[Bonus Episode] From The Side Hustle Show: My $550k Side Hustle: An Online Business from Idea to Exit

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This is the story of my $550,000 side hustle.

What's up? What's up? Pete McPherson here talking to the one, the only Nick Loper. Not what people are used to hearing here. Nick, thank you for having me on.

You bet. Appreciate you taking the chance and hosting this special edition of the Show Pete runs doyouvenblog.com, which is one of my favorite resources for building and growing an online business that serves you and serves others. I invited him to play guest host today to help me share the story of a website of mine I sold recently that over its lifetime, including the proceeds from the sale, generated over $550,000 in revenue. Now, of course, that's revenue and not profit, although to be fair, the expenses for this one were pretty low, and that's over the course of nine and a half years. But still virtualassistantassistant.com that's the site we're talking about, was always a very part time project. It's a directory and review platform for Virtual Assistant and outsourcing companies and was primarily monetized through affiliate relationships. We'll get into how that all worked in a moment, but this was a really important project for me in a lot of ways. This was my first time using WordPress as a website building tool and not just a blogging platform. This was my first time getting any significant free traffic from Google, my first attempts at creating video content, my first experiments with self publishing. I owe a lot to this project and learned so much just from having built it from the ground up for almost a decade. Stick around in this one to hear how I came up with the idea in the first place and gain some initial traction or what helped grow the site over the years and why I ultimately decided to sell it. Plus, at the end you'll hear from the new owner on what this deal and what this investment was like from their perspective. Notes and links are@sidehustlenation.com VA for Virtual Assistant Assistant and if this one inspires you to start a website of your own, as I hope it does, I have a free guide for you@sidehustlewebsite.com to help you do just that. So a half million dollar Side Hustle, which I think illustrates the benefit of learning an online business skill set of creating helpful resources and really becoming part of an industry or community. When I started the Virtual Assistant Assistant site back in 2011, I feel like I was such a rookie in the ways of the interwebs. To kick this one off, we're going back in time to 2011. Ready? Let's do it. So this predates side Hustle Nation by a couple years. I was already a full time entrepreneur. I was running my shoe business at this time, like comparison shopping, affiliate stuff in the footwear space and had started a Half a dozen other side projects, including a personal blog that nobody ever read that was@nickeloper.com and one of these projects that I was working on was a wine related site which I had no business running. I don't know anything about wine, I don't really care about wine. But for whatever reason, I thought this would be a good niche site to build. Who knows? In the research for that site, I came across this site that was reviewing wine clubs and I thought, this is kind of interesting. They had like the little star ratings on their posts and they would, you know, have this little blurb on, you know, this is a good wine club to buy. And because I had started this other site, it was called TheVirtualSeller.com I don't know if I still own this domain or not, but the Virtual Cellar was the wine related site that I was supposed to start. And so I knew the commissions on some of these wine clubs and I was like, oh, this is really interesting. They're just reviewing these wine clubs and people could submit their own comments and reviews on those and then they would make a commission on the sale. And so it was kind of going back to the rip, pivot and jam framework from the tropical MBA guys. Like, this is an interesting model. How could I pivot that to something that I know more about than wine? Not directly rip off their business model, but I think there's opportunity to review. I think Amazon has done a great job of reviewing physical products or curating reviews for physical products. TripAdvisor and Yelp have done an awesome job for curating reviews on hotels and restaurants and travel experiences. But what about services? And specifically for me, this was a pain point of mine in trying to hire my first virtual help. Like which of these companies are legit, how do I know how it works, how to hire them, how to pay them? All of that stuff were kind of questions that I had earlier in my entrepreneurial journey. That was the origin or the impetus of the idea for this site.

Okay, so that was actually going to be my next question. You already kind of answered. It sounds like you came up with the idea that you were going to rip. Like you have a format of an online business right there, like reviews and outsourced reviews even. It sounds like you have the idea because of a pain point. And I think that's actually worth underlining right there. Like scratching one's own itch, I think has probably come up on your show before.

Yes.

Let me ask you this. You'd already been an entrepreneur at this point For a while. By the way, you're old. I just thought I'd let you know this is 2011. That was almost a decade ago and you were already kicking by then. Did you think it was going to be successful? Now, before you answer that, let me give you a bit of context. A lot of people, when they're first starting out, the first couple of years, they're still throwing stuff at the wall. Right. And did you have your exit strategy in mind when you started this or was it just like a I'm still throwing stuff at the wall. I'm just going to see what happens here. Does that make sense?

Yeah, of course not. I had no idea that it would work, if it would work, that people would be interested in buying websites as assets. I don't think that was something that was on my radar at that point.

Okay, well that's actually good to know. I want to come back to when you had that realization. I think that's an interesting point, but I assume that's further down the road. So, keeping in mind with our chronological ness here, Nick, I don't know if that's a word, did you see any initial traction? Did you start it and making money day one, or were you patient enough to see it through? How did the first year go?

The first year, the site, Because I have records of this and this is a takeaway for somebody who eventually does want to sell their business, I would do a better job of separating the accounts. It was all intermingled with everything else that was going on and it was kind of a mess. But unraveling that, I found out that the site made around $1,000 in its first year. So it was showing signs of life, signs of traction. That was a small fraction of what the overall parent company, llc, including the shoe business and stuff in that. So it was just like this little side project and it really was this four hour week, ten hour week, maybe at its peak side project for the last nine and a half years. But it was something that I enjoyed. The prospect of getting off the ground and working in this industry and kind of becoming a player in the industry, getting to know who these company owners were and how they operated and being able to make recommendations and stuff, all of that was a lot of fun. And this was my first experience with WordPress as a content management system, as a website building platform rather than just a piece of blogging software. And so I think that was a really important kind of early experience to have early on to say this is really a powerful tool which you can Build here.

Let's come back to the WordPress and the marketing stuff in just a second. But I think we actually skipped something. For people who don't know what this business model is. They're looking at like, how did you make $1,000 in your first year? Give us the like one or two minute version of the business model for the early version of virtualassistant.com.

Yeah, in its earliest days and really for the most of its life, it was monetized on an affiliate basis, which in this niche in this industry is like lead generation for these companies. Like, hey, we will pay you for sending new clients our way. Sometimes that's a percentage of their first month's signup. Sometimes that was recurring in the early days. Odesk was one of the big partners. They would pay like 50 bucks for a new client coming on Odesky. And that was one of the companies that was featured early on. And that's how it kind of started was like, here are the five or ten companies that I've tested myself, that I've used personally, I've at least heard of in this industry. And then kind of spidered out from there. And I had no idea how wide and how deep the industry was. Of course, has grown over the last decade too, which is kind of cool to have a front row seat for, for sure.

Okay, so your audience probably knows a lot about affiliate marketing, but that's actually a great segue into, okay, how did you find the leads for these companies? They're paying you money to send them people. You send me in an email, Nick. I'll read this a little bit. This was your first Twitter account. This was your first experience with YouTube videos and an email list and your first like CMS WordPress experience, you know, outside of just a blog or whatnot. There's a lot of first in there. So I want to hear, like, how you thought about marketing. Was it all content driven SEO, social? Like, how did you even begin to approach that back in the day?

It's kind of weird because I don't feel like I knew enough about it. If I knew what I know now about SEO and content marketing, I feel like this could have been a home run out of the gate. Like, you know, maybe not $10,000 in its first year, but I feel like the growth curve could have been accelerated quite a bit because there was very little effort put into the marketing front. It was create content and curate reviews. That was kind of the game plan early on. Like create the company profiles either based on my own experience or Just researching what I could publicly find, what other people were writing about them. I had Google alerts set up for the names of these companies. I had Twitter alerts, or I would search Twitter for the names of these companies to see if anybody was talking about them. And then I would try and reach out to those people like, hey, I am working on building this definitive review platform for this industry. I would love if you would drop, in your opinion, good, bad, ugly, indifferent into the comment section and try and build up that database of reviews. And now on the site there are thousands and thousands of those and they come in mostly organically. But early on it was a little bit of hustle and legwork to go out and source those.

That's actually a modern day takeaway for SEO. This is just my opinion, 30 second side rant here, Nick. I consider authority, like authoritative content to be one of the, one of my favorite ranking factors for SEO. That also just leads to better content in General, whether that's YouTube, blog posts, podcast, anything. And part of being authoritative is providing good resources so people can go set up Google alerts or Twitter alerts or any sort of alert alerts in order to find authoritative data. A new survey, a new research, new mentions, all that great stuff that they can throw into their content that'll just make it that much better. Just a little side right there. So where did you get your traffic from? Even if it was accidental marketing, you were mostly like producing the content. Where did your people end up coming from?

It was probably 90% plus organic through the life of the site. There's no big pinterest presence for this type of niche. Actually, I should rephrase that. There is on the how to become a virtual assistant side, which is something we kind of dabbled in later on, but from the early days, like, very much focused on the client side. This is a destination and resource for people who want to hire virtual help.

All right, this is going to put you on the spot here a little bit, Nick. In the first couple of years, I want to hear your big takeaway. Like if you had to look towards something you did that made the site grow from revenue or from an audience perspective or traffic or whatever that is. What events can you look to and be like? This worked.

I think what worked well was making it not necessarily about my opinion, but trying to crowdsource a critical mass of honest user reviews. And at least at the time of the sale, like, that was the headline for the site, like honest review, virtual assistant reviews. And I think that played a role because you Know your experience may be different from somebody else's. You know, all these are service based businesses. They're going to have people who just wasn't a great fit for. And so, you know, maybe it worked for me, maybe it didn't work for you. But over time, kind of the cream tends to rise to the top sort of a thing. And that was the theory early on. One thing that did work on the SEO front was, was just not a lot of people were creating dedicated content about hiring on these different platforms, on these different companies. And so by virtue of being an early mover, and this is still like four hour workweek is four or five years behind us at this point. Virtual assistants have been a thing pretty much since the dawn of the Internet. As soon as people could work remotely, this has been a thing. So it's not like it was an unheard of term and you got in 1995, but it was still kind of early days. And I still believe for the new owners of the site, I still believe we're in the early days of this industry. And so there's a lot of upside there. But being an early mover in creating some of that content, when people were searching for that stuff, there just wasn't that much else that was out there. And I think by virtue of being first, you've talked about the same thing with your reviews of Elementor and some of these other products where it's like there's just not that many other people out there talking about it. If you can be early, I think you're setting yourself up for some success.

Huge takeaway right there. And Gary Vee says a lot of this. He dedicates like 5% of his time or money or resources or whatever towards experimental stuff. That's like 90% chance it's probably not going to work, but there's like a 5 to 10% chance that if it does work, he's going to be the earliest of early movers. And I like this idea too. I like this idea of spending a little bit of your time, energy and money on trying new things, like really new things as soon as you hear about them, just on the off chance that they blow up. And now you're the first person that was on TikTok in your niche. You're the first person that was on what's a new one? There was literally one like yesterday that I found. I can't even remember the name. It's a community or something like that. I don't know. So Nick, fast forward here. When did you decide that you were going to sell this. Did it happen by chance or was this something you've been planning for a long while now?

I had been kicking it around for probably the past couple years and had had a few conversations with interested parties to the point of adding somebody to your Google Analytics, like you kind of can see under the hood and how it all works, sharing some of the, you know, revenue and expense numbers, but hadn't had any real serious offers. And there wasn't a ton of urgency either because it was very time leveraged. And I actually had a good system where I would work on the business using my time blocking system. Like I had Wednesday mornings earmarked to work on this business and we'd ride our bikes to school, drop the kids off. I would go ride my bike downtown and I go to this yoga class where I was like the Youngest person by 20 years practicing this early retirement lifestyle. And then I'd go work at the coffee shop for a couple hours as just a change of pace, change of scenery, and working on a different business that wasn't side Hustle Nation. And then this year the school closed and the yoga studio closed and the coffee shop closed and all of a sudden Wednesday mornings weren't work time at all. They were family time or parenting time. And my fear was, I guess a couple things here. So my fear was the site would fall into a state of neglect. And yes, it could be very time leveraged, yes, it could be almost passive. It's very much like this four hour workweek type of operation. But how long does that last, right? And so my fear was if I continue to neglect this the way that I did this year, or the way that kind of was trending, then maybe it wouldn't be as attractive as a sellable asset in the future. So that was one thing. And then the other thing was just with those limited hours, I was having a lot more fun working on the side Hustle Nation stuff. And so it was just like, if you could only do these few things to move your business forward, what are the levers that are going to pull? What brings you the most joy and excitement? And while I still am excited about this industry, it wasn't something that was excited to get out of bed and work on every day.

One of my big takeaways from what you just said is freedom. We talk about diversifying income streams, not putting all your eggs in one basket. Whether that's a salary job or a side Hustle Nation or diving blog, just open up so much freedom. Now you have the opportunity to be like, yeah, I can sell this and I still have other things. And I want to sell this. I still have other things. It's actually worth noting the point on.

Diversification was a strike against selling it for quite a while was like, now I'm going to have all my eggs in this other basket. Like, what if I inadvertently nuke this brand somehow? That's a risky place. But it was time.

That's very true. Now all your eggs are in side Hustle Nation. So you got to like start more shoe businesses or more, you know, VA businesses. Okay, so the 2020 happened. I just decided I'm going to start referring to this year as the 2020. 2020 happened. You decide you might want to sell this, you want to spend where it may not be as valuable in the future. Who knows? What did you do? Did you go call some friends? You go to one of those agencies like Flippa or their Empire Flippers or something like that to try and find a buyer? What'd you do?

I had punched the site into the Empire Flippers little valuation tool several years ago. Just out of curiosity, what is this thing worth? And it was probably doing half the revenue that it was at that point. But it was still interesting to see. All of the interested buyers that I talked to were just industry connections. They were people who owned VA companies, they were people who owned complementary software services. They were kind of looking at it as a strategic acquisition. But what ended up happening was I had talked to Dom Wells on the podcast this summer from Onfolio Co on Folio Code. And kind of on a whim, there's a little header navigation tab at the top of his site that says, sell us your online business or something. So I was like, I wonder what happened? So I filled out this form, Dom himself emails me back, and we kind of go back and forth a little bit like, here's what I think this is going to be realistically valued at. It was in the range of what I knew to expect based on other multiples. And they kind of put me in contact with a buyer. So it wasn't one that they were going to buy and manage themselves as a portfolio holding company type of operation. Operation. But it was one where they had an interested buyer in mind and just kind of played matchmaker there.

So you said the word multiple for people who don't know what that is. I know what it is. I'm super genius. I'm joking, by the way. I'm being sarcastic. Tell me, what do you mean by multiple here, Nick? Because I think that's actually kind of important.

Yes, it is important. So an online business, a website like this one, will sell for generally 24 to 36 times monthly net income or 2 to 3 times annual earnings. And so that was the ultimate sales price for this as well, was in that range. It's just something to keep in mind as you're building online assets, as you're building up this business. It's like, no, you're not just adding monthly cash flow, you're building equity as well, which I think I didn't ever think about and ever realized early on. But it's like, oh, if you can add 1000 bucks to your bottom line, you just added, what's that going to be? 24 to 36 grand in equity for the business?

Yeah, I think that's important. So I think that answered most of the selling questions I had. And I don't know how much further we want to go, but I think I have something important for your listeners here. Everybody listening to this presumably either has a side hustle, has multiple side hustles, or is like probably, hopefully really close to starting at which point, by the way, you should jump in and do what Nick tells you to do and buy all of his courses and products that you can binge listen to podcasts and start neither here nor there. But what questions should we ask ourselves, Nick, to even consider selling our businesses? One more piece of context before you answer. So I personally have attached my name and my like this. This is a personal brand for my own business because I don't think I ever want to sell this part of it, but I am totally willing to sell other side projects I have going on. I've never done this before. For those of us listening who are thinking this, maybe even like a year or five years from now, what are some of the questions that we should be asking ourselves to prepare for that.

You'Re curious about the level of personal branding and entanglement in all this stuff?

Well, not just that, but for anybody who's like, yeah, maybe I'll sell my business one day, is there anything they should know now to start preparing for it or to make that decision easier?

Of course. So if you can remove yourself from the day to day operations, of course that's more attractive to a potential buyer. Like, oh, the owner isn't in the weeds turning wrenches and dialing screws and doing all this stuff every day, that's beneficial. This kind of was a personally branded project. So it was my name on the about page. It was My name on the author tags for all these articles. It was me doing video interviews with the founders of these companies. So it was very much a Nick Loper project, which I think was important and helpful, especially in the early days in getting it off the ground. And then maybe down the road as you have this critical mass of thousands and thousands of user reviews, if you go to TripAdvisor, you don't really care who wrote the blurb about the hotel. Like, I just kind of want to see the consensus. So down the road that becomes less and less important. The other thing that I learned in this process was keeping much better records of the partnerships and the URLs and the affiliate access because all of this stuff, a lot of it was private deals. And you know, so it's going back through a decade of email history to find out, well, who was my contact over here, what was the deal that we cut? And then trying to put all that into a Google sheet for the new owners because they're going to come in kind of cold and say, like, well, what's this company? I'm like, oh, I don't know. I think that was so and so. Let me see if I can send an intro to you. And it's like our last contact was in 2016, but let's see what happens. So the bookkeeping stuff, just from an administrative standpoint, a track record of who you talk to, what was the deal, especially if it's a private deal, if you're going through Impact or Rakuten or Commission Junction, it doesn't really matter as much. But especially for one off deals that would be helpful to have. And then on the bookkeeping side, I did a decent job of tracking revenue separately because there were different advertisers and different income sources than side Hustle Nation had. But a lot of the expenses were commingled. Like you're sharing freelancers between the two sites, you have shared hosting accounts, you're sharing a LeadPages account. Like all of that stuff, it made it a little more difficult to get a true profit and loss picture, which is, you know, you need that so somebody can tell you what the thing is worth.

Yeah, that's tough. And actually so records of all kinds. I was just, I was just looking, I say just looking. A year ago I was actually thinking about buying a blog and was looking at some different domain names for sale that already had some traffic coming to it. And half of the ones I looked at did not have historical traffic data from Google Analytics or elsewhere. They would have like Two or three months. But the domain had been around for like, ages. And that was actually kind of frustrating. So I think my, my personal takeaway from what you just said was to start keeping records now, if you haven't already. Whether that's relationships, affiliate information, contacts, URLs, as well as accounting data, of course, bookkeeping records, P and L statements, profit and loss. By the way, I used to be an accountant. I can use the word P and L. Yeah, okay. All right, I got it. That's good to know for all of us, I think. So did I miss anything? Is there any question that you were like, oh, man, I was hoping Pete would ask me about this about virtual assistant. Assistant.

I think the business model that is probably most similar that we've had on the show is Robert Brandel, who runs kind of a suite of different affiliate review sites under the Tool Tester Brand, where he and his team are going out and testing Wix and Weebly and Squarespace and Shopify and ActiveCampaign and like all these different software tools. Again, trying to review the stuff that's not already been reviewed a bazillion times on Amazon, but trying to become the authoritative voice in that space. And they do it a little bit differently where it's less kind of crowdsourced. It's more like the authoritative. We are the tool testers. We will tell you which one is the best, which one you need to do. And they do an awesome job with that beautifully laid out, structured data pages and all sorts of stuff. So I think there's a lot of opportunity to play in that space and you can kind of try and catch a rising tide, as it were. Like, okay, what is kind of up and coming in whatever niche that you're interested in? Because there's always new software tools coming out, there's always new companies and platforms and different things going on. So I would go into, well, both Google for one, but also just like the site search bar, like in Google Analytics, you can get a record through the site search function of like, what people are typing in on your site. And I would get content inspiration from there. It's like, oh, you know, several people typed in the name of this company that I never heard of last month. Like, oh, we had to do a profile on that. There's obviously some search demand. And so it create content even if there was no affiliate relationship immediately apparent with this company, just to capitalize on traffic and you could recommend alternatives that maybe did have an affiliate program. There's a lot of things you could do once you have that traffic, you could build email signups. You could drive impressions for the existing advertisers on the site. So that's kind of how I would approach new content generation in its mature years.

So I have a business idea I'm just going to throw out there. And this is actually a business that I started in 2014, I believe it was. And I did a terrible job at it. I had no idea what I was doing. It lasted like three months. But somebody should do it because it's a pain point and I think it needs to be solved. And that is reviewing or crowdsourcing honest reviews for influencer products. Courses. Online courses. I sell online courses. Nixon online courses. People listening to this have probably bought online courses or memberships or stuff like that. Digital information products. I don't know of any authoritative review. Or if I'm looking at buying Marie Forleo's the Copywriting Course she does. I don't remember the name of it. I need to be able to go on there and read the three star reviews. And when I started this, I literally had influencerreview.com again. What I did was terrible. But that's a pain point that people feel they can go look up ActiveCampaign or ConvertKit reviews fairly easily. It's actually hard to go look up. So I'm gonna promote myself here. It's hard to look up online impact reviews and find anything but just blog posts that have affiliate links in them, which are totally fine. I'm not bashing that. But there's a business idea for people.

That is an interesting one. Yeah. Cause it's either handpicked testimonials from the product creator or it's somebody's affiliate post where it's like, it was great. Go buy it. One person who is doing a good job here is Niall Dougherty. He runs a site called ebizfacts.com yes.

I like this guy.

Yes, this is one of my favorite newsletters. He's always curating awesome stuff. And he just posted recently about having to take out this pretty expensive. What do you call it? Media insurance policy. Because he'll give you an honest review. And if it's one star, if it's two stars, he'll tell it how it is. And he, I guess, has been threatened some legal action as a result of that. But I do like this idea. Trying to figure out the crowdsourced opinion of the digital products.

I love that. I like that guy. I really do. Nick, is it okay if I just kind of conclude with Two or three of my top takeaways from your side project here that you sold.

Absolutely, go for it.

I don't know if this will be helpful or not, but I'm gonna say these number one, patience. So, Nick, you're old, my brother. You started this in 2011. You already going a few years in entrepreneurship by that point. It's late 2020 at the time of this recording. You just sold this recently, man, you're in it for the long haul. Like that was nine years. That's really impressive. I want to just remind people to think long term. Not that you necessarily have to know, oh, I'm gonna start this side project. I'm gonna sell it for, you know, half a million dollars or I'm going to make half a million dollars from it over 10 years. No, of course not. But it's important to maintain some bird's eye view, objectivity zooming out like a long term vision in order to facilitate patients. That was takeaway number one. Takeaway number two was scratching your own itch. Always a great way to find business ideas. Always. There's always pain points there where if you're struggling with something in your life or in your own business or whatever that is, you do some googling and you can't find anything and you do some more youtubing and you can't find anything, that's generally a pain point. Scratching your own niche. Great way to come up with new ideas even in your own business, even in your current side hustle. And then number three, diversifying income streams. Like presenting yourself with options. Yes. Selling this site probably lost a little bit of monthly income from you. You lost a little bit of diversification there. But you are also able to sell it and make a good chunk of change there because you have other side projects or businesses or a career or whatever that is. And I think that's pretty important. A little personal finance seeping into my takeaways here, but diversifying income streams, you're.

A natural at this. You host your own show or something?

I do as a matter of fact. So that's all I got. If you don't have anything else, let me just promote myself for a minute.

That was my softball for you to plug your own stuff.

It took me way too long to figure that out. It took me like 10 seconds and I was like, oh crap, I should just went with it. Great Segue by Nick Loper. Terrible segue by Pete McPherson. Podcast over here. So yes, do you even. Blog. Com is the name of my own brand. I run a podcast and a YouTube channel and I got lots of online courses you can pay me money for, but I like to point people to the homepage right there. Do you even blog. Com come, you know, listen to my own podcast. I talk about side hustles, talk about online business and content and marketing and entrepreneurship and all that fancy stuff that we all love. So, Nick, brother, thank you so much for having me on here. This is actually kind of fun and interesting to me to talk about a Sell a sale. Excuse me, and learn more about your own life and your. Your own businesses. So it's been a pleasure. Thank you so much, Nick.

Well, thanks for coming on and doing this again. Do you even blog.com? check Pete out over there. I love his stuff. His show is awesome. His YouTube stuff is really great lately. And dig everything that you're working on. Appreciate you helping me out with this one.

Thank you, Nick.

I like all of Pete's takeaways from this conversation too. And I'll add one more that really stands out to me and that's that opportunities often only become visible once you're already in motion. If I hadn't been messing around with a completely unrelated website project, I might never have stumbled upon that wine club review site. It might have never crossed my mind to try and pivot that to something else. So you just never know when inspiration is going to strike and when you're going to be onto something you care enough about to bring into the world and really plug away at it for years and years. So that's the other big takeaway for me. Opportunities become visible once you're in motion. So the important thing then is to just start. And truthfully, it doesn't matter what that first thing you start is. So far we've talked about my perspective in building and selling this business, but there are two sides to every transaction. This is Mika Harvey, the proud new owner of Virtual Assistant Assistant, on what attracted her to buying an online business and what the deal was like from her perspective.

I had been in hospitality management for most of my working career, and if anyone knows, it's a very demanding job. You're basically working 24 7. So I liked the idea of working on something that was mine, something that I could firsthand see the results from my efforts. And I was actually wanting to launch a product this year for Christmas sales, actually. But Covid had other thoughts on that. So when the manufacturers and everything closed down in China that we were going to be working with, we had to take the plan elsewhere. And I thought of other ways I can work remotely and make an income. And so that's kind of what brought us to the decision of buying an online business.

Okay, you were going to go down like the Amazon FBA physical product e commerce route.

Yeah, well ideally it would be a product that I could sell to be on the shelves of stores as well as well as sales online and things like that.

Okay, that's something location independent, something that was already running. Is this is I imagine a little bit of a easier ramp up than trying to get a brand new product into the shelves of retail stores.

Yeah, I mean it's kind of been a win win situation. I still have the product available for whenever we're ready to get going in that aspect. But being able to focus full time on this and not have to worry about running something else at the same time has been good because I can kind of in the future work hand in hand on that. But yeah, definitely needing to be remote was one of the reasons why I was most attracted to buying an online business because I travel extensively, my partner travels extensively for work. So even in Covid times we've been lucky enough to be able to jet around a little bit. But that's why I needed to not be in one place to make an income.

Right. That's a good place to be, having some location flexibility, especially when you don't want to be tied to one city, one country, one town, all this stuff. So I spoke a little bit about what the process was like from the selling side and some of the different conversations and stuff that happened leading up to the sale. But what was it like from your guys perspective? What was it like on the buying side?

Well, actually it was pretty straightforward. We had a lot of support from our broker during the due diligence period for us in the very beginning we built a relationship with a broker that I guess had worked with you previously. So when you reached out to them as selling the website, they reached out to us before I think it was even really an agreement that it was available for sale. So we were kind of able to negotiate with you before anything else further developed and listing online. As far as I know anyways, I could be in track on that.

It was interesting because I punched in the form on on Folio after, you know, maybe a couple weeks or a couple months after talking with Dom on the podcast this summer. And almost right away he's like, I think I've got somebody who might be a fit for you. And it was interesting because the form says like we'll buy your website or Sell us your website or something. And so they have a portfolio that they run and manage themselves. And maybe this wasn't big enough fish for them to bother with, but it sounds like they also have this buyer program or this brokerage program that you were a part of. Did they present you with other sites or what was the shopping like?

So we had worked with Onfolio for, I want to say, about a month and a half before being presented with Virtual Assistant Assistant. They were never a perfect fit. They were online businesses, but they were things that I couldn't relate to or didn't actually believe in myself. And so when Virtual Assistant Assistant became available, I was like, this is amazing, because I had used VA services in the past, same with my partner. And we are familiar with the outsourcing world. So it's something that I could relate to. It's something that I believe in. It works. And I truly believe, I've said this my whole life, is that you can't teach passion, so you have to be passionate about what you're doing to actually be able to do well at it. And so I was like, this actually could work. And so when Onfolio brought it to us, we were really excited for the opportunity.

That's cool to hear. Anything that you would do differently, knowing what you know now.

Hard to say. It was the first online business that we've purchased, and we're used to buying, like, real estate or investing in something tactile that you can see or visit. So it was an interesting experience buying something that was completely online. So I don't know exactly what I would change, but definitely had been a great learning experience. So I'm sure the next business that we purchased, because this probably won't be the first, it will be a different process just based off of what we've learned going through this process. But I don't know if there's anything necessarily that I would change in the step by steps that we've taken. We're overall super happy with the process. You've been amazing with your handover notes and helping us by introducing us to your past partners and everything like that. So overall, really happy with the process and with the knowledge that we've gained.

Well, thank you for that. I talked about this in the previous segment about what I would do differently would be keep better records throughout this whole process of all these different partnerships and affiliate deals, because a lot of them were private deals. And like, okay, the last communication was in 2016, what's going on? And it was kind of interesting to Go through the hundreds and hundreds of different sites that were listed in the directory being like, oh yeah, that company. Like, it was this cool refresher. Where had I been smarter or more forward thinking early on, I don't know, I could have had a more internal structured database of who's my contact, what kind of, I don't know, something along those lines.

Yeah, well, when you work with so many partners and so many listings, it's a little bit overwhelming at first because you're just like, okay, I have been handed this and now there's so much information. What do I do first?

Yes, they all start to blur together. And it was exciting when you kind of presented some of your next steps for the site, like, oh, we're going to work on this project and this initiative and this advertising campaign and all this stuff that made me very excited. It was like, yes, there is a future for this over the course of the next decade. And obviously it's an industry that only continues to grow. The one thing and I went back and forth with Yuri from On Folio just a little bit on was like, have you ever done a deal where there's some sort of earn out where I would maintain a percentage of the ownership and be able to participate in some of that upside? Because one of my fears, because they publish case studies on their site like, oh, I tripled revenue in five months and then I sold it for three times the price. And I was like, I don't want to be that type of case study either. But that just kind of complicated, the paperwork and everything. It's like for the size of the deal, it's probably not worth it. But still excited to see where it goes.

Yeah, it's definitely exciting. I mean, what I found is that there's a lot of people inquiring on how to become a VA or how to step into the world of virtual assistants. So we've launched a three day quick course on the site just last week where it's a free course that you can take in 15 minutes for three days to kind of learn what skill set you already have that you can take online. So that's definitely taking off, actually more than I thought it would, to be honest, which is great. Yeah, there's a lot of opportunity and there's going to be a lot more development in the new year for sure. So it's very exciting.

Did you do any shopping on Flippa or Empire Flippers or even like Quiet Light like any of these other brokers? Or was it just straight to On Folio?

We definitely did. I actually still get email notifications from Empire Flippers and Flip actually I think I unsubscribed from Flippa completely, but Empire Flippers we're still a part of and just found that those sites were a lot of time on my end to look up the benefits of each company and the numbers and everything like that. And we being this our first time buying an online business just we're like let's get experts that know what they're doing and what to look for. Get a broker that is going to personally be working with us directly. We can be in communication with them. They'll do the due diligence for us and send us companies that they think is relevant for what we're looking for and kind of skip the step of having to filter through the hundreds and hundreds of companies that maybe aren't so great in the long run.

Right. And I mean they may still have a way where it's like, well you got to put down a deposit for each one if you want to see the behind the scenes numbers and analytics and everything. Yeah.

And like we did have to put down a deposit with onfolio, but it was only one with them. And then they sent us all the information and due diligence and everything that on companies that we were interested in versus put down a deposit on each one that we may not even be interested in once we see the numbers. So it was kind of just streamlining the process where we wanted to make it easy on us because it was our first time and we didn't want to make any mistakes in the due diligence period. So it was good. Just I'm a firm believer if you're not good at something then pay someone else to do it, which I guess is outsourcing. So there you go.

Right? There you go. Well, very cool. Mika, appreciate you joining me again. VirtualAssistantAssistant.com check it out for all of your outsourcing needs. Find the perfect VA company for you. And now check out the three day VA Quick Start course on how to set up your own virtual assistant operation. Mika, very cool. Thanks so much for joining me. Best of luck with the future of the site. Really excited to see where you guys take it.

Thanks Nick. I appreciate your time.

So there you have it. That is the inside scoop on one of my more successful side hustle projects and one that I'm really grateful for. Just for all that I was able to learn and practice along the way. Once again you'll find the full write up summary and links to everything mentioned at Sign Hustle Nation. And if this episode has inspired you to start a website of your own, my free video series@sidehustlewebsite.com will hopefully help you do just that. Big thanks to Pete and Mika for helping create this episode, and big thanks to you for tuning in. That is it for me. 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.

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