700: From $9 to $350K: How to Build and Sell an AI Headshot Business

Summary

---

Podcast Summary: The Side Hustle Show

Episode 700: From $9 to $350K — How to Build and Sell an AI Headshot Business

Date: October 6, 2025
Host: Nick Loper
Guest: Tanya van Gastel, Founder, Multiverse AI Headshot Generator

---

Episode Overview

This milestone episode dives deep into how Tanya van Gastel turned Multiverse AI, an AI-powered headshot generator, from a crowded side project into a six-figure business—and eventually sold the company after generating $350,000 in revenue. Tanya shares actionable marketing, pricing, and growth strategies, with a heavy focus on leveraging SEO and affiliates, the evolving AI landscape, and preparing a digital business for acquisition.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Entering and Thriving in a Crowded Market

• Not First, Still Early:
  Although Multiverse AI entered a space with about ten competitors, perceptions of market saturation were misleading. Most potential users weren't even aware of AI headshots, leaving ample room for competition.

  • “So easy to put yourself down and be like, oh, but, you know, you’re only like, the 10th or the 11th or whatever. But still, there are so many potential people out there..."
    —Tanya, [01:55]

• You Don’t Have to Be #1:
  Tanya debunks the myth that success requires being the top player—making $10K per month is possible without dominating the whole market.

  • “You don’t actually need to be the number one to make a really good living for yourself...”
    —Tanya, [03:40]

• Strategic Niching, Especially B2B:
  Focusing on strictly professional headshots (not casual or dating images) and pivoting to B2B unlocked bigger deals and allowed premium pricing.

  • “Our first huge client bought $4,000 of headshots for their internal teams... That was a huge wake-up call...”
    —Tanya, [04:14]

---

2. Building the Product with Minimal Technical Skills

• Non-Technical Founders Welcome:
  Tanya comes from a marketing/PR, not technical, background. Technological barriers have dropped substantially, allowing either a technical cofounder or today's no-code tools to build similar services.
  • “...You can build a lot of things as a non-technical person these days, but ideally you keep it super niche, super clear value proposition.”
    —Tanya, [07:00]

---

3. Early-Stage Bootstrap Marketing

• Grassroots Growth on Reddit:
  Tanya hustled to get traction on Reddit—despite frequent bans for promotional posts, early sales came from engaging users in relevant threads.

  • Example tactic: Search Reddit for “headshot AI”, join threads, and post as founder.
  • “That was such a magical moment of oh my God, like I’m talking to strangers on the Internet and it’s actually working.”
    —Tanya, [08:23]
  • Note that these tactics are less effective today due to stricter moderation.

• Reddit Marketing Hacks:
  Advanced users can use Ahrefs/Semrush to analyze which Reddit posts rank for valuable keywords and target those for comments or outreach.

  • “On these databanks, you can see which posts of Reddit get the most traffic...”
    —Tanya, [11:35]

• Formulating Viral Posts:
  Use AI to mimic the format of the most upvoted posts in your target subreddit to get better traction.

  • “Take a screenshot of that, put it in GPT and ask it to create a couple of posts in the same style, but with your own project ideas.”
    —Tanya, [09:52]

---

4. Primary Marketing Engines: SEO & Affiliates

• SEO Powerhouse:
  Tanya’s listicles ranking for “best AI headshot generator” keywords drove major user growth and attracted media coverage.

  • “...for about six months maybe we were number one article for best AI headshot generator. And that was based on a listicle that I had written...”
    —Tanya, [25:28]

• Affiliate Marketing Leverage:
  A robust affiliate program (paying out 30%) incentivized bloggers to write reviews, comparisons, and listicles that funneled high-conversion traffic.

  • “Our best paid affiliate writer was making about $10,000 a month in just sales... driving $30,000 of revenue to our business...”
    —Tanya, [16:04]
  • Tech: Used Rewardful for affiliate tracking and payments ([20:01]).

• Proactive Affiliate Recruitment:
  Monitored who ranked for key terms and reached out to be included in their lists, sometimes negotiating paid placements for top positions.

  • “Sometimes if they rank really well, they would respond back to us with a fee... for like one month or two months...”
    —Tanya, [17:49]

• Minimal Success with Influencers/YouTubers:
  Influencer partnerships were often too expensive and didn’t convert well unless the creators were already focused on SEO content.

---

5. Pricing & Margins

• Started Low, Grew with Confidence:
  Launched at $9 and eventually increased to $29 (with similar conversion rates). Higher prices brought better customers and improved margins.

  • “We kind of creeped our way up to 29, and we saw absolutely no change in our conversion rate.”
    —Tanya, [22:31]

• Cost Structure:
  Initial costs: ~$2 per headshot (plus Stripe fees); eventually costs rose only slightly, while price tripled.

  • “Near the end... looking around $4 or $5 in terms of cost, and then everything else was margin.”
    —Tanya, [24:11]

• Pricing Signals Quality:
  Charging too little can hurt perceptions of value, particularly with corporate clients.

  • “When you’re pricing yourself too low, a certain client won’t even pay attention because they don’t think that a product that is $9 can actually be good value.”
    —Tanya, [25:23]

---

6. Social Proof, Virality, and Word of Mouth

• Before & After Magic:
  Visual transformations were vital social proof and word-of-mouth drivers, especially on LinkedIn.

  • “Befores and afters are the bread and butter of the AI headshot industry.”
    —Tanya, [34:19]

• Gamifying with a Quiz:
  Created a viral quiz (“AI or Not?”) challenging users to distinguish AI images from real ones—few could score above 5/10.

  • “Nobody passed this entire quiz without at least getting one wrong.”
    —Tanya, [35:30]

• Incentivizing Sharing:
  Users who shared results could claim 50 extra headshots, processed manually for simplicity.

  • “...if you shared your results, we’d give you an additional 50 headshots free of charge.”
    —Tanya, [37:06]

---

7. From B2C to B2B: Landing Big Clients

• Pitching to Remote Teams:
  Positioning the service as ideal for remote teams needing matching, professional headshots opened the door to bulk sales.

  • “Our product was perfect for remote teams... AI headshots for remote teams, that is a perfect solution...”
    —Tanya, [45:53]

• SEO-Fueled B2B Inbounds:
  Direct outreach (cold-emailing) had low ROI; focused content on keywords like “team headshots for remote teams” brought decision makers inbound.

• Networking and Gifting:
  Giving away a handful of team headshots cultivated referrals and LinkedIn buzz.

---

8. Media Mentions and PR

• PR for Trust, Not Traffic:
  Mentions in major outlets (Rolling Stone, Forbes) legitimized the product and improved conversions (social proof), though they produced little direct sales.
  • “If you’re like a journalist and you’re doing research... That’s how we got into Rolling Stone…”
    —Tanya, [25:28]
  • “Very close to zero sales from media company itself…”
    —Tanya, [26:56]

---

9. Selling the Business: Timing, Positioning, and Lessons

• Why Sell?
  With new competitors (e.g., ChatGPT’s image generation) looming and cofounders ready to move on, the team decided it was time to exit.

  • “Within a very fast-changing field such as AI photography, you never know what’s going to shift in the industry and make it very difficult for you to continue selling your product.”
    —Tanya, [38:23]

• Marketplace Surprises:
  Listed on Flippa, Multiverse AI attracted a buyer from e-commerce (not SaaS or AI), who valued the huge margins and digital nature over their physical inventory business.

  • “We ended up selling to an e-commerce player... wanted to move away from selling physical products.”
    —Tanya, [41:04]

• Key for Buyers:
  Even for a business with primarily one-time purchases, a strong, recurring inbound traffic pipeline (via SEO and affiliates) made the proposition attractive.

• Preparation Advice:
  Tanya recommends founders learn the financial and narrative aspects of their business early—understand your margins, growth drivers, and story.

---

10. The New Frontier: GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)

• The Future of “SEO”:
  ChatGPT and other LLMs are surfacing answers based on training data and mentions, not just website rankings.

  • “GEO is really about how can you get ChatGPT to recommend your business and not your competitors.”
    —Tanya, [47:33]

• Optimizing for LLMs:

  • Get cited/mentioned in major datasets (Reddit, press, FAQ-type blog posts).
  • Ensure your features/benefits/questions are explicitly written, as LLMs are less likely to “reason” from indirect information.
  • “You basically want to make training data for your own business...”
    —Tanya, [50:32]

---

11. Notable Quotes & Moments

• On Side Hustle Mindset:
  “Success is just failure to failure without losing any kind of enthusiasm.”
  —Tanya, [52:57]

• On Productizing a Trend:
  “You can get really far building a product that makes, like, $10,000 a month, and that is absolutely not impossible.”
  —Tanya, [03:40]

• On SEO/Affiliate Synergy:
  “Our biggest two drivers were really about SEO and affiliate SEO… The biggest hacks that I have thought of for really effectively doing Reddit marketing.”
  —Tanya, [13:43]

---

Timestamps for Key Segments

• [01:55] — Competing in a crowded market, market awareness
• [03:40] — Mindset: You don’t have to be #1; B2B value
• [08:23] — Early growth tactics: Reddit
• [11:06, 13:43] — Advanced Reddit marketing & affiliate strategies
• [16:04, 17:49] — Affiliates & SEO; behind-the-scenes on listicles
• [22:26] — Pricing evolution, signaling value
• [34:19] — The power of before/after images and viral quizzes
• [38:23] — Deciding to sell, AI market disruption
• [41:04] — Finding unexpected buyers, marketplace surprises
• [47:33] — GEO: Optimizing for AI engines, not just Google

---

Actionable Takeaways

• Don’t fear competition: There’s more market than you think if you carve out a sharp niche and execute.
• Start with monetization and distribution: Build simple, sellable products and focus on SEO/affiliates for scalable traffic.
• Embrace and incentivize word of mouth: Find your version of “before/after” proof for virality.
• Prepare your narrative and finances early: It makes selling or scaling the business much smoother.
• Adapt to the new AI-powered search reality: Begin optimizing your mentions and content for LLMs, not just Google.

---

Follow Tanya & Resources

• YouTube: Founder Tanya
• LinkedIn: Tanya van Gastel
• New Project: Ranking on AI

---

“Don’t give up. Success is just failure to failure without losing any kind of enthusiasm.”
—Tanya van Gastel, [52:57]

---

For listeners and entrepreneurs at all stages, Tanya’s journey offers practical strategies (and warnings) for building and scaling a digital business in a fast-changing landscape—plus a look ahead at the rise of GEO as the future of visibility.

Transcript

[Host 1]

Introducing your new Dell PC. Powered by the Intel Core Ultra processors, it helps you handle a lot even when your holiday to do lists get to be a lot because it's built with an all day battery. Plus powerful AI features that help you do it all with ease. From editing images to drafting emails, to summarizing large documents to multitasking. So you can organize your holiday shopping and make custom holiday decor and search for great holiday deals and respond to holiday requests and customer questions and customers.

[Nick Loper]

Requesting custom things and and plan your.

[Host 1]

Perfect holiday dinner for vegans, vegetarians, pescatarians and Uncle Mike's carnivore diet. Luckily you can get a PC that helps you do it all faster so.

[Nick Loper]

You can get it all done. That's the power of a Dell PC.

[Host 1]

With Intel inside backed by Dell's price match guarantee. Get yours [e-mail] deals, terms and conditions apply. See dell.com for details.

[Nick Loper]

From a side project to six figure exit. Stick around to hear how today's guest started, grew and sold an AI powered headshot generator service all in just the last couple years. She is founder Tanya on YouTube. Tanya van Gastel welcome to the side Hustle show.

[Tanya van Gastel]

Hey Nick, super happy to be here.

[Nick Loper]

I am excited for this one. The business that we're dissecting today is the multiverse AI which takes your selfies and turns them into professional looking headshots. I just had mine done. Some of them took, turned out pretty well. It like it really went in with the professional look, you know, gave me a jacket and a, and a shirt and tie and a lot of them really cool product ended up generating over $350,000 in sales before the business itself sold this year. But even going back a couple years, there were other headshot generator services out there. This couldn't have been the first one to exist. So what attracted you to this space? What made you think. I think there's some, still some white space here that we can compete in.

[Tanya van Gastel]

Well, we were definitely not the first. There were probably already like 10 on the market. So that means we were still like one of the early ones. But this is something that most people kind of get wrong is that you have to be one of the only ones in the market or you have to work like so much harder. If you're not. Honestly there's so much more market than you'd actually think. Ask your friends, your family, maybe your parents, have they ever heard of an AI headshot generator? It's going to be super likely that they've never even heard of it. And that that's a pot clients, right? So for us, we were kind of surprised. Like, it's so easy to put yourself down and be like, oh, but, you know, you're only like, the 10th or the 11th or whatever. But still, there are so many potential people out there who could be your client. And we got to $5,000 revenue a month in the first six months. So for us, that was kind of like, oh, we're onto something here.

[Nick Loper]

Okay, there's a couple things there. The. The one is the market might be bigger than you think, or there's room for more than a few players here, because the sliver of awareness in this case is so small. And I felt this way in the early days of the side Hustle show, where it's like, there's already dozens of entrepreneurial interview podcasts. Does the world really need another one? But the sliver of listenership at that time was pretty small. And so as more and more people became aware of that podcasting was a thing, they could listen to it on their commute, while they're at the gym, while they're walking the dog. The rising tide of that tended to grow, you know, lift all boats or to mix metaphors and stuff. So maybe the same thing is happening here. There's this a little bit of market awareness as more and more people come. Hey, AI Headshots are a thing. Like, let's see what's out there.

[Tanya van Gastel]

It's absolutely true. I think there's two things happening here. The first is that, like, a lot of people, I think, strategically or intuitively feel like, oh, to. In order to become the number one, I need to do all of these things. But here's a mindset shift. You don't actually need to be the number one to make a really good living for yourself, right? Like, what does that mean, being the number one? Are you trying to become, like, get to, like, a billion dollars? Are you just trying to, like, provide for yourself, your family, your loved ones? And for us, it was very much the latter, especially when we were starting. For us, it was really about, like, okay, how can we build something on our own terms? Not work an insane amount of hours, which is not what happened, but, like, ideally, not work an insane amount of hours and still live a really great life, and also built this product that we're really passionate about. And so in order to do all that, you don't actually need to be the only one on the market, right? You can get really far building a product that makes, like, $10,000 a month, and that is absolutely not impossible. And you definitely do not need to be the only player in the market to do that. And I would say secondly, depending on what kind of products you have. For us we started as a B2C product but then we moved into B2B where we had bigger package sizes. So I remember like the first time we had a huge client, they bought $4,000 of headshots at the same time because they bought many for their own internal teams. And so that was a huge wake up call for us that oh, we need to actually go into this B2B segment because we only need to convince one decision maker and they can buy 400 headshots at once instead of needing to convince 400 people.

[Nick Loper]

Yeah, I would love to get into that positioning and so maybe that is part of the segmentation or niching down of the market to say, well we're not for everybody. We're the, we're the go to place for you know, really professional headshots and for corporate clients.

[Tanya van Gastel]

Yeah, absolutely. Well, it's part of why you got your like shirt and tie and blazer in your photos. We didn't want to focus on things like casual photos or like dating AI photographs and stuff like that. But we really felt that that would water down our value proposition and that wouldn't help us attract really the clients that we wanted. And you can price that very differently as well. When you say I am only focusing on this and you show that in your product it's super beneficial for your pricing strategy and you can just be very clear about the kind of thing that you want and don't want and what you focus on in your marketing.

[Nick Loper]

Yeah, scary to do. At the time we were like, oh, I'm going to turn myself away from all these other potential customers to focus over here and hopefully that pay off down the road. Now how, how technical do you have to be to build something like this? It's like it looks really slick interface, it looks pretty cool. But it's like I, I don't know, I mean I've heard of Mid Journey and other AI, you know, image generators. I guess you could do it in ChatGPT now too. But like to do that at scale and to be able to intake other people's images, like what's going on behind the scenes here?

[Tanya van Gastel]

We launched in like April 2023 and we launched with three co founders. So for me I'm a completely non technical person. My background is really in marketing. It's actually in PR and so I didn't know anything about it. Luckily, one of my co founders was an engineer and so he built a platform from scratch. One engineer.

[Nick Loper]

Okay.

[Tanya van Gastel]

And so that is something that was possible. Right? So I think whenever we're looking at like AI products or AI platforms, every single year, it's become so much easier to build platforms like that. And two years ago it was already possible to build something with just one person, whereas like a couple years before that it was not. And I think even now you can actually build a lot of tools like that with no code. Tools like, you know, you're lovable. Pickaxe is another really great one. And actually last year I built, as a learning project, I built a mental health app called Capybara Affirmations that got like 10,000 users within like the first month. And that was completely as like a non technical person. So I think you can build a lot of things as a non technical person these days, but ideally you keep it super niche, super clear value proposition. And as a bootstrap startup, you always want to go monetization first think small and then later you can think big.

[Nick Loper]

Sure, yeah, that makes, that makes sense. These technical hurdles are getting lower and lower and lower. And so figure that out. Or ask the, ask the coders, ask the coding machines to, to do it for you, to build you a prototype and go from there. Let's talk about this path from zero to the $5,000 a month within six months. What was going on on the marketing side to, to get those first customers through the door?

[Tanya van Gastel]

Oh my God, we were in a pinch. So I, I already mentioned that I, I kind of came from like a tech marketing background where our whole, my whole career was really about like headcount, budget, potentially like managing an external agency. And so now I was there trying to figure out how we can actually build something with no budget, no headcount. Literally just me and an Internet connection. And so we did a couple of things, or I did a couple of things. I spent all of my free time getting banned by Reddit. I kept making new accounts and commenting and posting about our product. And that's actually how we got our first like 500 in like revenue through users who would find us on there. And that was like, that was such a magical moment of oh my God, like I'm talking to strangers on the Internet and it's actually working.

[Nick Loper]

Okay, so what's an example of a thread that you would comment on?

[Tanya van Gastel]

It's a bit embarrassing to see, to be honest, but it would be like, oh, well, I like if people would say something about like headshot. And I would literally spend every day googling headshot Reddit AI and then going, seeing if there's like a new person making a thread about it. And then I'd be like, oh, hey, I'm the founder of, would you like to try us out? Or I'd be like, hey, Multiverse, you can create headshots with this kind of product. And so two years ago you could still add a link to your Reddit comments and people could just immediately click in on that.

[Nick Loper]

Yeah.

[Tanya van Gastel]

Now you just immediately, I think, get banned. So it's become a lot more complicated, but you can still do it. You just have to be very careful with the kind of posts that you do. And honestly, my huge tip for writing posts that actually go viral is go to your subreddit of choice, maybe that's our chatgpt or something else. But go where your audiences don't focus on where your fellow freelancers or hustlers are because they're all looking to sell and you're not going to sell to each other. It's not a thing. Okay, but go through your audiences, go to the sorted by most popular of all time, look at those top posts and formulate your posts about your company, your startup, your, your project or whatever. Do it in the same formulation. What you can do is you can take a screenshot of that, put it in GPT and ask it to create a couple of posts in the same style, but with your own project ideas. And those formulas work really, really well. You might not get like viral top page, like first page or whatever, but it at least tells you that people actually really like that format and it's likely to work a lot better than if you try to use your own brain, guess what the market actually wants.

[Nick Loper]

Okay, so there was, it sounded like a two pronged attack. One was the like burner accounts commenting on any headshot related thread and with the expectation, yeah, it's probably going to get shut down, it's probably going to get banned, but a few people might see it, a few people might click and buy before that happens. And then the second prong of the attack is a little more of a concerted effort on creating your own threads, your own posts about the founding story of the business and what's going on in there. Am I hearing that correctly?

[Tanya van Gastel]

Well, the second definitely yes. The first, I do not recommend that because it used to work, it will not work anymore. You'll spend a lot of time and you'll be very frustrated. But another, like a third one that I will add is that if you have an Ahrefs account or a Semrush account, and they're a bit expensive, they're like SEO data banks. They cost like $100 a month. SEMrush has seven days for free, so you can always try that out. But if you go to Ahrefs, you go to Site Explorer and you go to Reddit.com, you can actually sor by the most popular posts. So on these data banks, you can see which posts of Reddit get the most traffic and then you can search by keyword. So let's say that you are a company that sells Canva templates. You can go to Reddit.com site explorer in Ahrefs, then you can type in Canva templates and then you can see all the top posts that rank for the keyword Canva templates on Ahrefs. And you can go and you can comment your own product in there. And so that's a huge, huge amount of information that you get through these data banks that you otherwise really cannot get. Or you are stuck googling things and then clicking on 50 different tabs to kind of comment and hope that you can still get traffic that way. And those two methods are like the biggest hacks that I have thought of for really effectively doing Reddit marketing.

[Nick Loper]

Okay, yeah, that's helpful versus coming through individual subreddits and doing this manually. There's, there's a, there's another way. There's a tool that'll help you with that. And there is a lower tier Ahrefs plan. This is a H r e f s dot com. This is. I'm on like a $30 a month starter plan or something. I don't know if they advertise that or. You had to. I had to like threaten to quit. And they're like, hey, stick around, Come, come get this lower, lower price plan. But now it is cool to see some of the data that that's in there. Okay, so in using that to structure your own post, was there a post or two that ended up taking off and getting some traction, getting noticed within the Reddit community? For you, Tanya's response, plus her SEO.

[Host 1]

And affiliate marketing strategies coming up right after this. There are less than 100 days left in 2025, which means less than 100.

[Nick Loper]

Days left to hit those goals that.

[Host 1]

You set or to refocus your energy on what really matters. If you've got some catching up to do and maybe you've been procrastinating on taking that Next step, Our sponsor, Indeed, can help you find the best candidates.

[Nick Loper]

For the role you need to fill.

[Host 1]

And find them fast. In fact, three and a half million employers worldwide already use Indeed to hire great talent fast, and it'll be my first stop when I need to make my next hire. Don't struggle to get your job post seen on other job sites. Indeed's sponsored jobs help you stand out and hire fast. Plus, with Indeed sponsored jobs, there are no monthly subscriptions, no long term contracts, and you only pay for results. There's no need to wait any longer. Speed up your hiring right now with Indeed side Hustle show listeners get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility@inn Indeed.com Sidehustleshow just go to indeed.com Sidehustleshow right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com Sidehustleshow terms and conditions apply. Hiring Indeed is all you need Are you still overpaying for wireless? It's time to say yes to saying no. At our partner Mint Mobile, their favorite word is no. No contracts, no monthly bills, no overages, no hidden fees, no bs. And here's why I said yes to making the switch over five years ago and yes to getting premium wireless for 15 bucks a month. I really liked being able to keep my existing phone and my existing phone number when I switched over.

[Nick Loper]

This year we've taken advantage of their.

[Host 1]

Easy international add ons, including free service in Canada and affordable packages when we were visiting Japan. But closer to home, all Mint Mobile plans come with high speed data and unlimited talk and text delivered on the nation's largest 5G network. And the best part? Plans start at just 15 bucks per month. Are you ready to say yes to saying no? Join me in making the [e-mail] Sidehustle that's mintmobile.com Sidehustle upfront payment of $45 required equivalent to $15 per month limited time new customer offer for first three months only. Speeds may slow above 35 gigabytes on unlimited plan taxes and fees extra. See Mint Mobile for details.

[Tanya van Gastel]

We had a couple from like pages about people wanting to get get into like professional photography that did really really well and they did make a dent. But ultimately our like main users were not coming from Reddit. The biggest two drivers for us were really about SEO and affiliate SEO. Our affiliate program is a huge reason why we were able to sell better because we had a affiliate program that basically gave our affiliate ambassadors 30% of every sale. So what would happen is that people would make these reviews about the multiverse AI versus other headshots. They would make listicles that were like the best AI headshot generators. They would put affiliate links for every single one of those. I think like our best paid affiliate writer was making about $10,000 a month in just sales. Right? So that means that we were paying them 10,000, but they were driving $30,000 of revenue to our business. And so that was huge because basically as a business, we didn't have to prepay them. We postpaid them. And for the affiliate writer, they were doing really great revenue just from writing SEO articles about businesses like ours.

[Nick Loper]

Yeah, this is definitely a business that a lot of listeners will be familiar with. You know, creating the this company versus this company type of content or the multiverse review, you know, how it actually work. Is it worth it? Like you said, the best headshot generators, you know, here's our top five or something type of content and, and having that rank well. And with, and by the way, here's my affiliate link. This is, this is my top pick. And it's all performance based. So you, you say, well, this is a, this is a cost of customer acquisition that we're comfortable paying. Let's go to town.

[Tanya van Gastel]

On one end it is conversion based, but then on the other we would also do outreach. So you continuously be scanning for like our top keywords and then seeing, oh, are we mentioned in this listicle? Are we not mentioned in this listicle? If we're not mentioned, we're going to reach out and ask them like, hey, can you include us in? And then sometime sometimes if they rank really well, they would respond back to us with a fee. Right? They would be like, oh, you know, if you want to be the number one or the number two, it's $5,000 for like one month or two months. And if you're the brand and you're doing kind of the calculations of, oh, we know how much traffic they're getting on this page and we know what our conversion rate is. And conversion rates from affiliates are super high. Yeah, our affiliate conversion rate was 12% on our homepage, so that was crazy. Usually a conversion rate from SEO for us it was still quite high, was like 5% because we focus on like very bottom of funnel content, but really through affiliates, it was like, it was almost triple that. So it was super, super high. And we would pay that $5,000. I don't think we ever paid 5,000. I think that was like a bit steep. But there were definitely like very high sums being quoted by some bloggers who did really great affiliate articles. And sometimes they would even reach out to the brand being like, hey, we have a number one position for this keyword. Would you be interested in, you know, renting a top position for Dang, is.

[Nick Loper]

That how the game is played now? Shoot, I've been doing it wrong.

[Tanya van Gastel]

I'm not gonna say if I agree or not agree with that, but it definitely is something that I've seen and that has happened. And on the brand side, sometimes it makes a lot of sense because you're basically seeing that it's basically an ad placement at that point. If you're the number one article for best AI Headshot Generator, a keyword that is super high conversion and is driving like an insane amount of clicks every single month, whoever is out there owning that top position, I can guarantee you that they're doing really, really well.

[Nick Loper]

Yeah, but going out proactively recruiting these, these potential affiliate partners, because it's not just set it and forget it. What was the tech or what was the, the tracking software that you're using for that?

[Tanya van Gastel]

Rewardful. And I think they're really popular in the space. Rewardful is the easiest to set up affiliate program that I've ever used in my current like agency business that I run where I also help clients to set up affiliate programs. I generally recommend Rewardful just because it's so easy to set up.

[Nick Loper]

Okay. Anything on the YouTube front, I'm trying to recruit people who are reviewing similar products on YouTube. Oh, I can find some creators over here too on the. To be affiliates.

[Tanya van Gastel]

For me, YouTube was really hard for us to get into. I think YouTube and like content creators, like non bloggers in general, like TikTok people or like Instagram influencers, they quote us crazy prices that we were just not able to get to. And so we never, we almost never did any of those partnerships. We did some, like very, very small ones. But the YouTubers that we had the most success with were affiliate bloggers who then expanded into YouTube. And a lot of the time those YouTube videos were also very like SEO optimized. So it wasn't really about subscriber count of those YouTube influencers. It was really like SEO first YouTube where, you know, a lot of like, even now in like AI overviews, you're always being surfaced. Same thing with like ranking for top keywords. If you're being surfaced in YouTube, it's almost better than having your own content. Maybe you wouldn't be doing a lot of active outreach knowing that Influencer partnerships are extremely expensive. And honestly, my hot take is that they don't really work that well for brands unless there is a very clear incentive on the influencer side. And I think now it's very different from like 10 years ago where it used to be that there were like so little information about the whole industry. So brands could easily approach YouTubers for, oh, hey, would you be interested in this? We'll give you a free product or a free license.

[Nick Loper]

Yeah.

[Tanya van Gastel]

But now creators are very strict and I think as they should be because it does take a lot of energy and of course labor to like create content like that. But it's very hard to do outreach asking people, would you be interested? Because we're going to give you a great affiliate program. They're just not going to take that.

[Nick Loper]

You want to get paid up front, not. Okay, yeah.

[Tanya van Gastel]

Like, they're like, what's in it for me? You know, so not really happening as much.

[Nick Loper]

How did you think about the margin? So the price on the Website today is $29 for this headshot package. Has it been consistent at that rate?

[Tanya van Gastel]

No, actually, when we just launched, we were at $9.

[Nick Loper]

Oh, wow. Okay.

[Tanya van Gastel]

I think partially when you start as a business owner, you don't really believe that people are going to buy your product. But then as you get more comfortable in that over time, you do feel more comfortable increasing those prices and feeling secure that people are getting that value out of it. So we kind of creeped our way up to 29, and we saw absolutely no change in our conversion rate. And I honestly think at this point, we could have even charged a lot more. Like, we have some competitors who go up to like $60, and they have almost an exact same product. And so a lot of the time what you see in that kind of like pricing strategy is positioning. Right. So who are you actually targeting with your product? If you're going to go to the lower end of the market, you're again looking at like a sub$15 product. But if you go higher end, you actually get users a lot of the time who actually want that product as well. So sometimes your difference between like charging $50 or $500 for something is just your audience is not necessarily your product, and doesn't necessarily imply product changes. And we see that a lot in SaaS, to be honest. So with headshots, you're really competing with like non AI headshots, which can cost up to like $300 and half your day. So ultimately, that's still a really great deal.

[Nick Loper]

You know, Yeah, I was. I was gonna bring that up as a potential anchoring point. It's like, yeah, you could do this from the comfort of your home, or you could get a couple different outfits together. You could book a photographer. It's going to be a couple hundred dollars or more.

[Tanya van Gastel]

Absolutely.

[Nick Loper]

What's it cost you to generate these things? Like, are you happy with the margins? I mean, obviously, if you tripled prices, then things are looking a lot better. But what was going on there?

[Tanya van Gastel]

The margins have changed a bit over time. Part of that is because service providers increase their costs. But initially our cost was about $2, and then $1 for stripe fees, something like that. So even on, like, $9 products, we only had like, $3 costs.

[Nick Loper]

Okay.

[Tanya van Gastel]

So that was still, like, really, really good. Over time, our pricing did increase a lot, but our margin increased hugely. I think near the end, can't quote me on this, but I think we were looking around four or five dollars in terms of cost, and then everything else was margin. So that made a huge difference. I'll also add that when you are growing like that and when you have had, you know, more expertise, you've had bigger companies use your product. For us, we had Companies like Walmart, McKinsey, Google, huge companies using our product, and we were able to share about that as well. So that really goes to like, oh, hey, all of these companies are using it. It's only $29. Why wouldn't we use them as well? And in that case, when you are pricing yourself at like, $9, when you're pricing yourself too low, a certain client won't even pay attention because they don't think that a product that is $9 can actually be good value fair.

[Nick Loper]

Okay, so we talked about the Reddit strategy, we talked about the affiliate recruiting. What else was going on.

[Tanya van Gastel]

On the marketing front, we did a lot of SEO. SEO is really our, like bread and butter. It's how most users were discovering us for a while. I think for about like, four, five, almost six months maybe we were number one article for best AI headshot generator. And that was based on a listicle that I had written about. These are the five best AI headshot generators. And guess which one was number one. It was Multiverse. Multiverse was number one. And so these listicles work insanely well. And that drove a huge amount of users to us and also drove some top media to us as well. Because ultimately, if you're like a journalist and you're doing research for an article, you're going to take a look, you're just going to go and Google potential companies that you can like review. And so that's how we got into like Rolling Stone magazine. We also got into Forbes. We got into a bunch of other media like Forbes. And so that was huge also for like our general recognition and on the other end being able to say, hey, we were all in all of these media and again increased our conversion rates. I will add as a note that actually chasing media or like chasing PR mentions like that, it works really well now if you want to help, help you to rank on ChatGPT. But it doesn't actually drive that much sales to your platform from the media company itself. The reason is that these are not vetted leads.

[Nick Loper]

Right?

[Tanya van Gastel]

These are people just reading the news or whatever they see, oh, that's an interesting article. They may or may not click on that, but they're not going to say, oh hey, I'm going to go buy that right now. That's really where, you know, with SEO, with people searching for buy AI headshot generator or related keyword, they are ready to purchase, they are completely at the bottom of the funnel. With media, we really had almost, not zero, but very close to zero sales. So that was the thing that we tried and it didn't really work that well.

[Nick Loper]

Okay, yeah, it makes sense. It's more like that social proof. Hey, we, we got this mention in Rolling Stone, we were written up in Forbes and it's a validation more than a traffic driver or a sales driver.

[Tanya van Gastel]

You tell your mom. Yeah, for sure.

[Nick Loper]

Anything else on the SEO side that was proactive because it's like the SEO world for listicles like this. It seems like it's been taken a beating the last couple years where it's like we're just going to put the AI summary at the top. And maybe if you're cited in the AI summary because it's like a buyer intent type of keyword, then that's good. But it's everything else is pushed farther and farther down the page.

[Tanya van Gastel]

It is pushed further down the page. I would say if you're in the affiliate game right now, that is really, really tough. The one place that we haven't really seen so much of an is in like YouTube videos. So whenever your YouTube video is being surfaced in the AI overview, people will still click in on that and actually watch that video. Of course, generated text does not have that same thing. But then on the brand side, whenever you're trying to rank on ChatGPT, that is a complete different game because that is a huge opportunity. And so That a lot of that is about, you know, the amount of mentions that you have. PR mentions there help a lot. And also, if you have a legacy of existing SEO content that is already in the training data of LLMs like ChatGPT or Claude, you are much more likely to actually be recommended. But yeah, it's definitely still like very, very new. And it's impossible to track because most of the time GPT or AI overviews won't even link to the actual page. So what we see though is that branded searches are up a lot. Where, you know, ChatGPT actually gives you the recommendation, you go to and Google that company and then you click in, oh, okay.

[Nick Loper]

They're not going to link directly to you. We're not going to make it necessarily easy to follow their citation path, but they'll mention the brand by name and then. Okay, got it.

[Tanya van Gastel]

Yeah, exactly. And it's actually really helpful to do like a little bit of an audit about your brand. Make sure that, you know, you ask ChatGPT what is the best solution for this kind of thing. And you want to be asking about a problem that your company solves. Then secondly, I really highly recommend for you to do an audit about. About. What do people say about X? X being your company or your business? Because you're going to see exactly where that is coming from. It's going to tell you what people think about you based on a couple of citations. And those citations are publicly available. So you can kind of see where ChatGPT is getting all of that information from. Sometimes that's actually your own blog, your own pages, and if anything is kind of not okay, you can go in and make those adjustments yourself.

[Nick Loper]

What do you do if people are badmouthing you online and you're like, well, I got a reputation management problem.

[Tanya van Gastel]

It depends where they're badmouthing you, right? Like, and if it's something that you can actually do something about. So let's say that that's like a blogger, I highly recommend that you reach out to them. You know, if you, for example, like, you change your product and maybe they did a review of you in the past, you added a feature, that feature can now be mentioned as well. Send them an email, be like, hey, I know in the past we didn't have this feature, but we do have it now. You'll see that, you know, I think a lot of people are kind of scared of emailing blog owners or doing that kind of outreach, but a lot of the time people are very used to this in the blog world. And they don't mind that kind of inbound at all.

[Nick Loper]

Yeah, well, it helps them keep their stuff up to date.

[Tanya van Gastel]

Yeah, exactly.

[Nick Loper]

All right. That's part of the listening audit. Asking the AI, well, what's my reputation like out there on the, on the interwebs? And hopefully you start to improve that over time.

[Tanya van Gastel]

Well, I mean, I think if you're scared of that, it's not necessarily that it's not happening. It's that maybe you don't want to know, which is like a different kind of thing. But it doesn't mean it's not happening. Yeah, usually it's not going to be that bad. I think you'll be like pleasantly surprised by how you can also find really great things that people are saying about your business. And so it can be a very positive experience.

[Nick Loper]

Yeah. More with Tanya in just a moment.

[Host 1]

Including getting traffic and sales from social media.

[Nick Loper]

Her is it AI quiz and prepping.

[Host 1]

The business for a sale coming up right after this.

[Nick Loper]

One of the tools I've personally seen make a huge difference for business owners is quo, formerly OpenPhone. It's the same great business phone system.

[Host 1]

You'Ve heard me talk about before, just.

[Nick Loper]

With a new name. When you're running a business, you know that every missed call is a missed opportunity. So Quo, formerly openphone. This is the number one business phone system that streamlines your customer communication. It works through an app on your phone or your computer.

[Host 1]

So no more using your personal number.

[Nick Loper]

As your business line. No more carrying two phones around. With Quo, your team can share one phone number and collaborate on customer calls and texts, just like a shared inbox. So anybody can jump in to keep response times fast. And this is where it gets super cool. You can set up Quo's built in AI agent in just a few minutes to handle calls after hours, answer customer questions and capture leads on autopilot. I want to invite you to get started for free. Plus, side hustle show listeners get 20% off your first six [e-mail] Sidehustle that's quo.com Sidehustle look at them getting that three letter domain. Q U O.com Sidehustle and if you've got existing numbers with another service, Quo will port them over at no extra charge. Quo. No missed calls, no missed customers.

[Host 1]

A lot of side hustlers suffer from. What if itis? What if it doesn't work? What if I don't have the skills? What if I picked the wrong path? But one thing 100% of our amazing guests have in common is they took their shot. They faced down those what ifs and they got their answers through taking action. Our partner Shopify helps turn what ifs into why nots. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions.

[Nick Loper]

Of businesses around the world.

[Host 1]

From household names to the very guests on this show. What if I can't design a website? Shopify's got you with ready made templates to match your brand style. What if people haven't heard about my brand? Shopify helps you find customers with easy to run email and social media campaigns. And what if I get stuck? You can tap into Shopify's award winning 24. 7 customer support. Let's turn those dreams into and give them the best shot at success with Shopify. Sign up for your $1 per month trial trial and start selling today at shopify.com sidehustle go to shopify.com sidehustlez shopify.com sidehustole.

[Nick Loper]

The multiverse is one that lends itself to some kind of social media guessing type of content where it's like, is this real or is this AI? I could see it getting some traction on different platforms. We're showing almost the before and after of what it came up with.

[Tanya van Gastel]

Before afters are like the bread and butter of the AI headshot industry. It is the number one driver of anything of any sale. Because a lot of our like path also was like word of mouth. So word of mouth, like seeing a friend of you posting their AI headshot on something like LinkedIn or Instagram is huge. It's huge if you actually know what that person looks like in real because they're always going to post their best photo and they're going to say, oh my God, I can't believe this is an AI headshot. And you're going to look at that and you're going to say, oh my God, I can't believe that's an AI headshot. Because the realism is extreme at this point. But I created a quiz about like I think a year or so in and this whole quiz was about, it was called AI or not. And so you just start the quiz and then you would see a photo and you had to guess AI or not AI. And nobody passed this entire quiz without at least getting one wrong. And most people couldn't get more than like a 5 out of 10 because in a world where you have to guess if something's AI or not AI, you start becoming skeptical about everything.

[Nick Loper]

People listening are probably nodding like, I bet I could do better than that. I could pick out an AI picture.

[Tanya van Gastel]

And it was lovely. You know, I mean, that was such a fun thing because basically, actually you would put that quiz, you would submit your photos. Right. Like, the way it works is you have like 10 photos of yourself, you upload them, and then you have to wait like an hour or so before you get your hundred photos in your inbox, your results. And so whenever you uploaded those photos, we would encourage you to go and take that quiz. And like you, everybody would be like, oh, I'm sure I can, like, tell the difference.

[Nick Loper]

Guess what? We can't.

[Tanya van Gastel]

Right. Because when it comes down to it, in 2025, a lot of people are taking photos of themselves and a lot of people are also editing photos of themselves.

[Nick Loper]

Sure.

[Tanya van Gastel]

And so the difference between a photo that is edited and a photo that is AI generated becomes smaller and smaller as both of them basically are going towards more artificial and less artificial. People very much like to say, no, I can always tell when it's AI. I encourage you to go and take that quiz because I think it's very unlikely that you'll get a 10 out of 10. Less than 0.1% actually got a 10.

[Nick Loper]

Wow. Okay.

[Tanya van Gastel]

It is hard.

[Nick Loper]

We'll link up the quiz for sure. I like this call to make it. To make it visual. In a visual visual service or visual business like this, it makes perfect sense. And so the challenge is, for whatever business you're in is like, how can you find the equivalent of those before and after type of pictures? Were you doing anything to proactively, like, encourage or incentivize people to share those new headshots on LinkedIn after they got them back and say, wow, look. Look at what the multiverse generated for me.

[Tanya van Gastel]

Yeah, we would. If you shared your results, we would give you an additional 50 headshots free of charge.

[Nick Loper]

Oh, okay.

[Tanya van Gastel]

Yeah, but that was a very manual process. You basically had to email us or we're just like, see it in monitoring. And then we DM you about what your username was, and then we would send you so what your link was, and then we would give you those extra headshots. I think a really, like, tough lesson that we learned was don't try to automate things if they are too hard to automate. We spent so much time trying to automate it that it would have been so much faster if we hadn't tried and if we just like, like proceeded with manually doing everything. So it's like, find the balance between, like, creating systems and just doing things that don't scale sometimes.

[Nick Loper]

Fair. Yeah. Find yourself a virtual assistant or two. And just handle that process.

[Tanya van Gastel]

Yeah, I'm personally prone to trying to over systematize everything and it's not always to my benefit.

[Nick Loper]

Talk to me about the transition from trying to actively grow and run this thing to now saying, well, maybe now's the right time to, to find a buyer, to hand it over to somebody else, to take it to the next level or to start working on other projects. What's going through your head at this point? And you know, I've taken to this as far as I can go and I would love to cash out.

[Tanya van Gastel]

There are a couple of things at play. The first was that as co founders we were all looking to go our own path and pursue different projects. For me, that was an AI SEO project that I really wanted to pursue. And secondly, within a very fast changing field such as AI photography, you never know what's going to shift in the industry and make it very difficult for you to continue selling your product. And so when we started looking for buyers, that actually coincided with the time that ChatGPT's image generator had just come out, the latest version. And so a lot of people are talking about, oh, you can just upload a photo of yourself and then you get like a AI headshot out of that. The results were not there when we tested. You couldn't really get, get the same kind of output from it, but it was close enough that we got kind of, I wouldn't say nervous, but we were open to the opportunity of having an actual sale. Right. So I think within these kind of like very, you know, cutting edge companies, if you will, when you are making something that you can easily be replaced by ChatGPT and you have a potential for an excellent IT that was super, super attractive to us. So for us that path was super, super helpful to have Flippa where we listed our business and then we were able to find a seller very quickly. So that was really, really lucky. I think I was personally quite not anxious, but I definitely kept in mind that, you know, our business could be completely destroyed going to zero from one day to another if GPT or somebody else would actually bring out a free AI headshot generator. Yeah, I see this with a couple of caveats because for example, TikTok, I believe has an AI headshot generator embedded in and it didn't touch any of our business. Right. And so there are a couple of these things where even if ChatGPT had built out an entire AI headshot generator, it probably wouldn't have decimated us one day to another, but it would have definitely Stalled our growth. Both firstly and secondly, we were a one time purchase product. Right. So it's not that we had existing MRR to build off that could stay consistent over time.

[Nick Loper]

Yeah. How did you position it then to potential buyers? Because it's like there's no recurring revenue here. It's like we have a track record of consistent revenue. Sure. And like we have these SEO assets that continue to drive sales and we've built up this reputation in the industry, but we're starting from scratch every month and it's like, well, you know, how do you build up like, oh, the revenue is still going to be there after you take over?

[Tanya van Gastel]

Well, we definitely don't say that, but it's a really good question. And so you kind of want to think about the margin business from top to bottom. Like let's say at the top you have like offline businesses who have like brick and mortar and like offline employees and all of that. And for them a digital product like ours is something that is like insanely great. Right. And so you take it like a little step further. And in the end we ended up selling to an E commerce player who was used to having offline inventory, to having a lot less margin and dealing with a lot more logistics. And so that was a really great way for us to be positioned as well because this E commerce player was basically saying we are really great at doing paid advertising. And we were horrible at doing paid advertising. We never really did it. They were great at doing paid advertising. They wanted to move away from selling physical products, moving away from things like logistics. And here we were a completely digital product that we had never tried to do anything with ads and had no experience with it. So there was a really high potential for them to be able to push those ads and also not have to deal with logistics. So that was a huge part of that upside.

[Nick Loper]

Yeah, margin to play with probably much more so than a physical product business here where. Yeah, shoot. We can, if we know the paid ads game, we know the paid traffic game, we can, we could probably apply this to another business.

[Tanya van Gastel]

Yeah, I think if we had been talking to another kind of like SaaS business that had been a recurring revenue business, it would have been completely different because they probably would not have been as interested in buying a company that was like a one time purchase product. But again, kind of looking at that like pyramid of you know, what kind of margins exist kind of business models exist. Your business model could be super interesting to another company and you could have absolutely no idea about it. So the Big learning for us with Flippa really was that you never know who your buyer might end up being. And I definitely could not have predicted that he would have been an E commerce player. So you never know.

[Nick Loper]

Yeah, I would have expected a photography service or another, another AI headshot type of company where we can roll this under our own umbrella. Umbrella, yeah. That wasn't really on my radar either, but interesting. When you put it up on the marketplace, you know, it gets a lot of exposure and you never know who's going to find it.

[Tanya van Gastel]

Yeah. And we ended up talking to a couple of other potential buyers as well. I had no idea what to expect. The first time that I was talking to a buyer, I did prep with a Flippa M and a support person and they were amazing. That was super, super helpful. But outside of that, that first kind of conversation was really about like, oh, I need to understand the narrative of our business so much better. As well as things like the financials, understanding the P and L. And I highly recommend people to just start super early with all of your admin and really understand the financials behind your business and all the potential for growth that there is. And then having those conversations with potential buyers because you will just get so much further, so much further than I did my first couple of years.

[Nick Loper]

Calls fair, Fair. One thing that I did want to circle back on was this transition from one off sales B2C to selling thousands of headshots all at once through corporate contacts, enterprise clients. Were you proactively pitching like the PR department? Like, hey, when was the last time you updated everybody's headshots for the website or something? Like how did those bigger ticket sales come about?

[Tanya van Gastel]

I wish that, that I had done that and that it had worked. It definitely. So we, we actually tried to do like email outreach and I would do the thing where I go to Apollo and I get a bunch of emails from like our target demographic, which was actually head of marketing, and I would email them and we got very little responses on items like that. And so what helped a lot more was again, SEO looking at terms related to team headshots, positioning ourselves as great for remote teams. Right. Because our product was perfect for remote teams. If you're a remote team, how are you going to get headshots of your entire team where actually the background is similar and they're wearing the same kind of outfit or at least the photos are in the same style. The fact is, is completely impossible. You just cannot, you can't send a photographer to different cities around the world. You ideally don't take time during an off site because it's going to take you like half a day of like very valuable time where you're flying out like 20 to 50 people to one city city for like four days and then you're going to take half day out of that to take photos. It's just not going to happen.

[Nick Loper]

Yeah.

[Tanya van Gastel]

What's worse is when you onboard a new person, they're not going to get the same photo. It's going to get really awkward on your meet a team on your landing page. It's going to be a completely different kind of background. Again, there's no clear solution to this. And so with AI headshots for remote teams, that is a perfect solution. You can, can get new team members onboarded. You just send them an invite link to Multiverse AI and that's how they can actually get their own headshot without it needing to be different or a different background. So in terms of that, like our positioning on SEO, super important. Having things like samples and kind of mini case studies, super helpful. I also think that tapping into your personal network and asking people who are business owners, maybe giving, you know, a company like 10 free headshots, asking them to send posts about it on LinkedIn are very, very powerful strategies because that kind of word of mouth recommendation is huge for conversion rates. It's just really something that time and time converts so well.

[Nick Loper]

Yeah, these people at these companies know people at other similar companies and you know, they, the circles run pretty tightly together I think.

[Tanya van Gastel]

Yeah, they really do.

[Nick Loper]

We've got the founder, Twitter, Atanya, YouTube channel, you've got ranking on AI.com, the new AI powered SEO agency. What's next for you? What's got you excited these days?

[Tanya van Gastel]

It's really just kind of AI, SEO and geo.

[Nick Loper]

Geo, this is the new acronym.

[Tanya van Gastel]

This is the new acronym. I don't know how I feel about it.

[Nick Loper]

What is it? Generative. What does it even say?

[Tanya van Gastel]

Generative Engine Optimization.

[Nick Loper]

Okay.

[Tanya van Gastel]

And GEO is really about how can you get ChatGPT to recommend your business and not your competitors. Right. And so this is in my opinion the most exciting field that there is right now within marketing because you're really looking at first of all, how does AI work? And you're merging that with how does SEO work? And so those are literally my two favorite things. And for them to coexist in one kind of channel I think is super exciting.

[Nick Loper]

Where do you think they diverge? Because it seems, seems like if you rank well in Google, that's where chatgpt is pulling a lot of this stuff from it feels like. So is there a different path for geo or is it just a new name to an old thing?

[Tanya van Gastel]

There's a lot of overlap. So a lot of the overlap actually exists because ChatGPT now in a lot of its searches is using the Google Search API. They're using a third party API called SERP API that is pulling Google searches and then surfacing them as citations in ChatGPT. But ChatGPT doesn't always do searches. A lot of the time what it does, it sticks to its old training data. And that can be like six months ago or maybe even like a year ago, depending on where the cutoff is. And if you are in that database, if you are mentioned a lot, you will probably surface. But ChatGPT is really about mentions, it's not about ranking factors. And what's more, ChatGPT is probabilistic, which is an annoyingly complicated term to just say that you might get mentioned one time and not mentioned the other time. If you ask what are the three best podcasts for side Hustle Hustles. I mean, probably every time it will say side Hustle Nation, but it's going to give you three completely different answers if you ask three times. Because AI never gives you the exact same answer. And so same thing with GPT. Sometimes it's going to surface you and sometimes it's not. A lot of that is then you trying as a business to become the default part of the default mentions. You want to aim to be mentioned 8 times out of 10, not 10 times out of 10. 10. And a lot of that again, you're talking about volume of mentions, right? So let's say that you are super popular with Reddit users and Reddit is the most cited domain in ChatGPT by far, double that of the second most cited. Okay, that's from like Ahrefs top hundred domain research. And so if Reddit mentions you a hundred thousand times, but you don't even have a single blog post, you're actually still gonna be mentioned by ChatGPT. Whereas that's very different with Google. Right? You could mentioned a hundred thousand times in Reddit, 0 times on any other page and you might not surface as the top keyword for your actual Google search.

[Nick Loper]

Okay, so that's something that you can proactively do is try and build up your body of press mentions, your media mentions, and proactively build up your Reddit reputation and citations there to. To feed into this new geo world.

[Tanya van Gastel]

Yes, absolutely. You basically Want to make training data for your own business, right? So think about what is your user audience actually searching or what are they prompting ChatGPT for. If you can guess the exact prompt that your audience is searching for and then answer that in your own blog post that is formulated as an FAQ, you're like 10 steps ahead already of everybody else. And so that FAQ type content is something that is hugely beneficial because ChatGPT basically is looking for questions that are being asked on the web and if they are similar to the prompt, it's going to surface that answer in a way that is very similar. It's probably going to paraphrase it.

[Nick Loper]

That sounds like a, a good hack. Would you not take it too technical? Like, would you put that as a separate page, a separate post? Would you have like a list of FAQs, like all on one page, like different variations?

[Tanya van Gastel]

Your crawlability still matters a lot, right? So like, ideally it's in like a heading type format. A huge thing that I recommend a lot of my clients and I have clients who are doing anywhere between $2 million revenue to $2 billion revenue a year. So really companies, I always recommend them to have a great features page. And ideally that's, you know, a lot of the time it's very hard for like technical reasons to create your features page in a way that it's like SEO friendly. So do a blog post where you're talking about all the potential use cases of your actual product in an FAQ format and you're going to do really so much better on ChatGPT. A big part of that is also that a lot of the time when people do their own brand audit and they're asking about like a feature of your product or does your product do this or does it do that? And ChatGPT says, no, it doesn't do that. It's because you're not explicitly sharing that on your own website or you're not explicitly sharing that in your features page. ChatGPT isn't really good at reasoning. If you're not seeing it verbatim, it'll be very hard for it to pick it up.

[Nick Loper]

Okay. No, this is, this is great. And I imagine there is a lot more. So make sure to follow Tanya on your YouTube founder Tanya over there. We'll link up her LinkedIn as well Ranking on AI.com is the new site, the new project, so we'll link that up. 2. Tanya, this has been awesome. I'm taking a ton of notes. Lots of things for product builders on the affiliate side on the SEO side, on the GEO side, let's wrap this thing up with your number one tip for side Hustle Nation.

[Tanya van Gastel]

Don't give up. Success is just failure to failure without losing any kind of enthusiasm I think is the biggest thing I learned well.

[Nick Loper]

And then some successes sprinkled in there along the way. It sounds like so very good. Don't give up. We've got a couple takeaways from me before we wrap. Number one is looking for those low cost marketing channels that can scale really like the SEO driven focus here. Headshots for remote teams. Best AI headshot generate, right. Like these long tail kind of high buyer intent type of keywords. And then the other thing like if you don't have a recurring revenue business business then you're going to need recurring sources of traffic. Right. And so here's a one off purchase business. But we had consistent sources of traffic which made it attractive to potential buyers down the road. And then it's telling that story, telling those the features and benefits, you know, the one off customer and then the thousand person company customer. It was like, oh, you want consistency behind the backgrounds? Yeah, we can do that. And then for the buyer, the ultimate buyer of the business, well it's like it's a lot better margins than your physical product business. And and by the way, paid ads untapped. Right. You know you're going to be able to take this thing, take the keys and run with it. So telling that story to both kinds of buyers in the business. We did an episode earlier this summer on some AI powered product ideas that you might be able to build. That was number six 89 in your feed with Pete McPherson. Beyond that, I do send my best side Hustle ideas and updates to 125,000 people every week. If you would like to get that too, all you gotta do is go to Sidehustlenation.com join join and you'll be on the list. Big thanks to Tanya for sharing her insight. Big thanks to our sponsors for helping make this content free for everyone. Side hustlenation.com deals is where to go to find all the latest offers from our sponsors in one place. Thank you for supporting the advertisers that support the show. That's it for me. Thank you so much for tuning in. If you're finding value in the show, the greatest compliment is to share it with a friend. So fire off that text message, let them know, check this out until next time, let's go out there and make something happen and I'll catch you in the next edition of the Side Hustle show. Hustle on.