Timothy Dick - How Hostgator Grew And Exited For 9-Figures

One of the campaigns pre Covid I used to do a lot was, like, when there were conventions for certain industries, just basically grab all of the ad IDs for all the cell phones at that location using, like a geo fence. It's kind of like retargeting in a way, because, you know, a lot of people understand retargeting. You go to a website, they pixel you, and then you start seeing them everywhere. This is just a backdoor way to do it because you're just saying, Here are some IDs showing ads to them everywhere.

This is an intro. Intro, intro, intro.

Hustle and Float, Shark with your boy, my boy, Matt Wolf and Joe Fear.

Hey, yo, what up, my friend?

I have a question.

Sup?

Have you heard of hostgator?

Have I? Yeah, I used to see their freaking billboards all around the San Diego, like, downtown area.

They got to be a pretty massive hosting company.

You used to make a lot of money from them.

I did. I made a lot of affiliate commissions off.

Think you made from that?

I think at the height, we were making 40k a month off of Hostgator commissions.

Yeah, somewhere around there. 40k a month just off of Hostgator.

Just off Hostgator commission.

Damn. And how cheap was hosting?

I think they charge 50 bucks a year and they're paying US$100.

You're making 40k a year?

They were paying US$100 per customer we sent them. And the customers only had to pay for like A$50 per year subscription because they knew the customers would hang around for years and years and years and years. And so they would basically pay two years worth of their fricking revenue to get that customer.

I remember when you were telling me this years ago before I personally was getting into affiliate marketing. So when I was doing video production, doing my own stuff, when we were kind of just like, kind of supporting each other but not partners in biz, you were doing this, and it made me so fucking jealous. I was like, what? Like you're in the rabbit hole.

And went, hey, this affiliate marketing thing. You in?

Yeah. Well, yeah. And then of course, everything else is magical, but. Yeah, no, it literally was because of this. I was like, hold on. I think we used to have a debate even. It was like, I used to, there's no such thing as passive income. Yeah, we did.

We did.

And then I think it was actually this. And you were showing me, like, okay, you don't call this passive income. Yeah, like, I'm not working to make this money. Like, okay, yeah, I frontloaded the work, sure. But yeah, yes, there's always that.

But anyway, the reason I brought up Rotgator is today we're talking with the original COO of host.

He was literally there, not from day one, but basically pretty damn early on. Pretty damn early. Exited with him.

They exited for eight figure. No, nine figure exit.

Yes. And we'll just let Tim talk about that. But so Timothy Dick is on the show, or we've just been calling him Tim. So Tim, he's interesting, man. He's got such a cool background. I mean, just his story of becoming an entrepreneur so early, but how he's applied that to hostgator, but also beyond that, super cool. And yeah, so he was the COO and they did some crazy. So he basically opened the hood of how this company sold hostgator that we.

All probably grew it and how they sold.

Yeah. And he doesn't spare any details. So that's rad. Super open guy. Shout out to Aaron File as well. Mind fix. We just went straight into this episode down the rabbit hole. So you'll hear why I don't say anything more than that. It's already there, basically. But yeah, I mean, if you want to open your mind to how ads work to like, Tim is fricking brilliant. Yeah.

I mean, this episode, it's a little bit on the longer side from our normal length, but that's only because, like, towards the end of the episode, where we normally end the episode, he started talking about, like, advertising and programmatic advertising and like the rabbit hole of, like, where advertising is going and like all the stuff you can do with the data that's being collected out there. And we're like, our minds were blown in real time and we're like, we can't stop this podcast. Keep rolling, keep rolling.

And he took us on a journey, I feel like. Right, yeah. In full transparency. I'll just say it. Right. We asked him about the story and this was his story. So he walked us through the Hostgator days. He walked us through what has happened since then, like in between and like all these different alleyways almost. But there's a lot of lessons to be learned along the way.

Oh, yeah, no, this is a fascinating episode. So buckle up.

So the notes. Get the notes. Because there are a lot of actionable things, but again, you got to navigate the journey with us. So. Hustleandflowchart.com comp C O M P hustleandflowchart.com Comp get the notes. Two weeks from this day, they go away. But right now, they're free for you.

Yes. And also, we're sponsored by Ahrefs.

Oh, yeah, they're back.

Our buddies, our favorite SEO tool. And we were actually just talking about, you know, what's one of our favorite things about Ahrefs? What would we do when we first signed up for Ahrefs? Like, when we, like, $7, 7 day trial. I'm gonna test this thing out. What should I do? Day one.

Yeah.

And we decided probably run an audit. Right. They've got this audit feature inside there where you plug in your URL and it'll do a deep dive into your site. It'll look at all the technical SEO. It'll look at, you know, page load times and various areas where maybe you're using HTTP, where you should be using HTTPs, and it goes in depth of like, here's all the stuff you can fix on your site. And essentially, it's just gonna give you a checklist of, like, start optimizing.

Right. That anybody can understand, I think is more important. So a technophobe like me can be like, okay, I get it. My site sucks before. Like, it's a D. And I think they grade it as well. Yeah, Yeah.

I think it's like a number ranking.

There's some rankings, there's a scale. Basically, it shows you if you're bad or if you're good, how to optimize anything beyond that spectrum there. But, yeah, run a site audit. It's still like the thing. It's like the sexiest thing to do. Just, like, throw it in the bar, hit the button, here's your report. Custom to you. Even better. You could turn this into a little business and sell it on the side if you really wanted to pay for Ahrefs. Yeah, but excuse me. The point I'm making is it's a really cool tool that you can use with the content you already have on your website.

Yeah. You don't have to do anything else other than plug your URL in and it'll say, okay, here's what we recommend you do.

And it's actionable. So that's a great use case of Ahrefs. You should go try it, because they have a trial and it's only $7 for seven days. Dollar a day. So go to Ahrefs. That's a H R E F s dot com. That's a hrefs dot com. Ahrefs. Get the trial. Enjoy. All right. Tim, how you doing? We are live.

Good. How are you guys today?

Great, man.

Now, do you prefer to go by Tim Or Timothy.

Tim's fine. Either. Either.

Really? We're casual around here, man. All right, all right. Yeah.

I had an old business partner named Bradley and if you called him Brad, he would correct you. So.

Brad.

Yeah, I know some people are kind of like that, but I think it just if they have maybe like a son or some kind of name issue like that.

But yeah, I don't want to sound like my son.

Yeah, man. So we got connected through Aaron File. Got to give a shout out. Always love to do that. Yeah. All the best people come from just the other cool people that we've had on the show.

Yeah, Erin's great. I went through her mind fix program. I guess it's been two years ago or so. I mean, it's been a while. Can you like.

I mean, I don't know if it's like we just. I'm kind of curious about like a before and after, if you're open to sharing that kind of thing. Because she's been on the show and people have asked us, but I'm like, I don't have a good case study for you.

You know, it's really hard to explain, but I definitely noticed a big difference. You know, whenever I first went on it, I had had like some level of success already, you know, in terms of like financially and you know, business wise and everything. But I was like, still had like.

A.

Massive, massive level of like imposter syndrome. Didn't really.

Feel comfortable like, you know, talking about it, you know, interacting like going, you know, like doing a live video or you know, even like participating and like, like, you know, I was in like masterminds and stuff and I was just kind of like, you know, just the quiet and observed and you know, just like had a lot of like confidence issues and things like, like that. And whenever I went through, went through the program, you know, we worked through.

A lot of that.

We worked through a lot of things too where there had been.

A lot of things that I didn't really even realize about. Just like money blocks where, you know, I would hit certain levels and you know, then I would kind of just stay there.

Like a comfort kind of thing.

Yeah.

Like my comfort was getting companies to around 5 million and which is very, you know, it's good. I'm not complaining.

Nice comfort zone. Yeah. For a lot, you know.

And then it was kind of like consistently with multiple companies like that, you know, and, and just not having. I didn't for one of the beliefs that we kind of uncovered, you know, through it was I didn't really allow myself to.

To have feelings, really. I mean, you know, I suppressed it, you know, and it was.

So how did your feelings. This is like going deep now.

Yeah, we just jumped straight into the fire.

Like, where would they come out? Like in business or some other way.

You know, I just, I kind of suppressed a lot of it and you know, we. It took a little while to, you know, to figure this out, you know, and we. But we worked through it, you know, and like this was just one of the areas and you know, like, it was kind of like I like, as an example, you know, like, you know, would have like a big exit, you know, a company that, you know, made like life changing money. And it was kind of like blah, you know, okay, just another day, no happy, no sad, you know, like, or something, you know, really negative happens and just kind of. Yeah, you know, it was, you know, just kind of like I really just didn't.

I just kind of suppressed it all, you know, and it was like, like I remember, you know, like getting, you know, like whenever I got a Tesla, you know, the guys like at the dealership or whatever is just like, you know, you're. Are you not like excited? I'm like, I mean, I'm like, it's.

Yeah.

A car.

I mean, so now are you like totally in the cars and. No, I'm just kidding.

No, no. It really didn't change anything in terms of like my, you know, things overall. But you know what, it really.

You.

Know, kind of just came down to a lot of like.

Just the feeling that if, you know, any kind of like emotion was shown that, you know, then I would either be judged or disappointed or like showing success.

And not having like that background, you know, my family and growing up and all of that was like such a dramatic change that, you know, I just kind of suppressed it a lot, you know, and. Yeah, so that was one of the big things and just really just kind of got over a lot of.

I.

Guess you would say.

Imposter syndrome and judging myself.

Quite a. Quite a few things. I mean, it was like, it was a really interesting.

Interesting thing because I went in kind of skeptical, you know, and it's.

I think a lot of people would. Yeah, yeah.

You know, and it's a pretty expensive program. But I was like, you know.

I.

Had actually had a recommendation from Taylor Welch. You know.

I was in his program Mastermind and stuff in the past, and.

He had traffic and funnels, right?

Yeah. And I had, I was talking to him one day about. I'm like I don't know if I'm burnout or stressed out or. Or what, but I'm just, like, not happy. And I was actually. I think the trigger for it when I was talking to Taylor was, you know, I was like, playing it very small in terms of, like, I had, like, people coming to me for consulting, you know, business consulting, and a lot of what I do now, you know, with M and A and stuff like that. And I would turn a lot of them away, and there wasn't really a good reason. You know, it was more just a confidence thing.

I heard something recently. Who is. It was someone. We recorded an episode last week. It was Dan Martell. That's who it was. And he was. I'm sure you know him, but he was talking about, there's a lot of folks who will get in their own way subconsciously because they know they have to fulfill that thing they're about to sell. So for you, it could have been like, shit, I have to do another. Like, I have another client I need to fulfill, or I'm obligated now to make this transaction, this person happy. And I heard that's such a super common thing that I know I can relate to. And probably most people that have to do everything themselves or choose to.

Yeah. And I think all this stuff is, like. I wouldn't say that any of it ever goes away. I think most entrepreneurs always have things like this that, you know, come up, like, at each level, it's just a little bit different. You know, a lot of people think that, you know, once I get to the next level or once I hit, you know, certain milestone, certain revenue, certain number of employees or, you know, whatever that, you know, things are gonna just. Everything's just gonna be magic and happy. But, you know, it's. It's something. These things, they just are different. You know, you have different problems, but, you know, you just kind of have to.

I guess I would say you do kind of have to just kind of balance, keep things balanced, you know, not let the highs and lows really get. Get to you and, you know, keep a balanced perspective, but, you know, definitely celebrate your wins. You know, the small ones, the large ones. Yeah, all of them. And, you know, whenever you're dealing with something that's like a, you know, at the time, it feels like a really negative situation or hopeless situation. It's like, you know, I've been through things like that in the past. You know, whether it's like patent lawsuits, business partner disputes.

Lots of money lost. I'm sure along the Way I lost.

A million dollars in one day.

There you go. That will do it. That was.

You know, that was. And that was like cash money. Like.

You know, drop a duffel bag of cash in a dark alley, oops, that slipped, you know, so there's just.

Been a lot of. A lot of things like that. But whenever I look back at any of those, you know, I. I just. I've realized that, you know, I'm more resilient, you know, and I've. Going through those experiences just kind of makes me feel like whatever happens, you know, going forward, I'm gonna. It'll probably be a different problem, you know, things are likely not gonna be the same, but, you know, I can. I can deal with stuff, you know, and that's. That's, like, one of the. The biggest things, you know, and I think, you know, I mentioned last time one of the biggest.

Kind of.

I guess one of the. One of the points that, you know, I kind of realized that.

You know, that I could stop worrying so much and, you know, my stress level went way down was whenever I realized that, you know, I was confident that I could rebuild, you know, something if I lost everything, you know, and it was kind of. It's kind of like looking at, you know, in the absolute worst case, you know, you lose completely everything. I mean, I would just go online and build something else.

It's like, no one, nothing and no one can hurt you. So it's like, why. Why feel anxious or scared? Even losing a physical thing, like a car, money, even a million dollars, it's like, it doesn't matter. Can't hurt me. Yeah.

I mean, you can always rebuild. I mean.

Especially if you have sales skills, marketing skills, and you develop that. I mean, you have some resiliency built in.

Yeah, very cool. So I mean, what you're saying is, so with Aaron. I worked with Aaron, too, and Erin really, really helped me with the imposter syndrome. That was, like, the thing that she honed in on because we do this podcast, right? And so when I'm interviewing entrepreneurs who, in my mind, are way more successful than me, I'm sitting here going, you know, who am I to be talking to this person? Right? And so that was the big thing that I worked with Aaron on, and she, like, for the most part, completely cleared it for me. That's why I was saying, very cool. Because I'm like. I very, like, relate. So what.

What you worked on, Both experienced. Yeah. Her work, it's amazing. Yeah. But, yeah, you've done, like, probably or you have definitely gone way down the rabbit hole with her. But I know, like, your. Your. Your backstory, I'm sure that's what you want to get to. I was gonna.

I was gonna say, I feel like we. We jumped into, like, you know how when they start a movie, they always jump into the action scene, and then after the action scene, they're like, all right, let's rewind and go back to, like, how we got to this point. I feel like that's how this podcast.

Started, so we should do that more often. Man. I like it. It's like, boom, through the deep end. All right, now who the heck are we talking to?

So I know you have history with HostGator. I used to be a really big HostGator affiliate, actually, so we could probably talk about that a little bit later.

You're a customer of ours too. You read our stuff and that's super cool. See your name a lot. Yeah.

So let's go back. So what were you doing before you were kind of an entrepreneur, and how did you get into it? How did the Hostgator story happen? The exit, all of that? Let's get into the details.

Yeah. So.

I was born and raised in rural West Virginia. My family was not entrepreneurial. My dad was a coal miner, my mom was a homemaker. Didn't really have history of any kind of entrepreneurial type endeavors really in the family. And that was kind of something where I was in a small town and from a really small age, you know, I always. I always, from a young age, just like, felt kind of different. I felt like, you know, there has to be more. You know, I would see things on, you know, tv and it's just like, you know, I really. There's more to the world than what. What's here, you know. And basically once I got on the Internet, you know, that was really when, you know, when I got open up to, you know, all the opportunity that's out there. And, you know, I just kind of self taught, you know, started a computer repair business when I was in middle school, you know, put up flyers around town, you know, and I. I just. I just figured, you know, if I. I can't solve a problem or research and learn, then I just won't charge the person. So that's cool. You know, I just kind of kind of from that, that led into web design and, you know, this was late 90s, early 2000, so, you know, I was, you know, doing web design, but the problem was there weren't really a lot of customers for that locally you know, small town, there's only so much there.

So.

I realized, you know, on the Internet, you know, through like, message boards and all these different things, that, you know, I could do business with people in other places. And, you know, I was maybe 13 or 14 years old, but they didn't know that.

That's right.

You had the facade of the Internet.

Yeah, exactly. And, you know, so long story short with that, you know, web design.

Kind.

Of led into web hosting, you know, and I really. I thought, well, that's kind of cool. You know, people pay every month, you know, and you don't necessarily have to, like, do it. Do something every month. Like, you just set it up. And as long as it, you know, the server stays up, I mean, it kind of. Kind of just rolls. So basically, I mean, I've pretty much always been an entrepreneur because, you know, I basically have made six figures since middle school, you know, and so I was in the small town, you know, very, very small town. Like, our entire high school had, like, 100 people in it. Something like that.

So you were like this kind of anomaly. Anomaly that, like, came out of nowhere.

Yeah, yeah. And it was just, you know, like, I.

Finished high school early. You know, I was fortunate that, you know, there was a pretty supportive community. You know, I was getting, like, a lot of publicity at the time for being so young and, you know, had, like, a couple newspaper covers. The school was getting attention, you know, so they were happy with that, like, and it was just this crazy time. My parents had no idea. They didn't know what to think about it. Like, you know, they were kind of like.

What are you doing? How do you. Why are there money orders showing up for thousands of dollars and you're just, like, spending so much time on the computer and, like.

What are. What. How is this, you know? Yeah, yeah. You know, and, like, they. They finally just kind of accepted it, but I think they still didn't really understand it. And, you know, they.

They, you know, eventually. Yeah, they just eventually accepted it, you know, so finished high school early. And, you know, at that point, you know, I moved the day of the high school graduation, you know, so I had already had an apartment and, like, what would be considered, like, the more cityish part of West Virginia? I guess.

So you're like. You're, like, out of there.

Yeah. In graduation day, you know, I moved, you know, and it was in.

A college town, you know, and I was debating going to college then, and I just. I just couldn't do it, though. So I just couldn't I just didn't.

Didn'T want to like set through classes that weren't relevant to what I was doing and then knowing in my mind that I was already making probably more money than the person teaching.

Yeah. You know, all these, in high school you already.

Yeah, it was all these weird feelings. So like. But I was really excited because whenever I moved, my first place, first apartment by myself, I could get cable or DSL Internet because where my parents lived in that area at the time, there.

Was no broadband dial up. Everything. Huh.

Everything was dial up.

So you just saw probably like dollar signs too and exponentially like, oh, I could do everything way more efficiently.

Yeah. You know, and so from there, you know, I, we, you know, social media wasn't as that big of a thing back then. You know, the form of social media I guess were like, there was like IRC chat rooms and message boards. And so, you know, I had met, you know, others in the web hosting industry. I wanted to move to a bigger city. Ended up basically kind of folding my web hosting business at the time into another larger company in upstate New York. Moved up there. So I moved to the Albany area for a couple years and was.

I.

Guess 18 or 19. And I moved, folded my operations in and was VP of Operations at a company there in the web hosting industry.

There for a few years. We really didn't, didn't get along too well.

So, you know, that company will be nameless. But then through message boards again, you know, after I've been there a few years, you know, my friend messaged me.

From a message board. He said, hey, hostgator is growing a lot. You have a lot of experience in the industry. Do you want to move down to Florida and help?

I went down and met Brent, the founder of hostgator in person the first night that I was there. We went to dinner and then we ended up talking like out on his like front patio. Like we were sitting there talking for like 10, 12 hours straight, you know. Yeah, we really hit it off and then we're like, wow, it's like 5:00am.

So we, you know, I moved down about a week later, you know, literally went back and moved down. He just, that's where he grew up, you know. So he was founded hostgator then. You know, I think, I think at the time there were about nine employees or so. I don't, I don't really remember the exact number, but it was pretty, pretty minimal. But the company is growing really fast. And you know, whenever I went in, you know, it was he, you know, he was already, you know, growing the company. But I went in and you know, set up like the accounting operations. The more like his version of accounting at the time was I don't use any accounting software or do anything because there's so much money coming in that the bank account balance just keeps going up so fast that I can't, I don't. So I just save all my receipts and put them in a big plastic bin.

Oh, no.

Give them to the accountant at the end of the year. And I guess that year they had told him, they're like, we're going to bill you at like $65 an hour to go through this stuff.

His accountant hated him.

Yeah. So that's when he showed up, huh?

Yeah. And I'm like, okay, so you're doing almost $10 million and you're not really tracking any of this? Like there's no bookkeeping.

No, none of that.

Yeah, so I got all that set up, set up. You know, a lot of the initial hiring, we realized pretty quick, you know, South Florida wasn't going to work because it was. The real estate was still pretty expensive there. This was kind of pre crash. And so we were looking at office space. We were in this little strip mall in a tiny little 1500 square foot space in the strip mall. And we finally decided to look at other cities, you know, because hiring was expensive there, real estate was expensive there. And we ended up moving to Houston just. It was mainly just because of the taxes, the cost of living, all, you know, the.

There were some data centers there. So, you know, hiring was a little easier. And we went from that little strip mall space, 1500 square feet to actually buying a 35,000 square foot building.

Whoa.

And you know, when we got there, it was kind of like.

Where, you know, it was a four story building, you know, and so the, each floor was about 10,000 square feet. So that was, you know, going 1500 to just one floor of the building, you know, that'll last us forever. The rest of it was, you know, had tenants. So we were taking one floor. We had tenants. We'll never, never outgrow that, you know, of course the building was filled with. And we had to non renew leases like, wow. Pretty much within a year, you know, because we hired hundreds of people.

So that was mainly personnel then. So it's where your servers and all that stuff in there as well.

No, no, none of that was ever there, you know, and so but we, we were 24 7, you know, so we had three shifts, you know, and just everybody was in house. That was one of the things that was unique with hostgator is there weren't any remote employees. Yeah. So everyone. And that's, that's one area that, you know, I differ in a little bit than, you know, Brent, the HostGator founder, you know, because he really, at the time, you know, wanted to be focused on having everyone in the office and, you know, didn't feel that remote work could be very effective, you know, and I, I felt that, you know, I mean, either, either can work. There's pros and cons. So that was kind of, that's kind of where, where things went. You know, hostgator just kept growing. You know, I was, at the same time, you know, a few years in, I started a voiceover IP company and he actually invested in it. So I was still working for hostgator. I was COO at the time. It was kind of a choose your own title, you know, just, you know, selectively involved. Yeah. And we, you know, we were growing really fast. And you know, he had said, you know, can you please just go start another company because I kind of have all my eggs in one basket. I want to invest in something else. And ultimately that was his baby and we knew that I wanted to build my own. So he invested a million dollars into VoIPO, which is a voice over IP phone service. This was actually put in perspective before the iPhone existed, any of that. So Vonage was a competitor and that was really it. There was no Magic Jack. There was none of that.

And you're still, you still have this company running right now, right?

I still own it.

Yeah.

It's 14 years old now.

Dang.

And so.

Wow.

Some of our. We actually still have some clients that have been with us that for over. I think the oldest is almost 13 years.

Wow. So with Hostgator. Well, Matt, you have some history with Hostgator. You haven't said anything but like being an affiliate because you guys were like crushing it back in the day.

Yeah, I mean, hostgator, we actually had a company. Yeah, Bradley, we had a company called learntoblog.com but prior to Learn to Blog, he had a company called.

Oh yeah, I remember that.

Affiliate. Yeah. He had a company called Free Blog Factory before that. So Free Blog Factory was like, they developed some sort of software where somebody bought Hostgator. It would automatically load WordPress onto their server and then a whole bunch of plugins and themes and it was sort of like pre, you know, set up for you.

Right.

And that was Free Blog Factory. I had a company called the WordPress Classroom, which was just training on how to. How to be a blogger. We actually merged those two companies into learn to blog.com and we made so much more money off of promoting hostgator than we did off of actually selling our learn to blog courses.

Because, I mean, we were paying out like millions of dollars a month.

Yeah.

We got to a point where I think it costs $50 a year for your HostGator account, but our commissions were like $100 a sale or something like that.

Yeah, I think we topped. We had a tiered payout scale, and I think the top was like 125.

You were close, Matt.

Yeah, I think we were about 100 bucks.

125.

Damn. Yeah, I remember Matt telling me about that. I was like, wait, what? Hold on. Cause I think that's when I was wrapping my head around affiliate marketing and how you can inte your existing business. And like, here you are, trainer. Here's Bradley over there. I was gonna call him Brad, but he would have slapped me. Bradley, he's got the service side, and then here you need the infrastructure, the foundation, which is hosting, just fricking affiliate. There you go. Yep.

And that overtook your business, you know, and that's. That's kind of like one of the.

Approach that you took, you know, with, you know, I didn't know you back then, but, you know, obviously all of our top affiliates were doing something along those lines in terms of. They were adding something else as like a value add to get someone to, you know, sign up. So, like, we had someone that would, you know, give a free website, which was usually WordPress, and, you know, like, I'll give you the design or the templates. You obviously, you just have to get the hosting, you know, and you use the link, you don't get it. Sign up for whatever plan you want, and, you know, then you got the commission on the back end. And that was, you know, so many people.

In the affiliate program. You know, we had. I mean, we had tens of thousands of affiliates, but most of them didn't really make that much money, you know, most of them, because they would just like, they didn't look at it like that. They looked at it as like, I'm gonna sell this hosting to someone, send them my link. Yeah, it's like, no, you. If you add something of value and make it like just kind of like a. A value add. I mean, it was so easy.

Yeah, I know.

For the longest amount of years, maybe still. Yeah. Pat Flynn. I know this was a competitor but bluehost, I think that's been his like, longest standing affiliate commissions, like when he would publish all these reports. It's not like we know all the public numbers and bluehosted. It just seems like one of those things as affiliate promotions that's like, here's a foundational item that we all need as an owner of online businesses.

Yeah. And that's something that.

Obviously affiliate marketing in general is something that.

It's a good model for both sides because for us as a company at hostgator, you know, even though, like it. Some people, you know, may look at it as like, well, if we were paying $125 to some people and the customer was paying 50, we knew what the. That that customer would more than likely stay. And you know, it averaged out to, you know, the customers would stay for years. So, you know, for us it's kind of a. I mean, we. The bulk of our growth really. Hostgator was affiliates and AdWords. AdWords, Google AdWords. Yeah, those were, those were the big things.

I think when I knew you guys were getting like big time, I saw billboards around San Diego. I remember that. Like, there's like, there's like a big push like in the heart. I was like, what the hell? Like, geez, Hosting.

You know, we got to a point where we had, you know, we had Google reps, like, and Google actually had like, I think it was four full time reps just focusing on our account full time. Like we were spending so much money with them. We were spending like seven figures a month. You know, it was like, it was basically to the point where there wasn't. We couldn't really find anything else to do online. So that was where it was like, let's start doing billboards. We did.

A NASCAR team one year. We did a UFC fight. And you know, the guy had like the gator on it.

Yeah.

And then Brent's a little. I'm a little more conservative. Brent's a little crazy. He likes to do wild things. And so he put out this ad. He didn't really think anyone would do it, I guess, but you know, he offered to pay someone. I don't even remember. I think it was 10,000 to get the logo tattooed on the forehead. Of course somebody did it. Then there was. He found this guy that was like an amateur boxer or something. And the guy was like, I'll change my legal name to HostGator. And so then every time he would go to his amateur boxing matches or whatever, they would announce him and it would Be hostgator. And his last name was Dot Com.

We just did all these crazy things, and that was really. We were just at a point where there was so much growth that we were just finding things to do at that point.

You're kind of having fun with it at that point.

That's interesting. Yeah, that's a good problem to be good situation, huh?

And, you know, the billboards, we actually had more billboards for hiring than we did for the service itself.

I remember that. Actually, you did have a lot of hiring and I mean, that just shows you were growing somehow. Probably not through billboards. That's just such an interesting concept.

Yeah. And, you know, and it was something that. One of the biggest things there is that we. There were some things that we maybe did that were, you know, not conventional, but we didn't really have any external influence. So, you know, like, I was, you know, 20s, like 20 to 20, 21, something like that. During that time, the founder of Hostgator burnt. He's three years older than me. So, you know, he was like 23, 24. And, you know, so we just basically, we knew that we just wanted to provide really good service, focus on that and.

Just kind of use common sense and do the right thing. So all these different challenges that would come up with growth, like, I mean, when you hire hundreds of people, you run into a lot of really interesting situations, you know, anything you could imagine and stuff that you wouldn't even imagine, you know, like you start having to deal with. But we didn't have any venture capital or outside investors or any pressure or that was like an external factor. Yeah, there was, like guiding us, less.

Red tape to just make quick decisions on things like that.

Yeah. And, you know, so there were a lot of things that, you know, we were probably able to do that, you know, some other companies might not be able to, you know, because of the, you know, they have certain, you know, parameters they need to stay in. So you guys really focused on it.

Was that like a really big part of the growth, you think?

Yeah, I think so, because there's so.

Many hosting companies out there. Like I mentioned, bluehost. I mean, they've been around for, I don't know, maybe around the same length of time. It seems like they have always been in the game now.

Didn't bluehost exit to the same company that hostgator exited to? Yeah, so they're actually under the same umbrella now, I think.

Yeah, I think. Yeah, we talked about that last.

Yeah, there's like, there's like 30 or 40 hosts that are under the same umbrella. Basically an investment company bought up like all the hosting companies that they could. GoDaddy was one of the only ones that they didn't buy. They were bigger. So they spent about $2 billion buying hosting companies. Hostgator, Bluehost and iPower Web and basically on those top 10 sites, like eight or nine of the 10 they own. But the way they operate, they don't integrate the brands, they integrate behind the scenes. So I guess it's not entirely true. But they don't publicly integrate.

So all the systems, servers are probably all similar.

Yeah, you're literally talking to the same support people at bluehost and hostgator and on the same infrastructure and servers. But they just know that if you cancel service with one and switch, well, it's probably one of their brands and you just don't know it. Yeah, so that's kind of their model. But yeah, hostgator was sold to them. You know, it was a couple hundred million dollars exit.

So that was.

Did you have some equity in the company at the time too?

So I didn't have equity. Brent owned all of it. I didn't have equity, but I did.

At the time of the sell there. I benefited quite a bit from it.

So I'm curious, how did the exit go down? How did you and Brent sort of get the news? What was the atmosphere in the company as it was coming? I was just fascinated by it.

Yeah, so I had actually.

About three years before. Three years before the seller, I had kind of phased out of day to day type stuff and actually moved out. That's when I moved out to California and moved Voipo out here because I just really didn't like Houston and Voipo was like starting to take all my time. So then I was kind of just like selectively involved. So I. It's kind of hard for me to, you know, to say like how like the day to day, you know, looked. I know that, you know, there were. There's a period where there were a lot of rumors and things like that. But you know, ultimately it was something that. It was not really a planned sell. It was kind of like if they happen to offer the right amount of money, it'll happen kind of thing and you know.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, and once he, you know, he decided that, you know, they had hit that, then, you know, they announced it and it took about a year to, you know, fully close everything and exit. You know, there weren't any immediate changes, but.

It was.

It was definitely Like a really big.

Big roller coaster for everybody. I mean, because, you know, like, one of the interesting things is, it's like when you have a big exit like that. Like, even, you know, Brent, like, he was one of the. I remember a call with him, and he was like, I'm like, you. You should be happy right now. You know, Like, I mean, he. He was like. I think he was 34 at the time, you know, and he got, you know, several hundred million dollars in a lump sum wire transfer, you know, and he's. He's like, but now I'm not a billionaire.

Yeah. The. The whole worth of the company and all that. Yeah.

You know, and it's like. It's like, well, you know, a couple hundred million, you know, that should be enough, right? It's just like, no, there's more pressure now to, you know, to grow that into more. And that's one of the interesting things that I've seen is that I've seen that happen over and over. You know, there definitely is. You know, at each level, you know, we all think that we'll, you know, kind of be happy and, you know, content. But most true entrepreneurs, you know, we're. We're just kind of like, might take a few months off or something, but, I mean, it's very hard to just stop.

Yeah, the goalpost just keeps moving.

You and I were just having that conversation before. I think it was partially because I kind of knew that story, so I was talking to Matt. But we're like, it is interesting as an entrepreneur because we don't know how to stop. We're so driven. We see problems in the world that we know we can solve, so we do it or we find the resources to collaborate on it. So how do you make sure you're. And obviously you already talked about Aaron and mind fix, and maybe Brent needs a little bit of mind fixing.

Yeah, yeah.

But at the same.

How do you keep yourself. I guess, where those goal posts. How do you keep yourself happy throughout that whole process of knowing, like, hey, there's more to be done. Like, do you. Do you have any daily routines that kind of keep you in check?

For me, like that that's really been investing, consulting and basically being able to, like, experience other projects.

Challenges, industries, you know, work with different people, but not have to go fully start entire companies.

It's almost like, come in and inject your wisdom and collaborate and kind of. Yeah. See what they already have going in motion.

Because ultimately, I mean, you know, I'll be honest, like, voipo. It's 14 years old.

It's, you know, it's kind of, you know, there was a period of time for sure where I got bored with it, you know, and it's just kind of like, you know, it's kind of on autopilot. It's, you know, we have about a, you know, close to 100,000 customers all over the country. So even with Churn, you know, we have. We were still growing. Our growth, our growth is not what it was in the past, but it's still growing as a company because we were on the 5000 list a couple times. But then I can definitely tell, looking back the time, whenever I kind of got bored with it, that's when growth slowed down a little bit. So it's just been a slow and steady. Because I kind of look at it as a kind of a combination of.

A SaaS company, software in the cloud.

With kind of like the stability of a utility like telecom.

Yeah. Because it's really interesting. It's kind of like this. Not talked about a lot, I guess, technology, like, it's been around for a while, voiceover ip. But it's almost like, no disrespect, it almost sounds like a boring company.

Is.

What we're doing right now. VoIP?

Yeah. Oh, yeah, I guess so, yes. I mean, there's so many implications, but it's like, I'm just seeing it as like this amazing, boring, stable, recurring income company that allows you to kind of do whatever.

And it's interesting that sometimes the boring industries are the ones where there's the most profit and least competition.

Sure.

You know, and so another thing that a lot of people find really surprising about Boipo is that.

Over 80% of our customers are residential.

Interesting.

You know, people with home phones, we have a lot of seniors, you know, and a lot of people that have kids that they don't want to have handling like their iPhone or something, or a lot of people that make a lot of international calls because those rates are still pretty expensive on a cell phone. Then we have business customers and, you know, we have some that have like the. Guess you would say, you know, the phone system in the cloud, you know, with extensions and routing, and that's obviously accelerating a little bit, you know, due to more people working from home. They can use.

Still be on the same phone system, but use an app or a phone at home or, you know, pretty much whatever. But the bulk of our business is still in that residential space.

Where.

The customer has an adapter, they plug it into their router and Then they just plug their phones into it, you know, normal, regular house phones.

That's pretty sweet, man. I mean. Yeah. Well, I just love the fact that it's still such an easy. Not easy, because obviously you built it out and all that, but it's just such a, I guess, passive or understated thing that you've made.

Yeah. Because it's like, you know, so it works just like traditional home phone service, so people really, you know, wouldn't know the difference. But where we're at with it now, you know, it's kind of like we. We have a couple. Like, we have the. The core business, you know, but the network and infrastructure that we've built, you know, over the years, that can be used in so many different ways. So now within that business, we're looking at building new services that utilize the infrastructure that we have. Because a lot of apps tie in with Twilio and things like that.

And they may offer phone numbers for like A$1,$50 a month and then charge usage fees and things. We're an actual licensed phone company, so they have to go through a company like us to get the phone numbers that they offer to developers.

That's like. Yeah, texting companies. All these security, like text messages with apps that require this text to log in. There's probably like so many implications where you can tap into.

Yeah. So we just haven't built a lot of the developer tools for developers to tie in, except in custom situations. So we're working on more things like that. Those phone numbers cost us 5 cents, you know, then Twilio or someone sells them for a dollar, but that's still 20x, you know.

Well, there's the math right there. Why it's so sexy. And it's recurring too, right?

Yeah, yeah. And then there's. And like, usage, like, you know, wholesale carriers don't actually pay for usage.

They get paid for it. So it's kind of a convoluted thing, but if a company's charging you for incoming calls, they're getting paid on the back end of the telecom infrastructure.

And so they're getting paid twice. Wow, interesting. Okay.

And you might remember, like, years ago, there were some cell phone services that had free incoming.

Sure.

That's why, I mean, they were already. They're getting paid on the income.

So it's just like this system, this thing that people are just so accustomed to paying for. They're probably not even questioning because they don't understand what's happening.

Well, yeah, and they also look at it as, like, it's so low, the prices drop so much over the years that they're like, why used to Pay, you know, $40 or $50 for that, you know, so like, so for our residential customers, it works out to.

Around $7 a month for unlimited calling, unlimited features.

That's a no brainer compared to some local company or whatever, big name company even.

Yeah. And there's still a pretty steady market in that. But I know that that market is, it is going to decline over time. So that's why we're focusing on the business side. We have the phone system in a cloud kind of offering, but there's already a lot of that out there. So what we're really looking to do there is just figure out what are some cool creative things we can do like with messaging, you know, so like using like text messages because all of our numbers are enabled for messaging. So we can tie that into software for like a live chat where people can text in, you know, for marketing support. Conversational.

Analytics is another big one because since I love marketing.

Phone numbers are so cheap that we can use them for tracking.

So like swapping around phone numbers on websites or wherever else you.

Yeah, so like, let's say that you have like the most simplistic way to put it is like you have, you know, different ads running in different places. You put a different phone number on each one. So someone happens to call instead of clicking, you would know they came in on this phone number. So that ties into this ad. But you can actually automate that where on your site instead of putting in a phone number, you can just put in some JavaScript code that will dynamically generate a phone number when someone comes in and automatically label it in your system as far as they came from this campaign or however you want to link it. And so then, you know, it's just better attribution. And when you combine that with.

You.

Know, both the voice side and also texting, you know, there's a lot of really cool stuff that you can do. So we're, you know, kind of, we're working on some products, you know, that fall into those categories.

You know, and that's really where we want to put like our R and D, you know. Cause it's, it's the core of the business is going to be still slow and steady.

You know, and it's something that sometimes it is tempting to just sell it because I mean, I get a lot of unsolicited offers, you know, I'm sure it's like, because it's just A lot of recurring revenue.

Those are always very valuable. I mean, they're. Yeah. I mean.

Yeah. So when you've got, you know, we do around 5 million or so, so, you know, that's a decent amount of recurring revenue. Profit margins are good. So it's kind of a, you know, something like that. But I just look at it as like it's a platform to build on, you know, and it's something that there's so much more that we can do with it that.

It'S. And it's also an asset that can be looked at in different ways because like in a cell there may be. If whenever we. Eventually I do sell the company, you know, no plans to do that currently.

But stop the offers. Everyone stop them.

But like the infrastructure could be sold separately from the clients.

Well as assets. Right? Like individual asset sales.

Because even just like say like a regional cable company wants to launch a phone service and they don't want to spend a million dollars in several years even getting all the approvals and licenses and all those things in different states, they could technically just buy the entity that already has those.

I think it's super smart business, man. Retain the ownership of the foundation, but sell off all the. Or even maybe collaborate with partners who are doing something really cool. You have this cost savings vehicle. It's already proven you have the infrastructure to build on profit layers. Right? It's like. Yeah, yeah.

And then that's. That's, you know, profit layer. That's the. That's my consulting company. And it's actually a consulting company that has an agency side, you know, to it. So consulting wise, you know, I do a lot of, A lot of the one on one consulting is usually like M and A and business stuff in the SaaS space, usually where it's like helping.

Do due diligence on deals, where that's kind of like reviewing all the details, finding matching investors with.

Potential acquisitions and things like that. And.

Then I kept running into situations.

With.

A lot of clients.

Where I would end up doing some consulting on marketing. Because marketing has always been something that I've been really fascinated with and I've gotten into a lot of cool stuff over the last few years with Programmatic Native, you know, and like all these new platforms and you know, but I would have these consulting clients sometimes that would, you know, they would want to implement marketing and I could tell them what to do, map out a plan, but then they would have a hard time finding someone to execute it. Or they would get an agency that there are just a Lot of bad agencies out there that I was, you know, I just. I was really surprised at, like, how they're good. Some good agencies, obviously, but, you know, there are some that. Are they really. Basically, I think the biggest thing is they don't really take any.

They don't have any responsibility for how they manage the account necessarily, or the return that they get. You know, it's just kind of like a lot of companies just kind of gloss over that too, because they're just like, well, I guess they tried, you know, so what. What can they do, you know. But. So I ended up buying.

An agency and about a year and a half ago, merged it into profit layer. And. Yeah, so now we have the agency.

That'S with Nick Peterson, right?

Yeah, Nick's part of that.

He's part of it. And he works a lot with.

The.

Organic referrals, integrating those types of things into campaigns. Because we, like, with anyone that we're working with on the agency side, it's like we look at the full picture, you know, in terms of. We're not necessarily just managing, you know, just one ad platform, just so just Facebook ads or just Google Ads or YouTube ads or anything. It's, you know, we're looking at, like, their revenue growth, you know, and the actual real return. So kind of like as like an investment advisor, like, you know, we're managing their ad dollars to get the best result and depending upon what they want. And for most people, that's to make more money. And so it doesn't matter how many likes or clicks or shares or.

Leads. You could get cheap leads, but if none of them close, then.

You don't make money. So we look at that full picture and so Nick actually, you know, he works with a lot of the organic. And then I'm. I'm much more of a paid traffic guy. Like, I. There's. Because it's kind of like, it's that balancing act. You know, there's opportunities on both sides, but it's like.

Especially with like, programmatic types of advertising, you know, you can go in and the targeting can be so insanely tight that.

You can. You can speed things up a lot. So, you know, like building relationships and, you know, your audience and everything.

With. From a paid standpoint, you can just literally.

Really hone in on your audience. Like, so you can do targeting with. Because there's all these data providers that you can buy data from, and then there are ad networks, you know, and so.

Google Display Network is a good example. Google Display Network, A lot of people understand that because.

Websites off of Google, just general websites, can make money using Google AdSense and put those Google display ads on their sites. And there's a handful of other networks that do that. So basically every site that's monetizing their site, if they're not managing it in house, which very few are, they're using like 1 of 10 or so display networks. You know, it might be Verizon or Google or you know, any of a handful of them. And so we can go in and you know, with native we can literally like place, you know, do placements where we can literally find a spot on a site, you know, that is monetizing there. And it has like, you know, it has like a certain number of impressions available per day. And if we are the high bidder, we either run out, basically we just max out the number of impressions or we're outbid.

That's it.

There is no algorithm to fight with. You know, it's literally just say here's what we want, give it to us. And outside of placements, you can do the same things with like bringing in these data providers with behavioral stuff. So one example that's really interesting is the cable companies sell data to a lot of the data brokers. And so there's a filter that we can use. And this obviously wouldn't any, any of the targeting is it's not going to be 100% or it's not and it's not going to cover 100% of the people or. But it covers a decent enough number of them that it's definitely useful. But with the cable companies, we can target if someone is impulsive or not.

Oh wow.

Because they may need the offer to be structured differently. And it's like, well, how does the cable company know that? Well, they know if you fast forward a lot, they know if you skip around when you're watching TV or if you watch shows fully in order in episode by episode. So little things like that. And so you can, you know, you can use that obviously for, you know, structuring an offer or you know, like if it's someone that's impulsive, you know, you might want to have a cell that's ending that day with countdown timer. It's someone that's not, you might need like a more methodical offer.

And so you can do these things and you find the most.

Interesting things that like you, you may never even know because you can basically take like an audience that you already have or a list that you already have or even just put a pixel on Your site and a pixel for your conversions and feed that back to some of the data providers and they'll actually basically build out that profile.

So what are some data providers that you use or recommend?

Yeah, so it's kind of hard to say. You know, it depends on what you're looking at, you know, in terms of the data because literally there's like thousands of them.

Okay. So it depends on probably niche and all that Special.

Yeah. And they all kind of have like their own. Their own specific.

I guess you would say, like ways of obtaining the info. So, you know, I'm just like looking through a list of some of the common ones that I use. You know, there's like.

You know, Experian, there's, you know, Isn't tower data1 tower data? Yeah, Data Projects Data Label D and B. And what, what I actually do is.

I use basically a, you know, a DSP platform. You know, there, there are a couple DSPs. You know, it's just.

What's that?

Display side.

Okay.

So display side is kind of like the ad buyer side. And SSP is the. That would be like the actual ad network, like Google Display, Open X, all those. There'd be like the publishers on the supply side, but on the demand side there's a few softwares. You know, App Nexus is one that I use a lot. And it's basically think of it as like an interface that ties into those networks. So you can use.

The trade Desk or App Nexus or.

Media math. Like there's, there's a handful of platforms and the difference in it is that what providers, they integrate because if you were to go out, it's not, it wouldn't be efficient for like all these data providers to offer everything to individual advertisers.

Right.

So basically, you know, you, whatever platform you're using, you can just add all these different, whatever data providers they integrate with. And most of them are integrated with all the top ones.

And you can use that for targeting and layering things into your advertising.

That's cool. So you're basically combining all this data from different sources, depending on where you're looking. And then you have the ability to essentially bring in that data into an interface and then hook it into any kind of ad network or platform. We want to deliver that ad instead of just like going to Facebook and like, hey, let's do some targeting here in Facebook.

Yeah, it's kind of, I mean, it's, you know, it's kind of like the same principle, you know, like the data that Facebook has for that targeting is data that they've collected. This is just using data from other sources.

Yeah.

You know, and it's anonymized. So, you know, a lot of people are kind of like, you know, they, you know, a lot of people come to me and they're like, can you pull some data for me?

And I'm like, yeah, it doesn't work.

I can very easily run ads to that data, you know, like with using it as targeting. But I can't just like give you like a lead list or something.

It's like, I want to know about the guy down the street I want to target. No, it's like it doesn't work because.

What happens is like when you even, like when you are identifying like your own say, like if you took your list and you wanted to profile it to see if there's any high concentrations of something, like maybe the people on your list, like Heinz ketchup. I mean, little things like that is so random sometimes, but it'll be like you have a high correlation of this and.

It'S not going to identify the person or the lead or anything. What it'll actually, it matches it up using an anonymized token. And so it's just like this ID number. I guess you could say that you have no idea who it is. And all these different providers, they do the same thing. So you may get tokens for someone from different providers, but then when you put it into the networks, there's like a few.

Of the ad networks. They're kind of like directly integrated, you know, a few of the major ones that will basically export an audience of those people.

So it's like matched up and then they export. So you can then throw it into wherever you want to display the list.

I mean, we've downloaded a list of podcast listeners, and what it did was it gave us a list of mobile ad IDs, maids. Right. And they were just like random strings of numbers and letters that nobody can interpret. But you can actually upload that list into Facebook. And Facebook can target those people.

Yeah.

And you can do some really cool things with that. So like those ad IDs, like, you know, Android and Apple each have their own version of it, but it's almost like. It's almost like a serial number in a way, you know, but it's an ad id, you know, that they. They have for people. And you know, like, you could do some really cool stuff. Like.

Like one of the campaigns pre Covid I used to do a lot was like when there were conventions for certain Industries just basically grab all of the ad IDs for all the cell phones at that location using like a geofence.

So you would get those AD IDs from whatever provider from that conference or similar people and then what? Geotarget?

Yeah, I would just use in, you know, in the ad platforms, you know, there's different geo targeting providers. And so I would go in and I would say, okay, here, here's the address and everything that's within how many ever feet or miles or you know, whatever you, some of them you can actually even draw like in the geo coordinates, you know, you just draw like perimeter or something. You know, a perimeter. And it's like any cell phone that was there during these hours.

Grab a.

List of those IDs and then start running ads to them. And so what's really cool is like.

You have the ability, I guess technically to run ads to them while they're there, but that's such a short window by the time you would get ads uploaded and approved and all that. But you can download those IDs, and even though 100% of the people that were there at the time may not necessarily be like, if it's like a dental conference, you know, they may not necessarily be dentists. I mean there may have been some other people there, but the vast majority of them probably were. So then when you take those out and you just start showing them ads and it's kind of like retargeting in a way because you know, a lot of people understand retargeting. You go to a website, they pixel you and then you start seeing them everywhere. This is just a backdoor way to do it because you're just saying here's some IDs, start showing ads to them everywhere.

And you just can build up these audiences. And there's actually some of the data providers have even put together audiences where they've basically kind of curated for multiple events and conferences and things.

Yeah.

But you can do some really cool things like that. And it's changed so much even in the last two years, one year, you know, in terms of the accessibility of that type of advertising.

Yeah.

You know, because it used to be kind of something that budget wise you had to, you know, be like a Fortune 500 to, you know, get access to it. But you know, now, I mean.

We can run campaigns sometimes for people spending just a couple thousand dollars.

Yeah.

And this is kind of what creates those sort of serendipitous moments where people are like, my phone must be listening to me. I was Just talking about this. Well, your phone didn't listen to you to hear you talk about that and then put an ad. No, the data that's been collected knows you so well. That's why you're seeing these sort of serendipitous ads of like, man, I was just talking about this thing.

Yeah. And one of the other big things is that if you are basically feeding your conversion data back, so you're basically, you have a pixel or something to tell the ad network that this person actually bought something.

You're tying into so much data with these networks that then they're able to optimize using AI machine learning and basically keep figuring out these little.

Niches to kind of put your ads in.

And.

You could get to a point where.

It'S almost super predictable. I know for one ad network that I work with, Quantcast.

They have enough data from VoIPO that I can literally place ad insertion orders with them that are CPA based. So there's cost per acquisition because they are. And they'll just respond back with the volume. So it's like I can say, I want Voipo customers for $60 each. How many can you give me this quarter?

Oh, wow.

And you know, they just reply back and you just pay that flat performance.

Because they have over a year of conversion data though.

Right. They know how to target, they know how to expand and get more of those similar people.

Yeah. And so when you build things like that, that's like a really powerful asset. And it's kind of like just like having an email list or a subscriber list, like a YouTube channel or podcast or anything like that. If you're collecting.

Data and pixels and have things. Pixels on your site for different ad networks, that's basically like an invisible list that you can advertise stuff to.

Sure. So is this pretty much. This is like. This sounds like the backbone of pretty much everything you do. And we'd probably wrap it up pretty soon here too. I just checked the clock. I was like, oh, we're already over time.

Oh, yeah.

But this is like. No. Is this like just really fast? Like, was this how hostgator. Like, was this part of your growth as well over there? And pretty much any other thing you do?

You know, actually it wasn't. Because it wasn't as accessible back then.

Right.

You know, it was.

It was still a little too early, so wasn't really part of Hostgator. Hostgator was basically AdWords and affiliates pretty much gotcha.

But for Voipo, Voipo is started with referrals from hostgator, referrals, word of mouth, adwords, and then a lot of this programmatic and you know, and like, like within our agency, you know, we work with a lot of people. Like we run traffic for Abraham Group, we run traffic for Harv Eker.

Steve Sims. I mean, you know, a lot of, a lot of people, you know, that you guys are probably familiar with too, same circles. And you know, everybody wants to be on Facebook, you know, and we have like two of my partners in the, you know, in the agency because I had actually mentioned I had acquired an agency, you know, to put in the consulting firm and they, the two founders of that agency had been the internal media buyers for traffic funnels and they had left to start their own agencies. Seth Pennington and Glenn Hoddinott. And.

They are very big on Facebook, you know, and like we still run on other platforms and you know, we have a couple full time media buyers but like they're kind of, they love Facebook and I'm just like. But you have to fight with an algorithm. Like there's so many variables. Like to me it's like a lot of this stuff is maybe a little more technical and it's not as visual, you know, and Facebook has really, one of the reasons it's so widely used is that, you know, they make it fairly simple to get started at least, you know, and it's kind of visual and yeah, you know, and so this is more, just a little bit of a, more of a manual process. But as companies are building, you know, more software to, you know, access and manage these campaigns, then, you know, it does become a lot more accessible. But a lot of people still don't.

A lot of people still don't understand it because, you know, one of the ways to look at it is like social is just one part of the Internet. Facebook, you know, all that is one part of the Internet. Even when you combine Google and you know, YouTube, AdWords, all that, that's still just a part of the Internet. There's like all these other websites out there that you can get your ad on. And if you can put your ad on.

Like an article talking about the benefits of the type of product you sell, and there's like a banner spot available there and you can put your ad on there for like a few cents, you know, that's just like leaving a lot of money on the table. But, you know, it still comes down to the fundamentals that you have to have like a solid, you know, offer, you know, Something that people want to buy. Like, you have to have, you know, a solid flow, you know, for like your site or phone or whatever. But.

There'S a lot of cool stuff you could do.

Seems like a great opportunity, and especially if people don't know about it, slash, don't even understand it. And there's no like, interfaces to easily access it. It's like, this is a pretty good opportunity if you maybe if you want to scale something you're already doing with AdWords or Google or Facebook really well. It's like, dude, take it over here and apply some of that to new properties.

We do a lot of is really just scaling, scaling. We don't work with a lot of, like, people that are looking to start something new 0 to 1. But you know, we'll scale them up, you know, and in some cases, you know, the spending six figures a month, you know, on just Facebook, even so Facebook, Google or whatever. But we don't say that everyone has to go this route. You know, it's kind of a, you know, we look at everything as like, you know, there's no one size fits all. You know, it's like YouTube is really good. I love YouTube. But if you're not good with video, you don't like making videos, you know.

Then go somewhere else.

We're not gonna push. Yeah, it's. It's just like we can. There are different. Different opportunities and different ways to, to build things. And so that's. We work with people to kind of figure out what's best for them. And you know, I just love like really working with people in, like I said, different industries. And sometimes that's like, just as, you know, consulting, sometimes it's marketing. But.

It'S just really.

Interesting to see like.

What comes down to like, fundamentals and then the little nuances, you know. So like, we have like clients in like the mental health space. So that has a little bit of a unique twist, you know, because we have to. We have certain guidelines about what we can say and not say and you know, but it's like still like the fundamentals of marketing are. And especially online marketing. Most companies and businesses that are in like that space are not really doing much online. So for someone that is doing it.

They have a lot of opportunity. Or like we partnered with someone working with Cash Cow farmer. It's accounting software for farms. It optimizes like how many acres you have and it looks at the commodities markets and figures out here is how to optimize your farm based on the commodities market projections. This Year.

Oh, wow. So it tells you what to plant. Yeah, yeah.

And it's just kind of like that's.

Like.

I would have never even known something like that was needed or existed because I'm not a farmer. But, you know, someone created that and now, you know, they're like, how do we get it out there more? And that's where you can do some of the cool stuff, like going in with the native advertising programmatic and find farmers that may be also, you know, subscribe to certain business magazines or, you know, so there's kind of a little bit of an overlap.

Paid ads are so cool. Things like that do anything you want with them. Really? Yeah. Wow. So cool. Dude. This has been like a. I feel like under the hood of what you have hostgator. So you're so generous sharing everything there, but like the inner workings of that growth, obviously your story throughout the whole thing. But then a lot of the stuff that's just not talked about, like the programmatic advertising. I don't think anyone has ever talked about it this way. At least not in our show.

Not. Not at this database.

Yeah. Yeah.

So, yeah, it's something that, you know, I'd be happy to, you know, try to come up with some. Some basic resources, you know, to, you know, put put together and send over to you guys if you want to.

Oh, that'd be amazing.

I mean, there's. Because it's. It's one of those things that's simple, but it's. It's just not.

Well known at this point.

Dude, that would be forever indebted if you, if you made like a training or something. We could share it with our podcast folks community. That'd be right. Because, yeah, I think, like, this is just. For me, it's like a light bulb moment of like, oh, there's so much more out there. Yeah. But it's also so early on, it seeming where there's probably a lot more opportunity now for folks to jump on it.

Yeah. And it's, you know, it kind of overlaps a lot into like psychology and everything because you are looking at, you know, behavioral traits and psychographic traits.

Different things. Because another good example is like, does someone use coupons or not? You know, the Kroger cards, Ralph's cards, all those things that are tracking it, they sell that. And you know, and an example with that is you may have someone, you may create like a dynamic offer where it just quickly flags people couponer or not. And if they are a couponer, then, you know, it's like 40% off today, you know, here's the offer. Yeah, but if there's someone that doesn't use coupons, they may respond better to like a full price offer, even if it's the same price, just by not showing that there's any kind of discount or anything, then that person might respond better.

Yeah. With other. Maybe there's a bonus or maybe they're looking for some other thing in addition to make them feel warm and fuzzy. Not a disc.

Their psychology. Some people are like, I want a deal.

Sure.

So they want to see that. Then there are some people that if they see dealers, they're like, oh, I don't, I'm not a bargain shopper.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's a good point.

You know.

Yeah.

And it's just weird, crazy little things like that that you, you know, you think about and they make sense, but you don't realize that there's the ability to, you know, tap into things like that.

Well, let's leave people hanging and they could do their own research. But you know, eventually when they get some training from you, y can dig in a little deeper. No rush on the training.

So where can people go and learn more about you, get involved with what you're up to, all that kind of stuff.

Sure, yeah. They can go to profitlayer.profitlayer.com or find the Profit Layer podcast, Profit Layer website. Or just find me at Timothy Dick on pretty much any social platform. LinkedIn, Twitter, you know, pretty much any platform there. Or Timothydeck.com.

Nobody shouts out LinkedIn enough. I'm happy you shouted out LinkedIn.

I love LinkedIn. I do not like LinkedIn paid ads though.

Yeah. I haven't heard a single person that does. They're not a sponsor right now, these episodes. Yeah, well, I think they're getting. Hopefully they're aware of it.

I will say though that you can tie into LinkedIn data using Bing.

Okay, interesting.

If you advertise there. They've recently, in the last year, they've basically integrated that. So the backdoor way is to use Bing to tie it into job titles and things, you know, is use Bing.

Oh, very cool. That's a little hat. I didn't know that.

Yeah, no, that's awesome. Well, cool, Timothy. We'll link all those resources up in the show notes so anybody listening could find easy links over at the website and yeah, thanks so much for spending this much time. We went about 20 minutes over what we anticipated, but well worth it.

Thanks, man.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think, you know, hopefully, you know, in some of the rambling and stuff. You guys got some golden nuggets.

There's some gold in there.

Yes. Well, we take notes for them, so if they ever want to, you know, now that we'll let them know. Shortcut to the. To the actual takeaways. You can go check it out there. But this has been fun, man. Let's do it. And maybe there's something else. Another round in. Just programmatic stuff, like deep diving into that.

Yeah, I feel like that could be. We could do another round and kind of go through it.

Yeah, that could be a whole nother hour on its own. I think so.

I think that'd be cool. All right, man. Well, have a good one. Thank you.

Sounds good. Have a good day.

Bye. Bye. Hey, hey, hey. Thank you for listening to that episode. This is Joe Fear. I'm sure you probably already knew that, and Matt is not here right now, but I'm pretty sure he enjoyed the episode just as much as you and I did because, you know, he went into the production of kind of making that thing right along with me. So thank you very much. And I want to give a quick shout out to our buddies over at Easy Webinar. These guys have been supporting us for a while, a long time. And Casey Zieman is just a super good guy all around. He's actually been on the show before. He's the founder of EZ Webinars. So if you look up Casey Zman on any podcast platform you're listening to, go check him out. Go check out his backstory, what he's all about. You can learn a lot about webinars as well. And right now, you know, Easy Webinar, these guys are actually hooking you up with a great trial. It's a completely free trial to test out their software, soup to nuts. Check it all out and see if it's a good fit for you. If you go to easywebinar.com hustle, that's H U S T L E. If you didn't know how to spell hustle, there you go. So if you go to easywebinar.com hustle you can go grab a free trial. And Easy Webinar Liter lives up to its name. It's super simple. I mean, super easy. And it does all the stuff that you're looking for in any kind of thing with webinars, I mean, they literally cover every single type of webinar you possibly can do. So from live to automated to scheduled at specific times and all these crazy features in between can't even List them all out. I'll be here way too long. They give you a ton of advanced analytics, what's working, what's not. During your webinar, based off all these actions, you'll see who attended, how long they stayed, if they clicked the offer or if they didn't. Basically, you're going to make more money and you're going to work less with this thing and you're going to create better relationships with the folks that are listening because it's a good experience. You want to give that good experience along with some great content, of course, and a killer offer if that's what you got for them. So go try it out yourself. Go check out easywebinar.com hustle that's easywebinar.com hustole alrighty righty. So that is the end the of of this episode. Thank you so much for listening to this episode, enjoying it. Hopefully you did. I'm pretty sure you did if you lasted this long. And go check out Yeezy Webinar when you get the chance and we will talk to you next time. Bye bye.

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