeff: Yeah man, I appreciate having me on.

Steve: All right man, take care.

You might not have been able to tell from the podcast but the reason why I admire Jeff, is because he always has an open mind. And he is basically willing to try anything. And it’s because of his open mind that he’s constantly finding new and innovative ways to increase his brand and grow his business. And like I mentioned in the interview, Jeff is one of the main reasons why I started this podcast in the first place and for that I’m thankful.

For more information about this episode go to mywifequitherjob.com/episode25 and if you enjoyed listening to this podcast, please go to iTunes and leave me a review. When you write me a review it not only makes me feel proud, but it also helps keep this podcast up in the ranks so other people can use this information, and find the show more easily and get awesome business advice. It’s also the best way to support the show and please tell your friends because the greatest compliment you can give me is to provide a referral to someone else either in person or to share it on the web.

And as an added incentive I’m also giving away free business consultations to one lucky winner every single month. For more information about the contest go to mywifequitherjob.com/contest. And if you are interested in starting your own online business, be sure to sign up for my free six day mini-course where I show you how my wife and I managed to make over a 100k in profit in our first year in business. Go to mywifequitherjob.com for more information and thanks for listening.

Thanks for listening to the my wife quit her job podcast, where we are giving the courage people need to start their own online business. For more information visit Steve’s blog at www.mywifequitherjob.com

You are listening to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast, where I bring in successful bootstrapped business owners to teach us what strategies are working and what strategies are not. Now this isn’t one of those podcasts where we bring on famous entrepreneurs simply to celebrate their success, instead I have them take us back to the beginning and delve deeply into the exact strategies they used early on to gain traction for their businesses.

If you enjoy this podcast please leave me a review on iTunes and enter my podcast contest where I’m giving away free one-on-one business consultations every single month. For more information go to www.mywifequitherjob.com/contest. And If you are interested in starting your own online business, be sure to sign up for my free six-day mini course where I show you how my wife and I managed to make over a 100k in profit in our first year of business. Go to www.mywifequitherjob.com for more information. Now onto the show.

Welcome to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast. We will teach you how to create a business that suits your lifestyle so you can spend more time with your family and focus on doing the things that you love. Here is your host Steve Chou!

Steve: Welcome to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast. Today I have a good friend of mine on the show, Dave Lu. Now I’m trying to remember exactly how I met Dave, and I believe it was actually through a mutual friend Vivian from Stanford back when she was starting her own company. Anyways back when I didn’t have kids and I was able to stay out past 8p.m, I kind of got to know Dave at various social events. Now he’s a great guy and extremely knowledgeable and humble, and we could actually hung out more if he just was willing to make the move down to the suburbs, but he’s a city guy and we’ll see if that holds up when he starts having kids.

Anyways he is the co-owner of the site FanPop.com, which is a seven figure business that has a really cool business model. And in fact I would even go so far as to say that what Dave has created with FanPop.com is what I consider the, “Holy Grail,” of online businesses. So first off FanPop.com is a network of user generated fan clubs for different topics of interest that is maintained by the community. So for example if I like the movie frozen, I can go on FanPop and interact with some of the other fans and incidentally I was just on the frozen FanPop site, you know for my daughter of course but the key here though, is that all the content is user generated. And FanPop generates money off of advertizing revenue. So without introduction welcome to the show Dave. It’s been a longtime.

Dave: Thanks Steve. Good to be here.

Steve: So can you just give us a quick background story. Just tell us, take us back to when FanPop got started.

Dave: Sure, so I started FanPop with an old colleague of mine from Yahoo. We had worked together back in 1999 together. We were one of the first, you know early employees at Yahoo and we were part of management together and we re-united again because we were both working in down town San Francisco about, I would say about six years later or five years later and you know we would meet up and a lot of– we were seeing kind of a lot of new businesses launching like Delicious and Dig that were kind of you know the open source movement was happening and we felt like you know it was a lot cheaper than when were at Yahoo back in 99” to start a company and we thought, “Hey, we could probably do this on our own.”

And we felt like sites like Dig and Delicious were very tacky focused and we wanted to build something for the masses and you know we started testing out different models and ideas and I think originally we were trying out a travel idea but that was way more difficult to do back then and then we decided to try out this. We felt like there was lack of evolution for fan sites online. It was like GO city sites and really bad you know PHPBB open source forums that were from like the 90’s, and we just felt like there should have been– there should have be another new iteration of community groups for people who shared you know same interest topics like passions.

So we basically started you know working with a friend of mine who was a programmer and we picked up another programmer who also actually you might want to interview who runs cooking for engineers. He was running that at the time I was working at Intel and I went up, I talked to him about it and he was interested. So he quit Intel and joined us, and so we had a team of four and we’ve you know bootstrapped the company and have stayed for you know since we launched and we basically built it from scratch, this platform that allows people to create these communities and these condos around shared topics of interest. So like you said frozen fans, walking dead fans, people who you know love Justin Timberlake, it could be anything and everything and this…

Steve: I heard you started that one.

Dave: Yeah, definitely. That’s Justin Beamer that I started up. Timberlake is okay, but we actually you know the funny thing is when we originally started we had no idea where the audience would move towards and we started off with you know thinking okay, “We will be like [Inaudible] [00:05:31] or you know wine club, wine kind of stores are you know people babies.” They are different people who had shared experiences or interests or you know more hobbies. We had no idea that it would move towards entertainment and pop culture topics which is fine because I think you know all of us are very much into pop culture. You know sometimes it has to be a little younger towards the Justin Beamer’s in the one directions, but you know it pays the bills and there are a lot of people out there who likes that stuff. I don’t judge, I just build the site for them.

So yeah we’ve been, we launched the site in August of 2006, and we started working on it back in, I mean brainstorming back in until late 2005. So it’s been a long run so far.

Steve: Was it always called FunPop even back when you were thinking of doing the cigars stuff?

Dave: Yeah, good question. It was actually– the original name was, we went through a bunch of iterations when they were all the friends stars, we were originally, we tried fan stars and fan starred. Originally we changed the name to fan spots and the idea was that each fan club was kind of a spot and we just had you know a whole network of spots but the day or two before– and we had checked fan spot singular, we had fan spots plural. We in fact checked fan spots singular and it was actually owned by Carnet Media.

They do like the baseball card valuations, so we thought well we were not going to do anything with it, and it was in conflict at that point but two days before we were about to launch our data, we– I looked it up again and they had launched a sports social network. So since we also had sports fans in our mix we could not do that. We were afraid that it could cost too much money to pay for legal fees, to fight anything, even though we had launched our data before they did. We launched our data before then we were going to launch our official site, but we didn’t want to launch it when we had that problem.

So luckily we had kind of scored a way a bunch of domains and FunPop was one of them and it worked out. I guess it was kind of, for twitters because we ended up being a pop culture site. So it actually worked out pretty well and we ended up with a nice six letter domain that has really, the branding’s really helped. I mean users have, they love the brand, we’ve had users who’ve gone out and– even though we had short printed out a copy press for our own team to go to you know networking events and other stuff, we’ve had users who actually gone and paid good money to have sweat shirts and mugs and other stuff printed out with FanPop because they love the brand so much.

Steve: Interesting, is that a revenue source for you guys or…?

Dave: I mean, it’s pretty marginal. I mean, I’m buddies with the over the dictionary guy and he makes a lot more money out of this stuff than we do.

Steve: Okay.

Dave: Yeah, so it was funny, I mean the community that the users created, the brand helped but it was also a tines of like the community itself, and they launched all sorts of things like talents shows on our site and awards ceremonies for people who brought the best trivial questions or best polls. So we’ve seen a really strong kind of affinity towards the community as a whole, so it’s kind of cool.

Steve: So walk me through this. So let’s say I was interested in something, how would I interact with your site. Like how does it work exactly?

Dave: Sure, so if you– say you are looking, you are a big fun of X-men and you know, you go round the web and you find a lot of fragmented fan clubs who are X-men on Wikis or X-men and where blogs and even like you know some marvel or wherever and it’s kind of pain because you end up, you had to go all these sites and you know, you might have some interactions with people, but it’s mostly a one directional thing where someone is posting and you kind of comment. Well we wanted to change that and a lot of people that come on to our site look for X-men, go there and then basically anyone and everyone can, you know post an article or like you know a video or any fan out that they’ve made, you know create a poll question or you know play a trivia game. And so we just wanted to give people the features and just allow them have their own small community where people who understand them or were like them can relate to another and discuss all of their, you know their favorite topics.

So the goal was when you have one person– when you are by yourself and you are scaling the web for, you know all things X-men, it’s a lot less efficient than when you have a whole community of fans kind of contributing it to one place, one repository where you know, you might not have found something that someone else have found, and you can really appreciate it when you log in to FanPop and check out the X-men fan club.

Steve: So do you aggregate any of the other blogs that are out there or the information is already out there?

Dave: Yes, that’s I mean we– there is something we were working on and now we were originally grabbing headlines and other news feeds from other places but we are starting to build relationships with some publishers to bring in third party kind of articles and content. So anywhere from like Hooloo to other sites like Kid Fix and Just Jared, we are going to be– you know I think there is a lot of folks we want to talk to get their part of the content out there. So for people who don’t really use our access Orases readers this would be kind of a new solution for them.

Steve: I see, so would you pay these people to have their…?

Dave: We were just having, a lot of them just want traffic leads. So you know obviously we’ll take snippets of their content, but it’s at least it’s one destination that the people can go to and look, at least browse through all the stuff, and don’t have to search you know a bunch of sites for.

Steve: Okay, yeah that’s makes a whole lot of sense. Orases it’s kind of dying at least and your site will act like a more modern version I guess of…

Dave: Yeah and even more simple because I think a lot of the mainstream just I mean, they never adopted, I mean that’s just from my much knowledge, they never fully embraced Orases anyway so it seems like people were just going to the destinations sites versus aggregating themselves. I mean I don’t know why that’s why Google reader shut it down but– and it seems like even companies like Sleepboard [phonetic] who relied on that are having to move away from that model because I think it’s not everyone necessarily adopted it.

Steve: Yeah so you know, I’ve been thinking about your site a lot before I came on this interview, and I was just thinking about you know starting a user content generate site takes a ton of work and there is kind of this like chicken and egg problem in the beginning, right?

Dave: Yeah.

Steve: So how did you guys overcome that early on?

Dave: Yeah, it was tough, I– my mom always teases me or I guess makes fun of me in front of people because she’s like, “Oh, you are like a genius, you created a business and you don’t actually do anything,” because, I guess it did work out that way, but you know I think when we started it was tough because when there is no community, no one is going to be there. When there is no content, no one is going to come. So it doesn’t really make for good SEO when you don’t have any content. So I think one thing we did was we went around– early on we had to create a lot of fake users ourselves to like pretend that there are discussions going on, that’s kind of sad talking to ourselves, but you know we wanted to make sure when people came they didn’t see like an empty house like you know party.

But then we started kind of paying forums and groups around the web that we thought might appreciate it, and so we surely picked up on different, you know couple of different blogs and once we had, once you get a small– you only need a small subset of users to create the content, I mean and all we added like yolk and other sites at most it’s like 3% or 1% even contributors and the rest were all kind of consumers and so we only needed to get like a handful of the right people to start adding content and that just took off.

And slowly but surely we tried to reinforce that by giving them social recognitions like medals and banners and stuff so they could show that they were experts or good contributors and I think that incentivized them more. So we never got them rather having to pay our contributors or top contributors, it’s been all about you know the social reward of being considered an expert or you know a top fan of our site.

Steve: So earlier on you guys were trading a lot of your own content?

Dave: Yeah, we had to write our own articles, we created some threads for forums, we added you know videos we found or you know articles. I mean we just– or images, wall papers and things like that. So I mean, I think we just had to give people an idea of what it could be because when you start from scratch it doesn’t work like that.

Steve: Because I know just from my experience blogging that even if you have the content, even the people who are willing to make a comment on a post or wherever it’s a very small percentage. So how did you guys kind of encourage people to actually give their inputs and make comments?

Dave: Yeah, I mean I don’t know I guess people when they are already– I think it’s difficult when you are starting a topic that might be somewhat new and not that you know you are trying to build the traffic, but when there is in store base that you pursue like walking dead fans they all have an opinion and so everyone is on one like you know for Twilight they are on team Edward or team Jacob and they are already kind of, they are going to voice their opinions no matter what. So I think it’s that aspect that you hit, that you get to hit upon when you doing standard related topics that people are just passionate about and vocal about, and so we didn’t have much trouble getting them talk once we had the right topics up.

Steve: I just noticed you are very familiar with these female vampire series [Laughter].

Dave: Here it goes; I’m not going to lie.

Steve: So where did you grab these people from initially, did they just find you on search or…?

Dave: Yes a lot of these– a lot of them did find us through SEO but I mean like I said we reached out to some of these fan clubs as well, and we ended up getting typical folks coming from like forums and other places so we kind of like invited people to come check it out and they did.

Steve: Okay.

Dave: Yeah.

Steve: Because and just judging, you know banking on my own experiences in the past like you can’t just walk into a forum and…

Dave: Oh yeah.

Steve: And tell them to come to your site, right?

Dave: No, I think we reached out to the owners sometimes and I think they saw it wasn’t us, I don’t know, I don’t think they think of it as a threat, I think it was just a complementary tool that people could use to post poster fans so yeah I think I mean some of them like really embraced it and so they wanted to know that there are users about it.

Steve: Interesting, I think I might have an opposite reaction. Like if I run like the most popular fan club for one of your favorites like twilight, I would be a little reluctant to…

Dave: Sure.

Steve: Follow my traffic over to your site, unless there was a mutual benefit somehow.

Dave: Yeah, I mean I think we gave them links from our site as well so we didn’t do a sub co-links for their reasons but I think some of it was that the features that we offered that they didn’t really have appealed to them, and so there was like more, I guess they saw, some of them saw it was a complimentary feature.

Steve: Okay, that makes sense then and they are probably diehard fans as well, right?

Dave: Yeah, exactly.

Steve: Okay so let’s talk about the business model. How does FanPop make money?

Dave: We make money by splashing ads all over our site. Now we do make money through advertizing and a lot more, you know this– advertizing is since we started has evolved a lot. Before it was you know really cheap running networks and then you know some direct sales stuff, but we’ve worked with a couple of sales represented partners that sell large campaigns to you know, I think they were from TV networks, the movie studios to the Walmarts and T-Mobiles of the world, and you know they’ve made us money and then as the programmatic remnant of the world has continued to improve, places like Google and other kind of programmatic network businesses have really figured out a good way to generate high CPMs for– and optimize the whole ads base with like real time bidding and other solutions.

So things have definitely evolved and the ads side of things. I think there is still room for it to evolve on the mobile side and that’s something that we are shifting towards. Everything is moving towards mobile, and I think we need to be prepared for that. So we’re actually in the midst of redesigning our search of a mobile responsive site.

Steve: Okay.

Dave: And so when you see on our mobile site right now, it’s very different than we see like sort of the desktop, so that’s kind of emerging soon, but we want to be a much more visual site than we’ve been in the past.

Steve: So let’s– you said a lot in that last statement. Let’s back up a little bit. Regarding– eventually you guys only have four guys, and at least in my experience with blogging if you are trying to get direct sponsorships that’s almost a full time job in itself. You have to contact sales reps, kind of do negotiations and just work out how ads are being displayed. What percentage of your ads are direct versus remnant networks, versus you know other structured deals?

Dave: Yeah, so it does fluctuate from month to month. I mean like in some months it’s very slow and we can get back with like 10%, 20%. You know some months it could be 30 or 40 % so and usually isn’t more than you know 40, 50 % because the direct deals you would– there are a lot of websites out there, and it’s pretty noisy so you know in terms of revenue split, I would say most of your revenue is going to be especially if you are a display advertizing site, it’s going to be on remnant programmatic and the direct is you know when you can get it, it’s very high paying but the fill rate is just not always there.

Steve: Okay, and do you– are you using DFP?

Dave: Yes we are.

Steve: Okay so just for the listeners DFP is Google’s like real time ad serving. It allows other advertisers to bid and you only show the ads that pay out the most so…

Dave: So, I mean we use that as our subject P and stands for double click the publishers one the small business platform and you know we serve any campaigns that are sold directly to us, so say right now we have couple of classic campaigns for some books on our site, we use DFP to launch those sites and manage that but we also manage the whole [Inaudible] [00:20:17] chain ups and networks through DFP as well. So basically that handles all of our ads serving on the front end and we fill in on the backend with you know different networks and partners.

Steve: So what are some of the ads networks that you work with?

Dave: So we’ve basically, you know in the past we worked with so many you know from travel fusion to MTV networks to now it’s like all networks to cash programmatic everyone. And we’ve basically now that Google is just– since everyone goes to Google anyway; you figure all the demand is there so they had a supply of inventory. So we basically, we mostly rely on Google ad exchange, but we also have open X-exchange in the mix.

Steve: Wow, okay.

Dave: It actually helps with losing CPMs on both sides because when you’ve you know less supply who pushes out demand and the price, so the CPMs are higher on both sides. So it’s good to always you know put pressure on the prices more in the mix. So, but yeah those are basically our big ones for now.

Steve: Do you guys use adsense at all or…?

Dave: Yeah, I mean an exchange apparently pays a little better than adsense so the best, I think much of the, more of the high impact display ads are coming from ad exchange.

Steve: So outside of advertizing, do you guys try to sell products that are related to some of the fan stuff on your site?

Dave: Yeah so you know we experimented for a little while with Amazon and they have a unit called the omacasa [phonetic] unit that should read the cut on the page and target content based on the topics but contextually is not so good. It’s not so accurate so we stopped that one. EBay also has one and we were going to explore doing that but yeah we haven’t turned into the E-commerce side of things. We could but at the same time I think, it’s not like doing electronics websites where your revenue would flow or do much higher because you are on you know really high, you know high priced purchases. For us it will be like a cute t-shirt or paraphernalia and so we haven’t focused so much on that.

I think the one thing about our business is that because we are lean and small, we focus mostly on the product side. Our [Inaudible] [00:22:39] you know they cover our bills and we don’t, you know we don’t ask sales guys. I try to optimize it as much as I can but in the meantime we spend most of our time doing product stuff and you know the coding for getting the features in place so, that takes up more of our value.

Steve: Okay, so at least for me in my experience like the mobile ads stuff tends not to pay as much. So do you find that a lot of your traffic is kind of shifting over to mobile now, and how are you kind of making up for some of the, I guess the little revenue aspects of going mobile?

Dave: Yeah, I mean so the funny thing is we didn’t even have a mobile solution before. Basically what we had was when you go on you know your phone and you looked at our site you just get the top left corner of the page, it was pretty horrendous. We were trying some demo solutions like dedicate m.FanPop.com, there was someone else who was going to host for us and we were going to do a mobile version, mobile version of and we ended up shifting towards a mobile responsive site. So we have a mobile web and instead of a dedicated website. It’s now you know just responsive flow from our [Inaudible] [00:23:53], so a lot of those ads the same ads that we put on our mobile site because we’ve changed to a more tiled UI.
It gives us the facility to actually serve the same 300 by 250s and 300 by 600s…

Steve: Okay

Dave: in our phone view, but at the same time– so CPM’s on that all the same. We don’t have dedicated you know 300 by 250 or dedicate 320 by like 50 whatever units those mobiles are, and we tried out some mobile units that perform well, but I think we are looking at different mobile solutions that perform better on better CPMs. And so there are things out there, they are a few and far between because I feel like no one’s really tapped into the mobile web, advertizing space that well, is we had [Inaudible] [00:24:39] from a company called, “Mobile Theory,” and they seemed to monetize these certainly well.

I think it’s just like any creative and there is different start ups popping up here and there to do things like appleflows [phonetic] like the things that you see Facebook making a lot on with appleflows within their work. There’s companies that are trying to do that for like mobile web versions of sites. So I think it’s just about getting creative with what kind of you know units that are out there, that are available.

Steve: You know early on when you guys didn’t have as much traffic, how did you actually get signed on to some of these ad networks?

Dave: It’s very difficult like it is like there is a chicken and egg thing where if you don’t have the traffic they don’t really want you but I mean Google was always been you know you’ve got three pages a day or a month and you still signed up for Google. So we’ve always had Google mixed in there but in terms of getting the bigger networks, I think we had to definitely work on getting traffic out there before we even got their attention or had their interest to work with us.

Steve: So, I’m just curious from my own knowledge you know, how long did it take before you actually started generating a lot of traffic?

Dave: It was probably a year and a half or so, a year to a year and a half, I think so, yeah.

Steve: Okay, and was a lot of that SEO or was a lot that people just coming back for more stuff?

Dave: SEO takes a lot more time. We did have an SEO consultant come in and help us fix things and that definitely helped a lot but that takes time to build up. Initially it was definitely you know links that people hosted up or that we posted on our different sites that they got, yeah.

Steve: Oh, okay so did you make any mistakes early on and…?

Dave: Oh yeah.

Steve: If you could talk about some of those and how you overcame them.

Dave: We shot ourselves in the foot for a while. So like when we were, one of the things we did when we were testing some page if we had a little like star TXT blocking any callers because we were still doing a test and when we rolled up the page to the live production server, I guess it was like a few months before we realized, we were like, “Why isn’t Google indexing any of these pages anymore?” And then we started develop a TSC file up there in the page and we were like wow we just shot ourselves in the foot. So there are some silly things that we did like that. There is just a lot of other things that I regret and don’t really want talk about but there were mistakes made in contracts, you know contracts and other negotiations that we regret and you know there is certainly a lot we’ve learned along the way and I mean, it hasn’t you know, it hasn’t killed us, so they haven’t been fatal but it’s definitely an interesting learning experience the whole way, every step of the way.

Steve: So just curious going forward, you know the web has changed a ton in just the last couple of years in terms of Google updates and just the way websites are structuring themselves, how do you see kind of FunPop transitioning in the next coming years to grow?

Dave: So we are– I mean we are basically currently trying to redesign the site to become a lot more visual and a lot more user focused. So whereas before we were focused on the topics, we are much more focused on the fans now. So I think we want to provide them a feature set that allows them, that empowers them to share their fan dome whether they are on our site or the other sites and I think we are you know when we look at the pinterests and the tumblrs out there we see that platforms are the way to go. We were going to go down the path of trying to hire a editorial staff and have people write you know content, but we decided we’ll clear that because we are product guys that’s how we build the best. We– and we know that there is a lot of people out there who do a better job with that, so why would we you know try to re-write the same articles.

For us it was about what can we provide people that you know that are out there , that are fans that they don’t have today, and so you know we are playing with a feature set right now and we are trying to you know build it out so that you know we have a product that really speaks to fans, and allows them to express themselves and I think that will be the next iterations and yeah I mean if pinterest and tumblr can be that big as platforms I mean , I think our goal is to become that big as well.

Steve: That’s interesting so you are kind of going not towards the content, and you are more going along the lines of kind of aggregating and…?

Dave: Yeah, let’s, I mean it’s not just, well it’s not just well we are going to go the call on contract side only aggregating, but that’s kind of complimentary to the focus young user and giving them a tool set to be even more empowered to create content.

Steve: Okay.

Dave: So for us is more of a how do you get the user security content even better than they had before and make it easier for them to secure the content?

Steve: I see that’s very interesting. I would have thought that you would want more content on your own site and just kind of own more content going forward so that people definitely…

Dave: Oh yeah, this will be on our site. It’s just that…

Steve: Okay.

Dave: It would encourage them on their own profiles pages and other you know areas to create content for themselves. You can just…

Steve: Oh, okay, got it, got it. Yeah because you know the things with these fan sites; at least, I actually have very limited experience in this but you know if another site would have come on, let’s say I’m really into a TV show if a new site would have come on, that was better than the old I might grab a take towards that one, but I guess what you have is since a lot of your users have invested a lot of time into the content that they place on FanPop, there is less likely to leave? Is that…

Dave: Yeah, I think there is commitment on investment that they’ve made so they definitely stick around.

Steve: Okay. So what are some of the challenges then in just running a community based site? I’ve never done it before myself so I’m just curious.

Dave: It’s a lot of work. There is a lot of you know people get– it’s almost like being a teacher because you have to manage like kids like fighting in class or misbehaving and doing other stuff and we build that social kind of recognition system in it. We both try to cheat the system and they want the recognition from people so they create fake users. I mean it can be a big headache, but at the same time the users please themselves, and they are very vigilant because they are protective of their community, and they don’t want you know bad actors joining in and messing things up. So they definitely are very vigilant and let us know if there is someone misbehaving. And so we have a pretty good moderation kind of a queue and we have moderators on the site that manages it for us because there is no way that the four of us can do all that. But you know we’ve managed to– whether be using third party services like Mechanical Turk or others to get help, we’ve found ways that we can you know keep the site clean and safe for everyone.

Steve: Okay so you have designated users which are probably the most active ones to kind of moderate and handle the day to day stuff so to speak?

Dave: Yeah.

Steve: Okay, that’s pretty smart and they are just doing this not for money, they are doing it because you’ve given them a title?

Dave: Yeah.

Steve: Okay, wow that is really, that’s a great idea.

Dave: Yeah, I know, a lot of, I think my mom’s pretty impressed that I’ve really done absolutely nothing. Now, I mean I think the right way to do it when you are trying to scale, it’s just not– unless you want to hire a whole bunch of people, it’s just not a very scalable thing to do and basically by being small we are forced to you know come up with ways that we can scale by using the masses of our users to help support us.

Steve: So do you have any advice for people who want to start some sort of a crowd sourced site like your own if there were to start today?

Dave: Yeah. I think one thing I would say is we started off pretty broad which is I think the chicken and egg problem is the worst when you have to start off from a broad topic because you don’t have any, you don’t know where to start and where to target and even if you have, even if you have people coming, if they start coming to all different points in the site and different topics, then it will still be too thin and too shallow. So I think the most important thing is, I think to focus on a niche because that’s a lot easier to build up critical mass in than trying to reach critical mass in a lot different areas and we’ve gotten lucky. I can’t say that most people would have that you know fortune but you know doing it again, I would probably spend more time focusing on one specific you know topic of interest, or one kind of group of audience target because that makes it much more easier to target when you are trying to recruit people.

Steve: I imagine that’s kind of how you guys started too, right? You can’t possibly cover all the things. You probably just focus on a couple of them.

Dave: That’s right, we focused on a few and we went out to people on them, but for us is because since people have multiple interests anyway once you get into one, they get to add and register things. They will start themselves to build other communities around their other topics that they care about.

Steve: Okay. So what about in terms of platforms you mentioned you coded everything from the ground up. Are there tools out there today that makes this a lot easier now?

Dave: Yeah, I mean they’re definitely are. I think a lot of the CMS’s out there like Jupo and others have become a lot more play and play and easier to use. Ours because we started way back and we felt like so many nails and bolts on it that I don’t know that you could choose just like ours but I mean there are so many things with models out there that you could use, like Trupo [phonetic] and other you know CMS’s and even there is still programming languages and others like Nagios that make it a lot easier and quicker to build these things, but I think the hard part is knowing if you can scale it or not. So, I mean we’ve had to learn the hard way by building a site that was forced to scale so we had to make it you know work. So we probably had to get– it’s just targeting in a lot of time but out team is gun pretty good at managing this process, but I think for our future, for people who are developing now or building sites, if you are not a coder, I do think that there are some programs out there but I do feel like it’s a lot more difficult especially when you want a lot of customizations.

Steve: Okay, yeah that makes sense. So maybe some of my gold [Inaudible] [00:34:58] you…

Dave: Yeah.

Steve: Okay.

Dave: And they are very pretty robust and verse domino.

Steve: Yeah and I think if they had to scale to something your size, I think a lot change would need to be made regardless?

Dave: Yeah but then you– it’s you know let’s that’s good they probably had to get that big.

Steve: That’s true so.

Dave: Yeah.

Steve: So are there any business books that you would recommend or your favorite business book that kind of you know influence the way that you decide to run your business?

Dave: Yeah, I really enjoyed and it’s funny, I wasn’t very fortunate to meet him but those few books were great because they kind of– when you are getting started you feel pretty alone and unless you have other friends who’ve gone through it and even then they don’t always share everything with you. Hearing their personal stories of some of these guys and the stuff they went through when you are going like the tough dark times which a lot of my friends do, and then also focusing on the important stuff, programs, essays and, I guess since then they’ve probably published a book version of all those essay’s. Those are very helpful too because I think they just gave you the common sense and practical advice that a new entrepreneur needs to know that they don’t always teach in school, and it’s like simple things like the order of how you divide up equity and you know different struggles that you have along the way and you know, I think that hearing kinds of the follies and metaphoribles [phonetic] of previous people who’ve gone through this path is very helpful to avoid them, but you still end up making your own mistakes and that’s inevitable, but I think that it just gives you confidence that you don’t have to be perfect when you are doing, when you are going through this process. It’s okay to stumble and fall and that’s how you learn.

I remember when I started this or I guess when I started giving talks one I think I’ve done this– said this analogy a couple of times but I was like into the near Jones and the tumble of, none of that would do, it was last crusade where Andy has to walk to get the, “Holy Grail,” but he has to walk across the bridge to get the, “Holy Grail,” but he didn’t see a bridge it’s like just his bottom was casent [phonetic] . I think when you step off and take this journey towards entrepreneurship or starting your own business, it’s, you have to take that legal faith and step out and when you do you’ll realize that it’s going to be fine because all the friends and colleagues and you know co-workers that you’ve had from your past will all come out to support you and help you in any way and they build that bridge across so that you can be secure and I mean no one is waiting for you to fail unless they are a jerk, but there are people that care about you. They’ll connect you to the right people; they’ll introduce you to the right people. They’ll you know a lot of them will go out of their way to help you out because I think especially here in the valley it’s everyone’s dream to start their own thing. So when you actually do it I think people– they just feel like they want to do their part to see that happen and they are rooting for you, I mean hopefully and I think that’s one thing that I think every entrepreneur who is scared to step out– and I talk to so many people. I try to encourage them to start their own businesses but you know giving up their health care plan or their salary and other benefits is scary, and I think as you get older and you have more obligations that’s gets harder and harder so…

Steve: Yeah you know I’ve, I tend to preach everyone starts something on the side while they are still working. And just build it up until the point where they are comfortable quitting.

Dave: Yeah, I mean, I think the one thing is that I will say about that is, I started something probably on the side like that proved this model to me because I was working as a product strategy for EBay on a field in marketing and then that’s when I saw these guys were making tons of money on the side for referrals and affiliate marketing stuff like selling stuff on EBay and other sites and easily driving transactions, and so I build this project on the side for camera enthusiastic websites for you know canon digitalized horizon and saw people were– I was actually making some money on it, so that’s what gave me the confidence that this would actually work. It wasn’t making enough for me to pay the bills, but I think that model, seeing that actually worked gave me the reinforcement that it could be done on a larger scale.

I would say that the people I know who tried doing things on the side when they have full time jobs, it is much, much more difficult to do especially if you believe in an idea that can be big enough, but you are being held back because your best hours of the day are spent working for someone else and you know when you are like running around doing your product and personal life and trying to start something. We tried to do that in the beginning and it was you know pretty much hectic because we could only give it our late, our worst times of the day and we basically decided you know what if we are really serious about pursuing this, we just going to have to quit and go all in on this because you know it just wasn’t our best and so my co-founder and I– we just decided we had to quit our jobs to make this a reality, and if it didn’t work out, it didn’t work out but we wanted to know that we gave it all our best– put our best foot forward and not just kind of dipped our feet in the water.

And you know some ideas, I don’t think they require– I think for someone like new comers site where you are selling stuff, you can do that and see that people are buying and when you get pushed to the limits then you know better about whether you can afford to quit or not, I mean that’s a scalable model, but for us we would have build a lesser site or a lesser product and that could have ended up disastrous if we spent just half time on it.

Steve: Yeah, that’s makes a whole lot of sense. It really just depends on what your business model is going to be. So hey Dave I don’t want to take up too much of your time. Thanks a lot for coming on. If there is anyone out there who has any questions do you want to provide some contact information and just talk about your sites?

Dave: Oh sure. Oh sure, yeah you can reach out to me at Dave@FanPop.com and yeah www.FanPop.com is our site.

Steve: Okay, well thanks a lot Dave. Thanks a lot for your time.

Dave: Thanks Steve.

Steve: All right, take care.

Dave: Take care.

Steve: Here is what I like about Dave and his business FanPop.com. Unlike a blog where you either have to create your own content or hire a team of writers and editors, Dave has essentially created a business that pretty much populates itself with quality content by leveraging his audience, and as a result his business is generally hands off and it generates cash like a machine. Now while the end result is impressive, it clearly took a lot of hard work to get there and that’s why I admire him.

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Thanks for listening to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast, where we are giving the courage people need to start their own online business. For more information visit Steve’s blog at www.mywifequitherjob.com.