← Founder's Story
Founder's Story
From Rooftops to Revenue Streams: How Two Zoology Grads Built an Online Empire | Ep214 with Matt Raad Founder & Co-founder of eBusiness Institute
00:30:05
Loading summary
Transcript33 lines
- [00:00]
Daniel
If you're anything like me, your inbox is a mess. I used to spend hours sorting through emails trying to find that one thread or task buried under a mountain of newsletters and noise. I can't stand it. That's why I started using Notion Mail and honestly, it's been one of the most game changing things that we have done. Notion Mail is the inbox that thinks like you, automated, personalized and flexible to finally work the way you work with AI that learns what matters to you. It can organize your inbox, label messages, draft replies and even schedule meetings. No manual sorting required. It actually connects with the rest of my workspace so my messages, tasks and notes are all in sync. I've never felt more on top of communication. Get Notion Mail for free right now@notion.com founders and try the inbox that thinks like you. That's all lowercase letters notion.com founders to get notion Mail for free right now when you use our link you're supporting our show. Notion.com founders ever wanted to explore the world of online trading but haven't dared try? The futures market is more active now than ever and Plus500 futures is the perfect place to start. Plus500 gives you access to a wide range of instruments S&P 500, NASDAQ, Bitcoin, Gas and much more. Explore equity indices, energy, metals, forex, crypto and beyond With a simple and intuitive platform, you can trade from anywhere, right from your phone, deposit with a minimum of $100 and experience the fast accessible futures trading you've been waiting for. See a trading opportunity. You will be able to trade it in just two clicks once your account is open. Not sure if you're ready. Not a problem. Plus500 gives you an unlimited risk free demo account with charts and analytic tools for you to practice on. With over 20 years of experience, Plus500 is your gateway to the markets. Visit us.+500.com to learn more. Trading in futures involves the risk of loss and is not suitable for everyone. Not all applicants will qualify. Plus 500 it's trading with a plus. Hey everyone, welcome back to Founder Story. Today we have Matt Rod, the CEO and co founder of E Business Institute and Met. I'm really excited to dive into how you are talking through people about making money online, starting businesses online, buying and selling online companies. It seems to be, you know, these are the things that are are really taking off. At least recently I'm seeing a lot of people talking about this and as we know it's a global marketplace and a lot of people don't want to have the typical 9 to 5 job. I experienced that. So let's first start off with your story. And what was the spark for you that made you say, I want to be an entrepreneur and this is the industry I want to go into?
- [02:56]
Matt Rod
Yeah, really, really good question. I guess it's very appropriate. Daniel, I'm on your podcast and our founders story, I think in this instance, our actual founder story is probably most important because people look at what Liz and I do. Liz is my wife. We, like Daniel said, we buy and sell online businesses and it's obviously the place to be. But backing up to our actual story, I met Liz at uni. We were studying zoology. So red kangaroos here in Australia, which sounds totally bizarre. And ever since then, our life has just been very unique compared to most people. Neither of us ever wanted a 9 to 5 job. We both come from rural, like from farms in rural Australia. And we decided somewhat stupidly at the time to buy a small manufacturing business as soon as we got finished university with help of friends and family. And we absolutely loved it, but we made a lot of mistakes. It was going bankrupt. We got the wrong advice when we bought it. So to this day we're really passionate about teaching people to do good due diligence. And looking at our founder's story, I guess it was very challenging. People see what we do today, but this was 30 years ago and we, we. This, this bit sounds like I'm making it too simple. But we were very successful with that business. Eventually it took 10 years to get that one right. In that meantime, we bought and sold other businesses. We were exporting to America. We're making parts and outdoor power equipment. And we were, we bought and sold other wholesale or wholesale import businesses. Yeah, distribution businesses. And we're always buying and selling these businesses that revolved around physical inventory. And so what happened was we felt trapped. It was really difficult because we were hugely in debt for the whole, you know, that, that 10 years or 15 years actually we were massively in debt to the banks. And maybe if you're listening to this, you can identify. I know a lot of people, you know, invest heavily in real estate. It's the same kind of thing. We're investing heavily into stock heavy businesses. And, and in that time, what we started doing was we were hanging around mentors. We had private mentors who were also buying and selling businesses. And I think it was by doing that and we got into mergers and acquisitions. We started helping them buy and sell multimillion dollar businesses. And that just opened up our eyes. We literally were working with people that were in our opinion living the dream, basically using businesses as assets. And what they taught us was go for high cash flow businesses. And that's the, that's the trick to all of this. And they were literally making millions of dollars a year working two or three days a week. And I think that's what that became our goal obviously. And that's, that's what set us on the path. Meeting those guys, working with them and seeing that it could actually be done, that was absolutely eye opening. So we learn a lot through that and I think one to this day the power of high cash flow businesses. Once we saw the online space, it was an absolute no brainer. Online businesses are very high cash flow. That's kinds that we buy and for that reason we see them as much lower risk compared to what we used to do in the good old days of bricks and mortar businesses.
- [06:16]
Daniel
Yeah, I'm glad you bring that up because I think everyone wants to create the next beverage or they want to create their product but not realizing that they're going to not make any money for a very long period of time no matter how much revenue they're bringing in because it's all in this inventory and manufacturing and all these things that your, your capital stuck. So when you're looking at an online business are there parameters like EBITDA or margins or what do you look at in terms of like okay, I think this is at least viable in the due diligence.
- [06:51]
Matt Rod
The main thing we're looking at is the EBIT or the net profit for websites. To keep it simple, they're basically valued exactly the same way as a traditional bricks and mortar business. Typically anywhere from 1 to 3 times multiple, 3 to 5 times multiple of the profit if they're a much higher quality business and a much more automated and or you know are recurring revenues. But it thumbnail you know, quick valuation of most online businesses. If you're listening to this and you're used to how you value, you know any business, it's always a three times multiple. So if it's netting around 100 grand a year, it's probably worth around $300,000. And that's what we're looking for. But what, what we're, what we're also doing. Daniel, really important people hear us. You know Liz and I buy and sell online businesses the sorts of they think we're buying and selling e commerce businesses because of my founder's story there. That's definitely what we don't do that. We, we avoided that. We, we made a pact with each other when we got online. We are never going back to physical inventory businesses if we, if, if we can help it and we never have. So we never bought E commerce style businesses. We buy businesses that make money off selling information products or advertising or sponsorship packages which is a really big thing these days. And, and, or your traditional affiliate style businesses which are still very, very popular these days. They can still make great money. And in particular what we like I guess is niched online businesses that have unique communities or audiences behind them. It's all about the audience now in this day and age of AI and the way that the search are working.
- [08:41]
Daniel
So are you finding that are you buying businesses that have like a complimentary community to another business that you've already bought like over time or do you just. Is it kind of like you know, this, this industry over here, I like this one. This. Or are you putting them together as a, as an ecosystem?
- [08:58]
Matt Rod
Ideally yes, that, that is, I mean when you're starting out you just buy anything that's got a good profit and good recurring revenues and good traffic. So that's the other thing we look for when you're asking before in due diligence. It's all about the traffic and the profit that probably our main metrics. But we love doing exactly what you just mentioned because that's what we used to do and our mentors used to do with bricks and mortar businesses is go into a niche. So for instance we would help these guys buy every, as many wholesale import businesses in the electrical components niche, you know, electronics or whatever. And so we do the same online. We go into one vertical niche and we try and buy. You're right, businesses have complimentary audiences so the, but there is also merit in having websites in different niches as well. And we, we own a broad range of sites across a broad range of niches. But for us these days with is particularly this last year or two, the way the, the online space is working, it's all about community or audiences now and, and all things being equal, I guess that's one of the other main things we're doing our due diligence on now. It's about the, the audiences and the way our AI search is working. People are following. Yeah, the audience or the community is hugely valuable. And it, and it means you can have recurring revenues particularly if it's got an email list or a big or like even a social media following and we can create multiple followings as well that Becomes assets in and of itself as well.
- [10:35]
Daniel
Now, so when you, when you look at the company and thank you for explaining that, are you looking at these digital assets? I guess I'm just making that up. But these digital assets that they have, are you seeing. Okay, they may not know that they can monetize it this way, but we know we have monetize it this way. So when you're, when you're going through the due diligence or going through the phase of trying to figure out if it's even worth buying, how do you look at those things?
- [11:01]
Matt Rod
Yeah, that's a key point. And that also explains why what you're saying is spot on. It's also why we find or we love buying. Do I say bargains? I don't know. Or diamonds in the rough in what we call passion niches. So niches where, you know, people that don't typically know how to make money online love to blog about, for instance, like food blogs, travel blogs, gardening blogs, photography blogs, how to play guitar. All the classic evergreen niches have been around for many years. Believe it or not. These. These sites are quietly. The big ones now are worth millions of dollars. We know, like you go and speak to any website broker, you know, they. These days, I'll tell you, yeah, we're selling food blogs for millions of dollars, which never happened when we first started online. So we've been doing this for nearly 15 years now. But one of the advantages of going for these passion niches is that people will set these websites up, they chip away at them for a couple of years, and then they basically lose interest because they're not making much money. But they've actually created a lot of assets there. There's age. That's an asset that's worth money. They've created a following which is worth huge amounts of money these days, and they've created valuable online real estate. So a great example of like what you're saying is we have a young couple who are. They're actually coaches for ours, but Nathan, Alexa, they learned off us many years ago, and they want to do the laptop lifestyle. They're a young couple. They traditionally tried real estate investing, but they just maxed out with the banks. They had no money. You know, Nathan was an electrician and Alexa worked in customer service. So they started buying and selling these passion sites, got really good at renovating them and they found that they could work in the gardening niche. They owned a couple of sites in the gardening niche. They're not gardeners. They're literally living on laptops. They were, you know, traveling around the world doing the young person thing where the visa would run out and they'd have to move to the next country. So they. Three, three months at a time in a country on a laptop. They are definitely not gardeners. So they'd hire experts to write the articles. But they noticed that there was this neglected site here in Australia. It had been around for 14 years. And they could see the guy had stopped blogging on it. So they reached out to him and said, hey, do you want to notice you're not working on the site you're interested in selling? And he said, sure, I was going to close it down. How about $400? So they bought it for $400. And that site now, because they've assimilated it in with their team and their other gardening site, they've got a much bigger gardening site. That site is making $4,000 a month net in peak gardening season. So they renovated it, add more content, and now they get sponsorship. They've gone to local trade shows. Big gardening companies are paying to advertise on there or to do, you know, sponsored posts and things like that. And I think that's a great example. It's just in this humble gardening niche. And exactly like you said, Daniel the gentleman had, he just was bored with it. Never made that much money. And it's just a great example. These guys knew exactly what to do. They knew all the keyword research, they knew how to grow it. And now that wasn't a get rich quick thing. Please don't think they just immediately started making that. They had to work at that. That took about a year or so to build that up. But in the meantime, found multiple sites that are doing now they've got one in crochet, another couple in gardening. So for them, it's just a. They've got the team already in place and that's what they do.
- [14:33]
Daniel
This reminds me of in 2020, I wanted to travel for free. I'm like, you know what? I just want to travel for free. So I'm such a huge proponent of what you're talking about. I bought into a Facebook group for $300. It was like $250 a travel group. It had 90,000 people. I then went, while I was on vacation, I reached out to a hotel and said, hey, I have this group. I want to review your hotel. Will you let us stay for a few nights? They let us stay. We got upgraded to a Four Seasons presidential suite. I mean, this is because nobody was traveling Nobody was traveling at that time, but we took like about a year to build that up and then we built other sites. And then like you said, I'm a huge proponent of what you're talking about and I love the fact you're bringing up this is, you know, people like you're saying they're looking for the, they want to, they want to get into something that's making a million dollars today, which we knew highly unlike this, you have so much cash to spend. But finding these diamond in the roughs where, you know, these websites that people have been blogging on, that they're not really using these assets that, you know, they don't even know how to make money on, it's just a waste of their time. I think that is huge. This is the, the website. I mean the Internet probably has millions of these sites. It does that.
- [15:54]
Matt Rod
That's the exciting thing. And, and the main risk is your knowledge risk. You just gotta know what you're going to do with it and, and be thinking out five years in advance. That's the, the thing. And you know what else is really exciting, Daniel? This is how the small guy can end up selling out to the big guy. Because we can buy these assets up, build them up, and then we sell out for much bigger numbers. Because with business valuations, what we learned all those years ago and what everyone knows is once your business gets over a certain size, the multipliers jump up and the big buyers start coming in like the private equity firms and the high net worths and stuff. And that's the really exciting space. So once you get over a million dollars with online businesses, it's a really interesting space for acquisitions and things like that and generating wealth. Because you can flip websites at a very high level. But that's why we love teaching people this is the way we get them to transition from corporate careers and stuff is you can't really lose by having fun with this, doing like you're saying, buying these smaller niche sites that people have neglected, there's no real downside to you as the buyer because you're getting them cheap. You should, you know, you buy them small, keep under 50 grand, keep under $10,000 and just build them up. Learn your digital skills that you need for in this day and age anyway, and then you can hopefully sell out at a much bigger price down the track or you keep. For the cash flows. It's a, it's a really cool strategy if someone's looking to not immediately quit their jobs, you know, do as a, I guess you call it a side hustle, you know, over, over time. And that's where we've seen some fan absolutely fantastic success stories.
- [17:29]
Daniel
I love this side hustle. I love when people tell me, you know, I was able to replace my income and then I moved over. So when somebody comes to you with the 9 to 5 or they're like, look, I hate working for this corporation, Matt. I know I have skills that I've been building. I want to leave what is like two or three things that either that I need to know or I need to do in order to leave.
- [17:51]
Matt Rod
Awesome. My favorite topic is firstly, don't quit your job because it gives you financial stability, which helps with your mindset. You've got to carve out time to learn first how this online space works. And my number one bit of advice just we've been coaching people for more than a decade now. We've got huge success stories with it. And the thing that we noticed gave the gives the best result, the quickest is learn how to build a website and just understand how all this space works. So like Nathan Alexa, they could very quickly because they built lots of websites, they could very quickly look at that gardening site and go, oh, I know how to renovate that. I know how to fix this. We know how what to put here and how and then more importantly how we can monetize it. Most passion site owners don't really monetize very well either. So your first step is learn in the evenings, which is a lot of fun. Stop watching Netflix for a while, just turn off, you know, carve out a couple of days or in evenings, treat it like a part time diploma or something that you're going to study. And then the next step is, is buy or build a very small site first where there's very low risk so you can't really make too many mistakes. But the upside is huge if you get it. Even if you just get it to making a couple hundred dollars a month, that's a major win because believe it or not, the same skill that gets you that first couple of hundred dollars a month is the same skill sets that we used on $10,000 a month websites. So, so start. So learn and start small. That's probably my main bit of advice.
- [19:22]
Daniel
So let's say they do those things. I'm fired up, my site's making money. I want to start buying other types of sites. Is there a certain place or way that you find these diamonds in the roughs or the these sites or these digital assets that you find works the Best either for you or your students.
- [19:43]
Matt Rod
So we start everyone out on the world's biggest website brokerage site now called Flippa.com and it's the reason it's really good is because it does list sites under $10,000 that actually do make money. So you still need to learn how.
- [20:00]
Daniel
To do due diligence.
- [20:02]
Matt Rod
Sorry, that's the other key step you should learn in life as well if you want to get good at this is obviously due diligence. It's something that we made big mistakes on in the early days and particularly with bricks and mortar businesses. But that's the other beauty of going onto a place like Flippa. You can start out small and do practice due diligence. There's lots of other website brokers out there. Now obviously buying off a website brokerage means you're not always going to get the best bargains. But we do have clients that get amazing websites. So we just had a client recently buy a really cool snowboarding site for I think it was $12,000 and it's making a thousand dollars a month semi passively and it's all about snow, the topic of snowboarding and it was started by an expert snowboarder and it's got a really good following and so you can. And that was bought on Flippa and no one else bid on it. No one saw it. Because on Flippa the inside secret is the best listings on there are the ones that are in the classifieds. Once you know what you're doing. People seem not to hunt through those enough. They just look at the. It's like an auction site or the, the one that demonstrates all the statistics and everything. If you look in the classified listings that's where you can find the diamonds in the rough. But once you get experienced and you've practiced our go to our favorite strategy still to this day. And it's how we bought bricks and mortar Business is where we developed the strategy is literally what we call the private approach. It is in the good old days it was door knocking. We drive around industrial areas in, in, you know, where there's factories and things in the afternoons and we just go and door knock or go on, you know and identify businesses to see if they wanted to sell. We do exactly the same thing online. So we look for rundown websites in our niches that we know and we'll send them emails and say hey would you be interested in selling? They even don't have to be run down websites. But when you know what you're doing and interestingly People find this surprising. We don't even approach the sites that are on page one of Google or anything. Often we go to like page 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, the really low ranking sites, because you can pick them up for bargain prices and if you know what you're doing, you can fix them up. So there's lots of opportunities for private approach once you know what you're doing. That's for getting the diamonds in the rough, the bargains.
- [22:20]
Daniel
So when you, when you look at this private approach, I'm very fascinated. I've used Flippo before as well. But I like this private approach and going five plus into Google because I think I stopped at like maybe two. But yeah, Rhett, Yeah, I mean like the up. Like if you're already on page one, how much more upside is there? But if you're on page five, there's a lot of upside. So when you're looking at these, I would imagine that most people are, one, afraid to reach out for whatever reason. Maybe they don't know what to say. And then two, how do you offer? I would think that many of these sites are not making money. So if a site isn't making money, how do you know what to offer them?
- [23:02]
Matt Rod
Yeah, it's a really good question. And I guess coming back to like Nathan Alexa, it's a really, you know, they, they did exactly that. We looked. The reason we go so deep into Google like 5 to 10 pages back is this. There's no competition there. There's no one else approaching those. People just think those websites are dead, which they kind of are a bit. That little gardening site, literally the guy was just going to close it. He was just happy for 400 bucks just for someone to take it over. You don't always get that. Obviously some of those sites will be making money. It is interesting. Some sites on page five still make okay money. And people, there's always people that overvalue things. But then we just gently educate them. If we can jump on the zoom and chat to them, what we say to them, look, we're real, we're cash buyers. Typically we pay three times a profit and they say, well, I'm not making very much profit and go, oh, well, there you go. So it's not really worth that much. Do you want out or not? And sometimes people are just happy to sell it for a realistic price. If they're not realistic, that is the biggest problem. The challenge with this, if they're not realistic, we just move on to the next deal. That's the bottom line being Blunt about it. You can't convince someone to sell their baby for if they think it's worth too much. But typically we will say to them, look, go and look at Flippa. You'll see what sites like yours are selling for. We're here private now, we can do the deal tomorrow. That often gets people across the line. You say, we're cash buyers, we'll do it tomorrow. You know, the money will be in the bank account. We use escrow, by the way, escrow.com, which is really handy way to buy websites like when you're doing private deals. But in essence that's what, that's what we're doing.
- [24:42]
Daniel
I don't think people understand how important escrow.com is.
- [24:46]
Matt Rod
Oh, I pay. Okay. I take it for granted. But yeah, yeah, it's escrow. Yeah, it's like in the old days where we buy bricks and mortar business. You put your money into the lawyer's trust account. Escrow is an online version of that where the Money's held by escrow.com until both parties agree that the assets have transferred and then the money transfers to the seller. So yes, so we've, we've, it works really well. We've been on, you know, six figure deals and we've had to back out of the deal and we've just said to escrow, no, we haven't proceeded with it. And the way escrow checks it with online business is actually really easy because it just, they just see if the domain name's transferred and if the domain name hasn't transferred, you can back out of the deal.
- [25:29]
Daniel
Yeah, these are things that like you said in the beginning, these are the things if you, when you mess up, it could be huge. It could, that's all the thing like that could be like you could lose A hundred thousand plus dollars, some $3,000, could be a whole year salary for some people depending on where they're at in the world. So, you know, leveraging these tools and I think now with, with AI and the ability for at least generative AI to create content like you could automate so many things. You don't have to have a huge team or maybe they had a huge team that doesn't really need to be there anymore, you can really create a lot of profit or profitability. How are you looking at this?
- [26:10]
Matt Rod
Yeah, that's, this is the really exciting part. And obviously this is rapidly evolving. I've got to say, even as we record this, Daniel, even in the last two months, we are blown away in.
- [26:20]
Daniel
Our.
- [26:23]
Matt Rod
In our team, we're all testing all the different tools because all of us in our team and our coaches, we all own content sites or buy and sell websites or variations of those and we, you know, we're using Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini and we're all getting different results and now we're using a combination of them all. It's very pathetic. It's a very exciting time. And the good news is already for us and our clients we are noticing we are significantly reducing our out team sizes.
- [27:01]
Daniel
One of the best things I've ever done for my personal growth was picking up a new language. Whether you're traveling, leveling up your career or just love learning, speaking another language opens up many doors and Rosetta Stone makes it easier, more immersive, more fun. It's the leading language learning program available right on your desktop or mobile. Rosetta Stone helps you learn naturally. Just like you picked up your first language through real world context and conversation. Just practical skills you can use right away. What I love most is the true accent speech recognition. It gives you real time feedback so your pronunciation actually sounds like a native speaker. With 30 years experience, millions of learners in 25 languages to choose from like Spanish, also Tagalog, which I'm learning. Rosetta Stone is the go to for anyone serious about learning fast and retaining it long term. Don't wait. Unlock your language learning potential now. Founders Story listeners can grab Rosetta Stone's lifetime membership for 50 off. That's unlimited access to 25 language courses for life. Visit RosettaStone.com today to get started and claim your 50 off today. Don't miss out. Go to RosettaStone.com today and start learning today. When you realize you need to hire, it's usually already too late. I've been there wasting weeks, decent candidates. If I had used Indeed, I could have hired way faster. So when it comes to hiring, Indeed is all you need. Stop struggling to get your job post seen on other job sites. Indeed Sponsored Jobs help you stand out and hire fast. With Sponsored Jobs, your post jumps to the top of the page for your relevant candidates so you can reach the people you want faster. And it makes a huge difference. According to Indeed data, Sponsored jobs posted directly on indeed have 45% more applications than non sponsored jobs. One thing I love about Indeed, it makes hiring fast because it puts you right in front of the right people without wasting time. Plus, there are no monthly subscriptions, no long term contracts. You only pay for results. And while I've been talking, 23 hires were made on Indeed Worldwide there's no need to wait any longer. Speed up your hiring right now with Indeed and listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit. To get your jobs more visibility at Indeed.com founders story, just go to Indeed.com founders story right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com founders story terms and conditions apply. Hiring Indeed is all you need. You ever get stuck at checkout and suddenly feel like you're back at 2003? I was in this coffee shop the other day. Their system froze when I went to pay staff panicked. I ended up walking out empty handed. I was so annoyed. That's why I love businesses that use Square. There's a dessert shop that I go to right in Irvine and with Square, the checkout is always instant tap swipe done. Even if the wi fi goes down, Square keeps running sleek, easy to use and built to grow with your business. Whether you're selling online at a pop up or managing multiple locations, which I have done in the past, you need something like Square. And the best thing is it makes it simple. From payments to inventory reporting to customer loyalty, which is everything Square keeps up so you don't have to slow down. Get everything you need to run and grow your business without any long term commitments. And why wait? Right now you can get to $200 off Square Hardware at square.com go square founder that's sq u a r e.com g o/founder. Run your business smarter with Square. Get started today.
- [30:53]
Matt Rod
Writers and Editors we're now using AI to edit human written content, which is interesting. It used to be the other, you know, like a year ago when we're using AI, we're saying be careful of AI written content because it won't rank. You know. So you get human writers to write it and then tweak it up. Or you you draft everything with AI. But now it's the other way around. We we can edit old human written content with AI and make it a lot better. So it's a really interesting space. And I'll just come back to something you said there when we're talking about escrow as well. Just made me think like you said things. If you don't know what you're doing it you can lose money if you're not careful. But this is the beauty of if you're listening is please don't rush out there and buy a six figure website straight away or anything. Just buy a little site under $5,000. That's normally our starting point for everyone. Why? Because you can. You can hunt around. There's always sites for sale on Flippa. Right now, there's probably hundreds of sites for sale that are under 5,000 bucks. And that way you learn. That way you'll learn how escrow works and all those things work. And jumping back to what Daniel and I are talking about now, if you've never used AI with websites, on a $5,000 website, there's no downside. You can practice to your heart's content. That's a great place to learn how all these AI processes work and you'll be very excited. So, Daniel, we just ran a bootcamp this weekend where we run this challenge, really cool challenge where we get our clients. There's a whole group, there's about a hundred people at this bootcamp. There's an online bootcamp, and they have to build a website and. And they've got 10 days to do it. So we started this a decade ago. Guess how long it takes now to build those websites by the next break. Fully done? Yeah, literally 45 minutes to the next break. And whilst we're presenting, people say, I've done it. Have a look. And it's fully written. Not fully written, but it's got like the homepage, the about page, and a few articles because we say to them, you're allowed to use AI now. So we've got. And it's always the young people or the. Or the. All the millennials and, sorry, the gen zers and stuff, literally. And I think the record. The record for us was it wasn't actually this year. It was last year. It was 10 minutes just drafted up, done. And. And the site was about extreme ironing. Extreme. So really niche. We said, go niche. And he showed us the keyword research. There was volume for it, everything. Apparently it's a sport. Extreme mining. Who would have thought? So in 10 minutes. So that's the power of learning these tools on small websites and getting out there and having ideas. So if you're a bit older, like me, and you haven't grown up with computers again, I think this is a really important skill to learn for the future. The way the world's going, you need to learn how to use AI. Why. Why wouldn't you use it? Learn it on your own little side Hustle. I think that can be a very effective strategy for the future.
- [33:55]
Daniel
Well, Matt, this is super exciting. Who would have thought about extreme ironing? I think you got me really excited because there's. I think there's so many different niches. There's so many different things that people do that I would never think of but have a you a very. It's like, you know, riches and the niches. Like it's like yeah, it has a great community of people. They are hyper focused on it and they love it and they are passionate about following it. But there's barely anyone or places for them to even go. Yeah, but this is, this has been great. I'm fired up. I can't wait to join and I'm going to go on to Google 4, 5 and 6 right now because I want to see if I can buy something this week. That's my goal almost to use very small, maybe $400. Let's see if that works. Why not, right? But man, this has been really great. If you want to get in touch with you, they want to find out more. They want to join one of the boot camps. How can they do so they just.
- [34:57]
Matt Rod
Come to our website, e businessinstitute.com it is a dot com. We have lots of American clients on there though and we've got a free masterclass. So we actually go through actual examples from students, recent buys and we show our strategy of what we're buying, how we're buying them, how we're valuing them and the sorts of niches that we're going into. There's a free masterclass on there.
- [35:22]
Daniel
There you go. Free masterclass. How can you beat that? But Matt, this has been great. I'm very excited for the future and how many more people can be, you know, a laptop entrepreneur, traveling the world doing what they love, not having to work for corporations who maybe don't believe in them or don't give them the respect that they think they deserve. So I'm very excited for this by the way. Creating entrepreneurship creates a lot of revenue jobs, you know, it's the future. So I can't wait to see in a year from now how this is going. I can't wait to be a student and I want to get started. Started. So thank you for sharing that and thank you for joining us today on Founder Story.
- [36:01]
Matt Rod
Thank you so much, Daniel for being here. Real pleasure. Running a business is hard work. Building your website shouldn't be. With wix you can express your ideas, give direction, then leave the heavy lifting to AI from site creation to branded content and images. Have fun with the details, customize what you want the way you want and manage your whole business from a centralized dashboard with expert AI tools. Build, scale and enjoy the incredible results. You can do it all yourself on wix. This is a call to the leaders.
- [36:41]
Daniel
Who want to redefine their impact, tackle our world's greatest challenges with a powerful.
- [36:47]
Matt Rod
Network of global business leaders at mit.
- [36:50]
Daniel
Sloan School of Management.