Doug: Hey, what’s going on? Welcome to the Doug Show. My name’s Doug Cunnington, and today we’re gonna talk about like, I don’t know if we’re gonna title the episode this, but like, what the fuck happened to niche sights? Maybe we’ll take out the fuck for the actual title, but we’ll put it in the thumbnail and kind of blur out the word or something like that.
We’ll see how it goes. But anyway, I got this email from uh, Shawna Newman. She blogs over at Skip Blast. She’s on YouTube and she’s been on this show several times. She’s a friend of mine, so I’m under her email list and she sent out an email and the headline was Million Dollar Site versus HCU. The helpful content update and I encourage you folks to sign up for her email list.
We’ll put a link so you can check it out, but if you just go over to skip blast.com, you should be able to sign up pretty easily. Many of the emails are short. This one was pretty interesting. So Million Dollar Site versus HCU. And I’ll kind of go over a couple of the ideas from the email here. I’m not gonna read the whole thing, but basically.
There, uh, this episode will be like going, looking at this website that was worth over a million bucks most likely. And we will, we’ll look at the details and see if that’s an accurate depiction and what happened after HCU. And then this is just gonna be a bit of a preview. Into a video that I might do.
Anyone else could do it. This is a great idea, I think. But basically like the idea is to cover like the rise and fall of niche sites and. This channel was largely built because of that. My courses, the shit that I talked about, the niche site, project, blog, all that stuff it was around niche sites and SEO and, and that sort of thing.
And it, it’s largely evaporated. No one’s really interested in that. These niche sites don’t, I mean, it’s not really a thing anymore. They’re out there, but it’s like. Most people would not advise you to start even trying. And then the other part of it is the people that have the sites, perhaps the people that bought the million dollar site, they’re like, this, we lost money.
This was a huge mistake. Like we should, we shouldn’t have done this. So. Anyway, a lot of people were impacted. The thing we’re gonna look at is a couple of just short bits of interviews that I used to do all the time. I think one of them was like at the end of 2015 or something like that. So like nine and a half years ago.
Like almost 10 years ago. And I mean, I’ve been doing this for a little while and. I mean, there’s, there’s business cycles, things change, there’s external factors, all that stuff. So, you know, it’s crazy to think like the stuff that I was doing, the stuff that we were doing as a sort of niche site community and digital marketers and that sort of thing, and how great it was and how people thought they couldn’t lose, and then they, they did lose, like I.
Think I, I remember actually even sitting here, so it hasn’t even been that long ago. ’cause I’ve only lived in this house for five years. I remember people like a couple years ago saying, yeah, it’s pretty much, uh, it’s a framework, it’s a blueprint. Yeah, I have no issue like borrowing six figures to, to do this.
And it gave other people confidence to also do that. And they’re over leveraged. The thing is, the market price is in the risk. So it’s like if you can buy a niche site and potentially earn, well, basically an unrealistic amount of money based on the amount of risk that you think is there. But again, the market prices it in.
So I don’t, it’s bad to do math live, so I’m not even gonna try it. But essentially like people could. Purchase a niche site for like a hundred thousand dollars and then conceivably within like two to four years, they would earn enough revenue from the niche site to pay for the a hundred thousand dollars that they put in, maybe more if they had the blueprint to grow the site and earn even more money.
So what people would do is they would like buy a site for a hundred thousand dollars, improve a handful of things, and then they would sell it. And because of the leverage that they had, they would be able to sell it for even more. Now, when you compare that investment to like real estate, by the way, none of this is advice.
This is just observations and entertainment. Hopefully it’s entertaining. But basically if you buy a piece of real estate, you may be renting it out and you’re making like. $150 a month or $300 a month or something like that. So if you put in the same a hundred thousand dollars, it would take you a very, very long time to earn your money back.
And the thing is, the niche site, the website could go to zero value like that. And they, they did do that, but. With real estate, there’s a house, there’s a structure there. The actual piece of land is worth something. So overall, the risk is built in the people that were making money from, the transactions and the selling, and the, the people that ran agencies that they were like, Hey, you could buy the site from us, and then by the way, you can get the, all the agency working, get the content.
If you need SEO help, we’ll we’ll sell you all that stuff too. And it’s like. I mean, I would bust balls even back then, and I’m like, come on, come on y’all. I mean, if it was gonna work, why the fuck would you even sell it? Just keep, keep the site. It’s like the done for you sites. I, yeah, I would bust balls on that from the very beginning.
It’s, it’s on the channel. Those videos are fucking there. I was calling it out a long time ago. Anyway, so here we are, 10 years later, people were buying sites for like a million dollars. They’ve gone very low. We have interviews. I just picked two ’cause I don’t wanna bore you too much, but like people were so into this stuff that I would do interviews and I would do long form interviews and they would watch the interviews and they would watch ’em again.
So I was like, you know what? I have no issue running my channel into the ground. As you can actually go through and look at the recent, the recent number of views. You can see I’m sticking to my guns and, uh, some people are not very interested, but there’s a handful of y’all, a few dozen, a few dozen that continue to watch and I appreciate it.
Leave a comment. It helps the, the channel and the video get pushed out to other folk. But, but anyway, I would put together like. Five, one hour long interviews all together so people could like watch the greatest hits kinda stuff. And actually when I look at, when I look at like, I don’t know, like the Food Network channel, something I like to watch, they basically just put like live TV on there.
It’s all this stuff. They’re putting a, like a diner drive-ins and um, dives and basically. They’re putting together like longer clips and longer clips, and now they’re like these maniacs, just love Guy Fieri, fii and watching people eat and cook and food and all that. I do, I can watch it all day long, day and night.
And basically, basically they’re doing like really. Like long, like multi-hour things. ’cause what I’ll do, I’ll, I’ll cook, I spend a lot of time cooking. I’ll put it on the tv. It’s just going, I’m like, oh, I’ve seen that before. I’ve been to that restaurant. Like, whatever. So, so anyway, people were so into the niche site success stories that they actually were like watching these long interviews with people that they had already seen.
And they would work on this, they would work on their sites and they would have it going on in the background. Multitasking, as they say, it was just kind of distracting them a little bit. Inspiring people. I hope. So let’s look at this email here and take a quick look. So basically I’ll summarize the stuff that Shauna wrote.
Again, shout out to Shauna. She gave me the idea for this and, of course I’m gonna promote her stuff. So she was like, yeah, it’s cool. You could do this little video. It’s nice. So she was gonna build a coffee site when someone approached her about doing SEO for a coffee site, and she declined conflict of interest.
But a few years later, that coffee site grew like to a huge level. And the reason why she knew it was worth about a million bucks is ’cause it was listed for sale. And I’m gonna show you the listing. So it was listed for sale number one, and then there was like a press release for the new owner. So we kinda have a bit of a paper trail to.
Substantiate the actual valuation, but the thing that I’m showing here, so if you’re listening on the podcast, I’ll explain what’s going on. So essentially we have a graph, a traffic graph from Sam Rush, and it shows at the height about a million visitors per month, which is often an underestimate. So there’s a chance it was like 25.
Percent higher to like a hundred percent higher. So some, depending on like the long tail keywords and some other factors. But generally it’s accepted that the estimated traffic is lower than what the actual traffic is. So right around a million, it was like 962,000 monthly traffic. And Shauna also mentions that the underestimating situation happens, but basically.
By around early 2024, the site, at least the scale that this graph shows, it looks like it’s fucking zero. So I think the site still gets a little bit of traffic, but it’s extremely low. And if you look at the graph here, it shows about 7,300 visitors per month. Again, that’s probably an. Uh, underestimate.
But the fact is, well, if you were around a million and then now you’re just getting maybe around 10,000, well, that’s bad. That’s really bad. The site was sold around late 2020. I. And the punchline here, as Shauna wrote in the headline, is essentially the helpful content update like killed this million dollar site.
Now let me show you one of the other pieces of information that adds the I guess details that we need to understand that it was actually around the million dollar value. So. This is the FE International, which is a website broker and a business broker. This is the way back machine from around When is this little snapshot?
January 27th, 2021. So this site was sold, so January 27th, 2021. So it was listed at the end of 2020. I’ll tell you some of the details. So it’s 52,000 gross. Per month. Alright, 52,000 gross per month. The annual revenue, 474,000, the net profit is 317,000. The asking price here was 1.3 million, so 1,317,000.
It says it was sold by the way it. It doesn’t mean it was sold for that. It’s almost I could almost guarantee that it wasn’t sold for that, and that was just the asking price. There’s often negotiation that happens. Not often. You always negotiate. Right? Always fucking negotiate. So no surprise there.
But the thing is like there’s other factors that would come into play. So sometimes there’s an earnout, so maybe they pay half. Upfront, and then they pay the rest over the next year or something like that. Or maybe there’s some other piece of the business, there’s an email list or whatever. So there’s other value, there’s other negotiating things, and those details don’t matter too much.
So the descriptions here, if you want to check it out, I’ll put a link to the Wayback machine and the web archive. But the punchline is. It was a coffee website. It was making a shit load of money. It was a, you know, in air quotes, a normal-ish like site that we talked about. I know people, I have friends that grew sites this large.
They started the same way I did. They just worked harder. They worked harder. They were smarter. There was, you know, probably a little bit of luck. There was a little extra stuff going on. But at the end of the day, like. This stuff was doable. And I could tell you when I first started, I was like, ah, maybe if I make a few hundred dollars per month, that’ll be great.
And sometime later I was making considerably more than that and it absolutely blew my mind. I didn’t have any concept that I might be able to do that. So before I show you the press release of this website, home grounds.co, which is still out there and you can check it out, I’m actually drinking a beer.
It’s the afternoon. But I’m, I’m drinking an Oscar Blues hazy, blues Juicy IPA. It’s pretty good. Very, very aromatic. Like when I pop the Can poured it, it just hit me, hit me right in the nose. It’s a good beer. I like Oscar Blues quite a lot, just a couple miles away from here. So let’s look at this.
Press release homegrowns.co. It was acquired by Bleecker, that’s B-L-E-X-R, and this was December 21st, 2020. That is. The Effie International press release, and this is like PR Newswire, blah, blah blah. So there’s some detail and it says it was a, the world’s largest home barista community and blah, blah, blah.
There’s how to guys or recipes, this and that. There’s a YouTube channel out there too. I can’t remember if they mentioned it in here, but basically. Plexor, this company purchased it and they were putting out a press release, so it was indeed sold seemingly fairly quickly. If it was listed at the end of 2020, but I’m not a hundred percent sure when it was actually listed.
Again, this website is indeed out there so you can go check it out and look at it, and you could see they have a YouTube channel. They were featured all over the place, like it was legit. They were doing a good job. It was sold for a million fucking dollars. Right? Like someone else thought it was pretty good too.
And you’ll see like this was a good website, but you could see the roots of just like the niche site idea and yeah, no, no big surprise. But as the industry got. More mature and got a little bit better and people were earning good money and they were actually into the actual, like coffee for example. They were putting more time and effort and money and they were testing products over on YouTube and stuff.
So when you think about it that way, it’s like, yeah, this is a legit site. Again, some company acquired it and they paid probably around a million dollars or so. So again. Like what happened? Like it really hit people over the head when it all fell apart and yeah, it’s pretty crazy. Pretty crazy. So the other part that I was telling you about is like, I did so many interviews in the past, starting.
In, I don’t know, probably 2015 or so. And they were sporadic. And it was before, I mean, when I think back, I mean really it was like the origin of the podcast, but I was doing like YouTube interviews and only later did I start doing like a pure podcast, just the audio form. So anyway, I’m gonna play a couple of the clips here, just the beginning, I believe.
And if you wanna check these out, I think. It’s, um, it’s interesting from a historical perspective to see like what was going on back then and the. I guess the logic and how people were building sites and I don’t know, it’s, it’s sad that it all fell apart ’cause it was a great stepping stone into like working for yourself.
You learned all this great stuff. At the end of the day, I mean the last two episodes of the podcast, I was complaining about recipes and how it’s just BS and then like just Google results are kind of horrible now. And then Google, it pushes Revit. That’s one thing. The other thing is like, if you actually go to a niche site, it’s like, who are the, who are these people writing this?
Like, no, no one knows what’s going on at all. And there’s so many of them that it’s hard to even sort through the bullshit. So anyway, I’m a cranky old man now, and this is a get off my line kind of thing. But let’s, let’s go back, let’s relive the, the good old days. And every now and then I’ll, I’ll ping people from the past and they’re like, ah, I moved on something else.
Not really interested in chatting with you. This is pastor Duke. He used to show up on my live streams, and this is the old house back in Bozeman. And this was recorded in April. Or sorry, it was published April 19th, 2018. Has about 6,600 views out there. 169 likes, which is pretty good. I get nothing like that now, which is interesting.
So I’m gonna play this and we’re just gonna listen a little bit and I think we’re, we’re just talking revenue, so I don’t know how long I’m gonna let it go here, but I’ll, I’ll be quiet and we’ll hear what’s going on. Yeah. Just so people can quickly get a sense of why we’re talking.
Duke: Well, I just came in under a thousand dollars in March.
Cool. Congratulations. I was like huge. 967.
Doug: Yeah. Okay. So maybe. Maybe this next month coming up, so Very good. Yeah. What’s the traffic at, just to give people an idea. Right now, like the last month in March
Duke: , it was right around 200 visitors a day. Gotcha. Okay. So six, 6,000 people for the month.
Doug: Nice. So that’s really, I mean, that’s, that’s a great amount of revenue for that many visitors, I think.
And I, I cut you off. I’m sorry, duke. So that’s all right. So you’re at about close to a thousand, about 200 unique visitors a day, and you, it’s. You know, you were telling us that you were basically trying to find a solution to a problem and you ended up with, you know, a bunch of sites with maybe not great information.
And did you eventually, you know, so we have a conclusion to your story. Did you eventually find the right cable?
Duke: Yes, I, I found the right converter. It. Yeah, actually it was 120 bucks or whatever. And I have a whole article on how you do it now so
Doug: you could help others.
Duke: And yes, and that’s how I started. And the niche has actually proven to be fairly popular.
It’ll never be a large. Site because it is so narrow in focus. Sure. But it, it’ll definitely be profitable.
Doug: Very cool. Very cool. And I’m gonna toot my own horn here, Uhhuh. So the keyword golden ratio played some role in what you were able to accomplish. Can you just describe maybe like when you heard of the keyword golden ratio and then how you implemented it?
Duke: Personally, I had stumbled across human proof designs, authority hacker, and niche pursuits, and in there somewhere.
Doug: Hold on. I’m gonna pause that for a second, man. I’m with an ego on me. Fucking toed my own horn there. Hey, let’s talk about the keyword golden ratio. How awesome is I? Crazy. Alright, we’ll start the video back.
I just, just an observation, a reaction video from my, my younger self. Look at all that hair I had too, man. What a full head of hair. All right, I’ll shut up.
Duke: Where either you did an article or they referenced you, and so then I found you on YouTube and at that point you were talking about keyword golden ratio.
And so I started looking and about 40% of the articles I have on the first site is keyword golden ratio articles.
Doug: Cool. And you did that without knowing, you just were very. Minutely focused, or did you intentionally write those with a keyword golden ratio, or you just discovered that you already followed it?
Duke: 50 50. I went back and looked at some of them that I was already targeting and they were keyword golden ratio compliant. But then I, I. Specifically went looking for more. Got it. So about 40% of the articles, it’s like, I’m gonna give a different niche ’cause I’m not gonna out my niche.
Doug: Yeah. Just use ballpoint pin just to okay.
Duke: They would be like, best ballpoint pin for greenhouse workers.
Doug: And that’s a. Great format, by the way, for people that are just getting started. It’s like product type for a user type or a specific application. That’s a great way to look at it. Yeah. Basically it sounds like there was a lot of keyword, golden ratio content.
You stumbled upon it by accident, and then after you realized that that is actually where your site was getting a lot of traction, you double down on it and now. You know, you’re intentional about what you’re publishing. Exactly.
Duke: Got it. I have one article that is the best ballpoint pin for writing essays.
Say it, it showed 10 searches and I get a hundred Wow. A hundred visitors a month off of that. One article.
Doug: It’s so misleading because when we, when we first get started, we believe the tools, right? We think the tools are, I mean, they give exact numbers, so we expect there’s a amount of precision and or accuracy.
If you’re a science nerd, you know the difference. It’s really an estimate. There are just estimates, so I hear basically everyone has a story of like, yeah, I went after something with 10 or zero searches. Now it’s like. The most trafficked page on their site. And it, it’s like really against intuition. So.
Interesting. Now let’s, let’s go back further, duke. So what can you tell us a little bit about your day job, just to get to know you? Alright. Duke’s awesome and I think this is a good spot to, to end the clip, but if you wanna check it out, if you wanna watch this episode blast from the past, we’ll put a link so that you can watch it and.
Yeah, it’s, it’s so interesting to go back and, and view this. Maybe, maybe this is what we can do for my live streams. ’cause I haven’t done a live stream in a couple few weeks. I was outta town. I’ve been traveling a lot. I’m lazy. I’ve been busy. I got a million excuses on why I haven’t been doing it. But we could do like a mystery science theater where, um.
Maybe we watch these old videos together and then someone can join me. We just fucking make fun of me asking dumb questions. When I look at this, it, it does make me number one. I mean, I was, uh, I was talking about the keyword, golden ratio. It was a big thing. I mean, no one paid attention for a very long time now.
I mean, you could throw it off the fucking window overall, but. It is interesting ’cause I was so deep. We were, uh, obsessed with this stuff. We were talking about the tools, like we tested different tools. I was talking about like a lot of details and I really, you know, at some point I got a little bored with a lot of this stuff and I was like, you know what?
I think, I think I’m kind of, I’m ready to move on to different things and my interest shifted. And that’s totally cool. I think that’s why I haven’t burned out. And the the other part is I hear myself talking and I just think, I thought I was so smart then. But it’s like the Dunning Kruger effect people look it up.
I should do a whole episode. I reference it often, but it hits me really hard. ’cause like as time goes on, I feel like, I know less than I ever did before, but it’s only because I know so much that I realize that I almost know nothing. So I feel uninformed and ignorant and, and like whatever experience I have, I’m just like, ah, this whatever’s, there’s so much that I don’t, I don’t know.
I shouldn’t even give people advice, you know? Who am I to even talk? Of course, to do a show, you have to have a big enough ego to think that whatever you’re saying is fairly important. So I, I, I do get that part. But the other portion is I’m like, man, I just got lucky. I had no clue what was going on the whole time ever.
And you know, it all worked out fine. I, I must have just got really lucky. So anyway, there’s a few interviews with Duke. Again. Duke is awesome if you happen to see this. Duke. Thank you for being on the show. I hope everything’s going well with you and your family and everything. So let’s go to the next one here.
Blast from the past. Same tale, but this is even earlier. So when I’m looking at this view here. I look, I look a little rough. I’m blinking. I’m just blinking there. But this was the apartment that we first stayed at when we moved to Bozeman. So this is December of 2015. And funny thing, we, we recently just celebrated like.
Leaving Atlanta and we’ve reframed it, you know, if people, you live in Atlanta or the South, it’s great. Uh, folks like to live there, whatever. It was good growing up there. We’re glad we moved. So we, we will call it like going to Montana today, or we moved to the Rocky Mountains. Day or something like that.
But anyway, this was published December 22nd, 2015. Back in those days, I basically did the interview and then published it really quick. So there’s a strong chance this was recorded like a few weeks beforehand and this. Got about 3,758 views, 41 likes. The channel was just budding starting. If you watch other videos from that timeframe, like I was trying to do some questions, some q and a, I didn’t know how to.
Do audio and I mean, it was a mess. We, we learned how to do stuff and through experience, you, you do a better job. Dave was one of my early coaching students. I was chatting with him on like Facebook messenger. Maybe a month or or two ago. So he’s still out there, he’s still still grinding, still doing stuff.
He had some ups and downs and all that kind of stuff. I’ve done a bunch of interviews with him as well. There’s a lot on the channel with Dave. So let’s see what’s going on with Dave. And this one didn’t have chapters, so this’ll be, um, we’ll just, we’ll let it go. Let’s see how I start an interview here. I wanna share with you.
So it’s my friend Dave. And let’s see, Dave, I think we met almost a year ago. You sent me a couple emails and, and you found Yeah. A niche side project. And then I think, you know, through the correspondence you eventually asked for coaching and then we worked together for a while and, uh, we haven’t talked in a few months.
Yeah. And then I, you know, we’re just. Checking in. Sounded like your site was actually taking off pretty well. So that’s how we we got together. But you know, how are you doing today, Dave?
Dave: Oh, things are pretty good. You know, just a regular old workday kind of thing where we’re, and by work I mean, I’m gonna be doing a lot of like SEO website stuff for at least part of the day, like I usually do.
Doug: Right on. Yeah, me too. Me too. And I guess, you know, we’re, we haven’t done this format before, but I think we will probably just like talk through a few questions and just see where the conversation leads. So, you know, you do some SEO work, of course, and you have some niche sites, but do you have any other job or profession that you work?
Dave: Yep. I’m a private music teacher here in Ontario. I’ve been doing that for about, I guess about 10 years. And that’s been going pretty well, I guess, but it’s not it’s never been like a huge money maker. It’s always just been something that’s kept me going. I also do I paint as well, so I do a lot of artistic type stuff that doesn’t make a lot of like, huge money.
Gotcha. So that’s basically what I do. I do other jobs too, from time to time, but I, I never really get into them too much.
Doug: All right, I’ll jump in here. Super interesting. Well, Dave’s a pure artist out there, right? So that’s cool. And basically this is one of the first interviews I, I did, I mean, you could tell, I’m just like this is a different format.
I don’t know what I’m doing. And we’re gonna give it the best shot that we can. And here we are, 10 fucking years later. I’ve practiced interviewing a lot. I, I put a lot of time in, listened to interviews and actually I’ve improved quite a bit, so it’s kind of cool to go back and, and check this out. So I’m gonna pause for a second and find the juicy parts of this, because like I said, there’s no chapters in here.
They didn’t have chapters or timestamps back in those days was so long ago. So I’ll be right back. Alright. I think I found a decent spot to jump in here. Also, I hope this episode comes off like I, I hope it does. But quick, uh, note, Dave’s also a cool guy. It’s interesting, like I’ve met so many people and just like creating the channel and blogging and doing the podcast, I was able to meet so many folks.
So many people would indeed talk to me. And one thing that I’ve been thinking about, especially for my other show called Mile High Fi, my. My co-host that started the show with me, Carl Jensen, he left the show and I, I wanted to keep going and I had some guest hosts pop in. And the thing is like, I think I could probably get bigger guest and bigger guest hosts to sit in with me, but I’m a little scared to ask.
So I think one thing I’m gonna do is to start making those bigger. Leaps and actually ask people to do it. And actually, when I look back and I see, I see the struggle and I’m, I’m trying to get through the interview and I’m, it’s okay. I mean, a lot of people did watch it maybe at two x speed just to make it go a little bit faster.
But basically I’ve come a long way. I think I could probably get bigger guest and. I actually have someone sit in as a co-host, which is the cool, it’s a different dynamic. So when I have a guest host come in, we can cover a topic or we can even interview someone else versus like me interviewing them. So it’s like we’re having a conversation and that is way more fun usually than doing like an interview, especially if they.
Have a thing, like a book where they’re like, oh yeah, I’m gonna promote the book. And I, they have their stock answers and they don’t really think about it too much. When you’re having a conversation, they get to talk about things they don’t usually get to bring up. So with that said, let’s keep listening to, uh, Dave here.
I think we we’re gonna talk about some of the, early success and the essentially the amount of money that people were earning. And that’s what I wanted to highlight with Duke, it’s just like pretty quick. You were able to get a site going and then boom, you’re earning a decent chunk of money. And that is what I found when I was getting started in 2013 to 2015 or so.
So here we go. So you and I worked together on a particular site and you know, our focus was around like Amazon type review sites. And you know, I don’t want you to reveal your, your U-R-L-U-R-L or the domain or the niche or anything like that. Since it’s obviously a lot of hard work you put into it.
But tell us, um, you know, a little bit about the success that you’re seeing right now and, you know, maybe some of the trajectory that you saw. When you first started, so what, you know, just to keep it simple right now, in December of 2015 sort of where, where are you at now?
Dave: Okay, so it’s been a year since I started that site and I’m going to probably make, it’s like it’s right on track to make a about of grand this month, which is cool, but it’s also December, so, so it’s probably a little bit to do with that too, although it doesn’t look too much different from last month.
Like, I was expecting maybe December to be like crazy somehow, but it’s, it’s just kicked up a notch, I guess. And it’s sort of, it’s right on track for like about a thousand.
Doug: Awesome. Congratulations. That’s, uh, this big money probably. I know, you know, for anybody, no matter what job you have, an extra a thousand dollars is, you know, a lot.
Dave: So it’s definitely cool to see it happening, so, yeah. Yeah. And then like last, I mean, when we started last year, like, ’cause this is the one you helped coach me on, this was sort of the first site that was, I guess heading in that like on a good track. So all the, the four or five sites I had before that were, they were kind of scattered and going all over the place and, and I was just like, I gotta figure this out.
I had, like, I’ve been learning so much over the past year, but just. Screwed up a lot of things and so Gotcha. Yeah. So this is the first one where I’m like, I’m pretty happy about the, the trajectory it’s been having some. Awesome.
Doug: Yeah. Well, and take us back a little bit ’cause I know I mean, I remember when you bought the domain and, and you were like, Hey, I, I picked it out and I already have like, you know, 10,000 words written and you know, we, you know, we went from there.
But, so rewind a little bit. To say six months ago. So right now you’re at about a thousand dollars and, you know, there’s some effect from the retail season, but, you know, say the middle of the summer what, what was it like then, do you recall?
Dave: Yeah, yeah. It was, uh, that might have been at the peak of my sort of like anxiety for that site because it’s right at the point where you’re not sure, like it’s starting to make a little bit of money, but you’ve been working on it for about six months straight.
Yeah. And so. You’re like, is it what’s happening? Is it gonna like start making anything? And so it was just starting to pull in a few dollars. I think it was around like, I might have made like 50 or a hundred bucks that month, possibly maybe just 50 or something. So I was like very trepidatious about it.
I’m like, okay, I hope starting to work. But it was just, uh, you know, after doing six months of work on something and making 50 bucks your. So you’re still a bit kinda tense about, right?
Doug: Yeah. You’re making like 1 cent per hour at that point. So, okay, cool. And then so, and then if you, we rewind to, you know, January of last year.
I mean, that was, you know, literally you were laying the groundwork and, you know, the, the revenue there was zero and you probably invested, you know, a few, you know, maybe a hundred bucks or so. Maybe, maybe a little bit more. I know you, you did most of the writing yourself, right?
Dave: Yeah, to start off with. I did.
Yeah. It was, it was like, you’re right, it was about a hundred or a couple hundred bucks just to get it, uh, to do whatever. I forget even like what the money went to exactly. Like, but yeah, I did the, the initial writing myself thinking, oh, okay, I’ll just, you know, you do like some what, whatever you hear, like these like keystone articles where you’re like, okay, these are gonna be my, like, key articles.
Right. And those articles are still, I don’t think they’re really keystone articles anymore. Like, oh yeah, you know what? I thought of them as like being pretty important and they’re, they’re floating around and they’re now, but they’re not as, maybe not as important as I thought they were. Gotcha.
Doug: Yeah.
It’s like you, you never know. You never know which ones are really gonna be the ones that take off. I mean, you, you have hopes and you have a plan, but you know, you have to cast a sort of a wider net and then you’ll see which ones, you know, work out. All right, so I think this is a decent stopping point, but I kinda like this idea of watching these videos again as my live stream and then just fucking roast myself, kind of reaction videos, make fun of myself.
I can invite people on to do it. I mean, that’s entertaining, right? Get two or three of us and it’s not bad. Get to watch myself. The thing, the thing that’s so interesting is how so much changed and that is the clunky idea that I’m trying to get across, or it’s a good idea that I. And explaining in a clunky way, and this is the idea that I’ll give to anyone out there that wants to do it.
I mean, the rise and fall of niche sites, I mean, I think there’s a whole story. It’s dramatic. There’s people that would want to talk about it, that were impacted dramatically, and it’s absolutely crazy. When I listened to myself and listened to Dave tell the story here, it’s just like, what? What was I even working on?
Like, like it’s so crazy. It’s so nuts. Now, like I said, we moved away from the Atlanta area in 2015. It was around this timeframe in April of 2015. And right now that I’m recording this, it’s April of 2025, so it’s like a decade and. I remember ’cause we, we kinda slow traveled. So we went up to Whitefish, Montana and we got an Airbnb up there for about a month.
And then we went down to Bozeman. We had an Airbnb for like six weeks or so. And we actually thought we were gonna end up in the Boulder County, Colorado front range area. We spent a decent amount of time here in the previous. Preceding couple years. I’ve spent a lot of time here in like college and stuff.
And when we got to Bozeman, we were like, this is amazing. So we ended up staying there. So that, like I said, the apartment that you see me recording, we were like, you know what, Bozeman’s awesome. We’ll get an apartment here, we’ll figure it out later. And then I went home to, uh, or I went back to Atlanta, not home.
I went back to Atlanta, got all of our stuff and drove it out with my dad. And the interesting thing is I remember talking with Dave and coaching Dave in the Airbnb that we were in, in Whitefish, Montana because Elizabeth, my wife, was like, so there’s someone that’s paying you for coaching. You, they’re paying you for coaching, what do you, what, what are you coaching them in?
And um, it’s so funny because even actually if I go, she might be able to hear me upstairs. I’ll say it quieter, but even if I go ask her now, like, Hey. Can you believe that I’ve been self-employed for so long? She’d be like, no, I can’t believe anyone. I can’t believe anyone paid you any money ever. Like, I don’t know what you did or how you did it.
So yeah, Dave was like probably the first person, first or second person that I coached. Actually, I had some other stuff going on too, but. He was one of the first people that I coached and I was like, I think I have some of this stuff systematized a little bit, and my project management background helps me place a framework around it and I can help other people.
But even if I say that as I say that right now, I’m like, I can’t, I, it doesn’t even make sense to me. Like I said, Dunning Kruger effect. The more, you know, the more knowledge you gain. You’re like, I actually, I’m, I’m not really sure. I’m not I don’t know. I don’t know. So, couple things for you to take note on.
Number one, if you think the livestream idea, it’s worth testing. I think it would get old. Me making fun of myself. Maybe not. Maybe that’s pretty funny. If you just watch old stuff and you’re, you’re like, you know what? You’re a fucking idiot and you can admit it. ’cause it’s your past self. If you’re interested in that.
I think it could be a little bit funny. I can invite people, I can invite funny people to do it and make fun of me. I got thick skin. You know, that’s the thing. If you’re. If you’re, if you’re on the internet, if you have a YouTube channel, you have to have thick skin. ’cause basically you’re putting yourself out there to be made fun of.
And if you make fun of yourself, if you get ahead of other people, then you’re pretty much all right. The other part, and I realized that, ’cause I, I haven’t tomorrow for my other podcast and I didn’t, I didn’t write it down in the outline, but I. And I won’t dive into the full outline or anything, but basically one of the things that I realized is I’m like, I really don’t give a fuck what people think about me.
And that is a skill that I, I was okay at previously, but you know, it hurts when people judge you. But then as I put myself out there and I publish YouTube videos and I basically just. Put yourself out there to be criticized and like, you make mistakes and you say words wrong, and you, you know, you’re a fucking idiot sometimes.
You just grow a thick skin and it’s totally fine. So at some point I was just like, oh yeah, like, I, I don’t care. And the one little piece of information, so. I used to have a corporate job and a lot of my old colleagues, well, they still have a corporate job, and I think they would look at me now and be like, what do you, what do you even do?
Like, do you have like no responsibility? Like, don’t you have ambition? And the answer is no. Very little at this point, but I, unfortunately judge them in the opposite way where I’m just like, you’re so busy, you have no time to do anything, and you’re feeling like you’re important ’cause you’re doing all this corporate stuff and they’re kind of wasting your time.
And I’m going to get a little philosophical, but it’s just like that’s your life that you’re giving to them and there’s so much other stuff that you could do. I. And I’m not here to tell people how to live. I mean, we’re just talking about niche sites and everything, but the point is, I don’t mind if they look at me and they’re like, dude, like what are you even doing?
I’m like, oh, that’s great. I have plenty of time. I walk the dog a lot. I spent a lot of time, um, trying to be outside and I could wear shorts all the time. And, you know, we’ll finish up with a quick. Hopefully fun story. So this has been a couple years ago. I went down to Boulder. I think I, I went to have a beer and maybe walk into a bookstore.
And, uh, it’s, if people know it’s the one on Pearl Street, I think it’s like Boulder Bookstore or something. Pearl and right on the brick right there. So I think I got I bought a book or something and just kind of walked through. And then there’s now a, a, well. A brewery, this closed and I think I had a beer.
It was like Taste of Belgium or something like that. So basically I was walking by and it was around lunchtime and there were some people having lunch and they looked pretty important, you know, ’cause they had suits on. So they had a suit on, they had a tie, they had dress shoes, slacks. The whole thing, right?
They look like professionals. And I was basically wearing shorts and a t-shirt, flip flops, something you could see me in all the time over the summer. And basically I was like, oh, I feel bad for those guys. They have a job where they have to dress up, they have to do dry cleaning, they have to wear a tie, they have to wear a shirt with a collar.
With buttons, it’s not flannel. And it was pretty clear. I was just like, oh yeah, those guys, I feel bad for ’em. And they look at me and they’re probably like, that dude has no job. True self-employed technically, uh, prob you could say. I probably don’t have a job now. And, um.
Yeah, it’s interesting. So I don’t mind if they, if they were like, oh dude, what are you even doing? I’m like, I don’t know. I’m just having a beer at lunch and gonna go grab a book over here. And as a beautiful day, you can see the flat irons. What a great day. The skies are blue. There’s birds singing. They always have flowers out there in the spring.
So I think that’s it for today. I have some dinner I need to cook. I have the rest of this beer that I need to drink. Thank you for listening. Shoot me an email feedback at Doug show and let me know what you think about the livestream idea. Leave a comment if you’re watching on YouTube, helps the algorithm.
And the other thing is if you want to take a look at the back archive of like, I can get it out. Uh, Cali, uh, va, my virtual assistant that has been working with me for many years, leave that mistake in. It proves that I, I drank the beer earlier, but the point is, check out the old archive. It’s very interesting to go back and I left all the videos in so you can go back to the very first video when I first created the YouTube channel.
And then you could actually see, like, I was try, I was trying to publish stuff, I was trying to do better. It’s a little bit of a train wreck. Um, and the more I put reps in and got better at it. I mean, it, it, it did pay off tipped. You know, don’t drink while you’re recording, but we’ll catch you on the next episode.
Thank you for listening, and don’t forget to let me know what you think of the idea