Evan Carmichael built evancarmichael.com as a simple hub for speaking dates and entrepreneur profiles. Readers loved it, he added ads, the revenue grew, and he left his VC job to run the site full-time. He credits helping others and community feedback for turning a side project into his main business.
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Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael. Welcome to another edition of Ask Evan. In today's episode, I'm going to answer a question from one of my forum readers, Don, who wrote in asking about success. And he said, "As an entrepreneur, what has been your biggest success online?" So thanks for the question, Don. For me, my biggest success, I think, is the launch of EvanCarmichael.com and turning that into a business. So when I sold my first software company and hooked up with a venture capital company, I was being asked to do a lot of speaking as a young entrepreneur, kind of success story. So I used my website, evancarmichael.com, basically just to say where I was speaking and what I was talking about, as well as share some of the famous entrepreneur profiles I had found helpful for me when growing my business. People who I modeled their success and was able to build successful company myself as well. And that was the launch of the website. And no matter what, I was always gonna have that website. I felt it was adding value back to people who were reading and people would write in saying that they really loved what I wrote and it was inspiring and motivated them to keep going with their business and not give up. That's awesome stuff, right? That makes you want to keep going and doing more. When you get feedback like that, you know you're doing something right and you're on the right track. It was never intended to be a business at the start. It was just something that I did as value-add to help people out. A lot of people helped me with my business that I started, so I wanted to give back. And it also felt really good knowing that you're helping people. And then when I discovered, hey, you know what, we could try some advertising on the website, and that did well, that kind of made the click with the website, and that started the process for it to become my next main business. And so I transitioned out of the venture capital company and did my EvanCarmichael.com stuff on the side while at the VC firm. And when I noticed, hey, this has some serious revenue opportunities as well, and if I can do what I'm really excited about and make money doing it and help a lot of people, that's an awesome formula. And I was able to leave the venture capital company and pursue EvanCarmichael.com full-time and turn it into a real business. And that's what I'm really proud of, really probably my biggest success. Online. We've done a lot of little things to make it better and better and better on an increasing basis. Every day we try to do things to make the company better, but from a big picture point of view, I think being able to launch EvanCarmichael.com and get a lot of people coming to it and be able to turn it into a business is probably my biggest success online. So thanks for the question, Don. If you guys like the video, please give it a thumbs up. It makes me wanna do more of these videos for you guys. And if you have a question about success or another question for your company, feel free to leave it in the comments below. I always read those and try to respond to as many as I can. So thank you, and I'll see you on the next episode.
