Acquisitions Anonymous - #1 for business buying, selling and operating - A cash printing food blog - Acquisitions Anonymous 174

Episode Date: March 10, 2023

Michael Girdley (@chilis) and Mills Snell (@thegeneralmills) review a food blog for sale.----Thanks to our sponsor!Acquira - your acquisition in a box service. Acquira offers training to help you find, evaluate, and close on a small business. All in under a year.    Their team has bought over 30 businesses across  3 different portfolios. Whether you’re just beginning your business search, actively pursuing a specific deal, or looking to grow your existing company, Acquira’s training and team of experts can help. Their M&A advisors provide individualized support through the entire process. They will provide guidance toward your offer structure, drafting your LOI, in-depth due diligence, and securing funding for your deal.  They will even fly out to the business with you.  Once you acquire a business, they can help you grow it too.Acquira’s ACE Framework will help you transition that business from owner-operated to management-led, increasing profits and allowing you to step away from the daily operations and enjoy doing more of what you love.  And if “more of what you love” is buying and growing more businesses, they can help you build a portfolio of businesses, and eventually get liquidity from that portfolio by selling it to a financial buyer, or selling it to its employees.Space is limited each month, so if you’re looking to acquire a cash-flowing business this year, sign up now at acquira.com/pod-landerSubscribe to weekly our Newsletter and get curated deals in your inboxAdvertise with us by clicking here Do you love Acquanon and want to see our smiling faces? Subscribe to our Youtube channel. Do you enjoy our content? Rate our show! Follow us on Twitter @acquanon Learnings about small business acquisitions and operations. For inquiries or suggestions, email us at [e-mail]

Welcome to Acquisitions Anonymous, the internet's number one podcast doing case studies of businesses for sale. And we use that to talk a lot about how to think about business and how to do business better, especially on the small business side. I am one of your host, Michael Girdley. Today's episode, super fun. We went through and we found a half million dollar blog that is located out of Israel that focuses on baking. And it makes $170,000 a year plus or $9. and profits and the people are selling it. And we went really deep into it to think about who's the right buyer for this.

Should you buy it? Should I buy it? The short answer to that is no, I should not buy this. And then we went deep into that and some other stuff. So I think you'll enjoy it. And here is the episode. Today's sponsor is Acquira.com. And Acquira is your acquisition in a box service.

They offer training to help you find, evaluate, and close on buying a small business, all usually done within a year. and their team has bought over 30 businesses across three different portfolios. Whether you're just beginning your business search, actively pursuing a specific deal, or looking to grow your existing company, acquireist training, and team of experts can help. Their M&A advisors provide individualized support throughout the entire process. They will provide guidance towards your offer structure, drafting your LOI, helping with due diligence planning, and securing funding for your deal.

They will even fly out and do on-site visits with you as you look at the business to consider. Once you acquire your business, they can also help you grow it as well. They use a proprietary framework called the ACE framework that will help you transition that business you buy from owner-operated to management-led, increasing your profits, and allow you to step away from the daily operations and enjoy more of what you love. And if more of what you love is buying and growing more businesses, they can help you build a portfolio of businesses and eventually get liquidity from that portfolio by selling it to a financial buyer or selling it to your employees.

They run cohorts each month, so space is limited. So if you're looking to acquire a cash flowing business this year, sign up now at Acquira.com slash pod-hyphen lander. And again, that's Acquira, A-C-U-I-R-A dot com slash pod-hyphen lander, and tell them that the acquisitions anonymous folks sent you. Mills, happy Friday, buddy. Are you impressed with my new lighting?

It's so mysterious and ominous. Do I seem very dramatic to? Yeah, yeah. I'm just, I'm waiting on you to drop some, like, it looks like a Masterclass video is what it looks like. The Masterclass does some serious, like, here, I'll turn out some lighting in the background so you can get different colors. But, yeah, like, do I look like I'm, yeah.

This looks like a thriller. Because we're going to, yeah, everybody says something cool. All right. Yeah, well, Masterclass does very dramatic lighting because they want you to feel like there's like magnitude from, you know, whoever teaching you, you know. Yeah, Bob. Gordon,

Gordon, whatever's name, teaching how to scramble eggs, which literally that's one of the classes on there. I'm like, I think 300 bucks to learn how to scramble eggs.

Like, I don't have to do that. Yes, you did. Yes, you did. But anyway, it's good to see you. Beard looking fierce. I knew it would come back. But you've got a deal for us

to talk through. Yeah, yeah, this one's kind of fun. We, I saw this. We haven't talked about anything like this. Let me screen share real quick.

There we go. All right, so this is, we haven't done a deal like this. This is a food blog, a nine-year-old food blog with 500 posts and multiple traffic sources. Just got listed this week from Quietlight, and it's a content site. So quick overview financially, doing $165,000 in revenue, 158,000 in earnings,

and they're asking $520,000 for it. So they say there's a content library. It's a WordPress blog that was launched in 2013. which, you know, for blogs, that's some impressive staying power. They have over 500 pieces of content driving 68% of the total traffic via organic search rankings. I don't know if these are recipes or, you know, what it might be. But they say on social media, they have 10,000 followers on Facebook and 60,000 followers on Pinterest. They have an email list that they use Mailer Light for with 4,800 email addresses, subscribers.

The owner has done minimal sponsored content work, only occasionally working with a few inbound requests. This work could be ramped up by a new owner that wants to drive more revenue via this channel. So that'd be like, you know, hey, Oatley wants to sponsor a recipe or maybe something like that. Growth opportunities, they've identified multiple additional growth opportunities to create and update more content, scale up video content creation, create more U.S.-oriented content. So maybe that says that most of their revenue comes from international sources and also increase the ad density on ad thrive and more. Let's see, they have over 7.5 million page views in the last 12 months. That feels like a lot. bulk of those coming from organic search. In the middle of

last year, the owner attempted to hire an employee to take on her workload, but they did not work out and were recently let go. So it's maybe some growing pains trying to figure out how to an absentee owner, but that did not pan out. They also, it seems like probably owner-centric because they're saying the owner has created the bulk of the content over the years, with the exception of a virtual assistant who's no longer in the business, and also the recently hired employee who didn't work out. They used to spend 20 hours a week working on the blog, but they haven't been spending that much time on the business due to raising a young family. Oh, the owners based in Israel started this business before having kids and is looking to exit due to time constraints. It's with

Quiet Light, a guy named Chris Guthrie. What do you guys think? Hey, Bill. Hello, I'm in late, but I couldn't miss this one. Bill's like, did somebody say food blog? Count me in. Did someone say online business? I cannot miss it.

What I do love about Quiet Light is when they refer to themselves as the broker, and I don't know if it's in the version. You look at the email down at the bottom and says, this listing has been artfully prepared by Chris Guthrie, advisor. Advisor. Not broker. Okay, guys. It's like, yeah, like artfully prepared.

Thank you. You know, it's like the Sistine Chapel of business list. I actually do have to. I do. I know this guy. Yeah. I know this guy. Do you sit in Christmas cards?

Yeah. So I actually have a great relationship to Quietlight. They are, in my opinion, one of the best brokers in this whole digital space. The thing, interestingly, that makes them one of the best brokers. And I really don't think this comes through in all of their markets. marketing and they do a way better job of this. They do not take on scammy businesses at all. There are a ton of scammy businesses on the internet. Like there are a ton of no. No. It's all legit. So like and that is like when you were buying an online business, like your

primary diligence item is this whole is this whole thing a scam. Right? Like did they like let's take this food block like did they spin this up you know two years ago obviously I know this one's older. But did they spend this up two years ago? Did they buy a bunch of bot traffic to the website? Did they buy a bunch of followers on social media and write a bunch of AI generated content? And they're trying to flip it off on you. And it's going to get crushed by a Google update as soon as Google figures out what's going on. Like there is such high scam risk in buying an online business. And that is actually why I really love Quietlight because they have extremely high ethics and they just don't take those listings. There are other online business brokers that I know of that take those listings all day long,

who shall not be named unless you guys get beer in me or two. But that's what I like about Quietlight is you can be very confident with Quietlight. If they're representing it, it's most likely not a scam. That's good to know. That's a good selection, mice. This has 7.5 million page views in the last 12 months. Is that a lot? That's a lot.

Yeah. I mean, that's like 750,000. month. That's three quarter of a million a month. Now, here's the thing that I would immediately say, it's not that many because that's page views. What I would immediately want to know is how many sessions, like how many people that is, deduplicated human beings.

Because if this were, and there could be pros and cons, because if this were 750,000 page views and 750,000 sessions, that means your average user is looking at one page and then bouncing, that's an indicator of a pre-low quality site. Right. Now, at the same time, this is a larger total addressable market for ads. So unsophisticated ad buyers might pay you more just based on the number of sessions. If you had, say, 750,000 page views a month, but 100,000 sessions, that would be an indicator of a really engaging site, seven pages per session, probably high quality content, probably ranking very well, et cetera, because bounce rate is a ranking factor for Google. So like every website the internet has

Google Analytics installed on it, what you don't think about is Google Analytics is owned by Google Search. So all of that Google Analytics data is being piped back into the Google Search ranking algorithm. So if people come to your website, stay for five seconds and click the back button, Google Search knows that and it's going to derank you. So how does this site make money? They just display ads? Pretty much. I would assume. I mean, they didn't say that they have any like membership or like content, you know, anything like that.

They say there's a little bit of sponsored content, but it seems like if it's, right, if it's not that, and they don't mention affiliate. So, like, to me, sponsored an affiliate, it's worth kind of splitting hairs. Sponsored is, you know, and I had an old client who it was in this case, and they were a food blog, and like Silk came to them and was rolling out their own almond milk. And they were like, hey, we want you to put these into your recipes and just kind of like name drop and like have, you. have the container like there in your photos, that would be sponsored content. Like, you know, this recipe is brought to you by Silk. Affiliates is, I'm going to, you know, put links in the description to go by the blender or, you know, to go buy this, like, incredible spatula. And then you click on Amazon or you click somewhere else,

and I'm getting a kickback just based on that affiliate relationship where I refer traffic to them. Which kind of the cool thing about affiliate, Bill, you're going to know way more about this than I do. But doesn't Amazon pay you for everything that you put in your cart, not just that one item? Like, there's some parameters, right? Yeah.

Yeah. So that's the cool thing about the Amazon affiliate program. There are other not cool things about the Amazon affiliate program. The cool thing about the Amazon affiliate program is that, you know, if you're reading my blog about, you know, bumper stickers or whatever. Yes. And you click through and you add a two, like if you click on my bumper sticker, your link, view the page on Amazon for the bumper sticker I was talking about, and don't buy it.

But you have a thousand dollar cuisine on an espresso machine in your cart. If you buy it in the next 48 hours, I'm going to get credit for affiliate for referring that sale. It's amazing. I don't think they're really doing that, which is hard to do if you are just, like, if this is recipes, right, which most food blogs are recipe related. It's very, very hard to sell hardware, you know, unless you're like look at my great, you know, mixing bowls. You should go buy them. But I don't, it doesn't seem like they're, they're capturing that. This is just, we have good recipes. Uh, it's maybe Israeli inspired because that's where this person is from. And, you know, they get traffic and they sell based on those, those eyeballs. Yep. You can sell ads on the site. And very often the best

run ones of these, especially in kind of recipes and cooking, uh, are very often personality centric. So they have a great Instagram account to go with them. So you can sell sponsored content on the Instagram account, on the website, on the email list. And it becomes more of like a media property rather than just a blog, the best ones. And that sponsored content, by the way, is where a lot of this is going. Because, you know, consumers are very, very aware of the affiliate game. And, you know, the end state of any affiliate site is, is like the, here are the 10 best bumper stickers for 2023,

right? Everybody's seen, like, and it's so obviously affiliate and like, they're not actually doing any real work and reviewing it, right? Yeah. And so you have to do that or you have to be consumer reports

where you like actually have to pay to see it. Yeah, you buy the stuff. They test it. It's rigorous. They're like showing you videos, but there's a paywall to get to the info. Exactly.

So like affiliate marketing is basically ruined the internet. because all the free stuff is totally affiliate driven, right? And what will rank number one, by the way, when you're running an affiliate site, you would be a fool not to rank number one the product that sells the most, not the best one. Like maybe the cheap, the one that gets the highest conversion rate, right, and drives the most affiliate commissions, that's number one. And by the way, it's a very common tactic where you go, like, let's say we have,

you know, a dog supplement. You go to whoever ranks number one for best hip, joint dog supplement, and it's going to be the top 10 dog supplements of 2023, you email them if they're Amazon affiliate and you go, okay, I want to be number one. Every month, send me your Amazon affiliate report and I'll match it, but you got to make me number one. Right? So like it's all bought and paid for like any of those top 10 sites, like do not trust them.

So affiliate markets are in the internet. So what is happening next is the sponsor content wave, right, where it's like, you. you, the dog supplement brand in this case, would pay for the whole article, right? And it's going to be about, like, why glucosamine is really important in dog supplements. But, like, at the bottom, there's a very strong recommendation for our brand of supplement that has glucosamine in it. Yeah. So sponsor content. And just what, like, when you describe silk in this case, like silk almond milk, this recipe brought you by silk almond milk, like that is where it is going.

Is this whole thing you're describing just a bull case for Amazon? I was like, why don't I trust things I Google, like on the internet very much in terms of, like, buyers guides? Like, I don't trust any of them. Like, I go try to figure out which of the Amazon rankings are fake. They're all fake, Michael. Do you want my rant on fake Amazon reviews? Next?

Oh, please. Please, hold on. Let me click record here for the clip of the week. All right, they're all fake. I think the clip of the week was affiliate marketing killed the internet. Affiliate marketing completely killed the internet. It's, I mean, you guys see every, every serp is the top 10 whatever's of whatever year you're in. It's terrible.

The Amazon reviews are all bought paid for as well. It is a complete war on Amazon with trivial amount of looking. You can find someone who will drive hundreds of Amazon reviews to your listing from different IP addresses all around the world. They will, there's all of these, which are scams, but are review manipulation where there are private Facebook groups where you can go in the Facebook group, you can be like, do you want a free dog supplement? You know, the first 400 people that buy it and send me your receipt, I will PayPal your reimbursement because what you need is the verified purchase on Amazon in order for the review to stick. So you need a verified purchase and then you got to leave a review. Email me a copy of your receipt and your

five-star review and I will refund you the purchase price plus $20. And there's these whole schemes that go on in private Facebook groups. And in fact, recently Amazon infiltrated some of them, the FTC sued some brands who were doing this, which was awesome and needs to keep happening. But it is review fraud is rampant. Oh, by the way, the other thing you can do, and this is so frustrating because people have done this to our brands on discontinued skews. So like we have skews that have a whole bunch of reviews. So what will happen is someone will start selling a bumper sticker or a garlic press or

mixing bowls or whatever. And they will basically edit the old listing of the, the product's not for sale anymore, but has hundreds or thousands of five-star reviews, and just change all the pictures and change the title and change it into from an ad for a dog supplement into an ad for a mixing bowl. And then all the review, and you're reading, you're like, why does this five-star review for a mixing bowl talk about how it really helped their dog's hips? Right. I'm sure this like happens to you guys, if you're ever seen this on Amazon, you're reading their reviews.

You're like, these reviews are not about this product. Uh-huh. Right? But they're squatting on the old reviews. They've totally edited the page. So you can't trust any reviews on Amazon either. Wow. All right, Bill, you mentioned Instagram.

They don't say anything about Instagram. They say Facebook and Pinterest, which kind of adds to my suspicion that this is a little bit, maybe it's a little bit stale, you know, they had a following early on, and they haven't really migrated it to other platforms. And it's just kind of a, you know, a lifestyle business that is, you know, taking over their life. Maybe. I mean, the other thing that, I mean, there could be pros and cons. The other thing that could mean is it's not a personality.

driven brand, which on one hand, you can limit your growth, right, because you're not going to grow a huge cult of personality on Instagram or something. On the other hand, it means this business is probably much more transferable because, you know, you buy the business from, you know, Kim Kardashian, and she's suddenly no longer posing your Instagram ads, you have a problem. So those businesses we've talked about on the past of the pot are difficult to transition celebrity based or personality based or influencer based businesses. So maybe this is not that, which could be good. Bill, one of the things that you and I've talked about a ton is these amazing online businesses that have so much traffic and so many Instagram followers, like in this case,

it's not Instagram followers, but they've got all the right ingredients, but they are just grossly under monetized based on the following that they have. And you have a lot of experience in this. But it's always interesting to me to just go, okay, what could you do with an audience this size? 4,800 email subscribers is not a ton, but based on just their traffic, I think. I think, think in my mind, it's similar to what you said, which is it's impossible to, you know, it's one of the hardest things in the world to migrate a business from Amazon to your own.com. To me, if you've been largely like a recipe, you know, ad driven, which is why their revenue is so low, but also why their margins are so high, they're not, you know, making anything other than

content, is it also that difficult to transition this business to some kind of product oriented? You and I've talked about a bunch of them offline where I get, you know, outreach. from people and they're like, hey, what is this thing worth? And it's like, oh, you do have like, you know, a million Instagram followers, but you just can't make money off of it. Yeah. So it depends entirely on what the traffic is. I'll give you an example.

We used to own a laundry detergent brand. And our top ranking page on the website is we had written years ago a blog article on how to get grease out of blue jeans. You know, for whatever reason, right? And it just got a ton of traffic. It ranked really well. But the problem was the way you got greased out of blue jeans was not laundry detergent. So we didn't have a problem.

We basically couldn't monetize. We had all this traffic and we couldn't monetize it with the products that our brand had. Now, what we could have tried to do is launch a blue gene degreaser product, right, and associate it. But you've got to understand where this traffic is coming from to see if it is how it is monetizable. And that traffic that we had was not very monetizable without launching a new product for it. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And I've seen, I mean, I've seen some of these folks, you know, basically begin to like white label and contract manufacture certain things. Like if, you know, somebody I knew was doing this with their own, you know, super clean, like high-end premium weight protein, you know, where they had all the content, they had all the eyeballs, they had all the subscribers and a massive email list, a lot bigger than this. And they just slowly started. to put into their, it was recipe driven. They slowly started to put into their recipes, you know,

hey, here's a link to this product and we own it and we stand behind it. And it's, you know, super, you know, clean and green and organic and all these things. And they switched from a largely content business to a product business. But that's a big transition. And it's very, very hard to do. It's a great strategy. It's the strategy. Like, that's the way it should be done.

But it is not necessarily a buy this business and drop in, products. Like, it's not that easy, but that is absolutely the long-nerve strategy. So who should buy this business? You should buy this business if you're very good at SEO. I would, it depends a lot of the systems that are in place. If this business has great systems in place to create a whole bunch of new content, and they've got, you know, they got like five Filipinos on staff full-time, you know, that write good English. And, you know, and all you got to do is basically then there's a system for keyword research to figure out what keywords you got on rank for, you pipe those keywords over to the Filipino team who write all the content and then

just get posted on the site. And if you're, if you've never done this before, then you should buy this business. If that system does not exist in this website and you've never done this before, you should definitely not buy this business. And this business should be bought by someone that owns another site that can use their engine. And that's these SEO sites get bought and traded between SEO guys all the time for exactly that reason. That's my red flag on this one. It's like, why are we the lucky buyer, right? Like, it's especially given, you know, how many of our friends we know are Yossick and the type that are buying this type stuff all the time. Like, why have they all passed on it? Like, that's the first question I want to know. Why am I so fortunate here?

Well, there's, there's a thing in this space in sites that depend heavily on their Google rank for their survival. There is a thing in this space. I'm not saying this happening here. It's a much older site, which means it may not have happened, where you, You basically do a whole bunch of stuff that's against Google TOS, and Google takes a while to catch you. And then you basically sell the site before you get caught. And then the new guy, eventually the algorithm catches them, and they get deranked aggressively. But the first guys have already monetized that are gone with your money. I think there's also, like, what I've seen is kind of like an affinity or like a novelty by where somebody is like, I love Israeli food.

Let's just say these are Israeli food-based recipes. They're like, I love this. This is like my passion. And, you know, I, you know, I'm not a stay-at-home mom, but I love this and I need, you know, a hobby or some way to spend my time and monetize it. And that's what they do. You know, they, there's so much affinity for it that they're like, the numbers don't really matter. They're not going to underwrite it as strictly. And they're not really thinking about SEO.

They're just like, I love this audience. I love this, you know, I'm already a user and I would love to pick this up. and like carry the torch, you know? That is a recipe to get absolutely bug splattered in this. Oh, totally. I've seen it happen. I've literally seen it happen and like the business shuts down, right? The people who buy it are like, oh, you know what?

The personality didn't transfer. The kind of messaging didn't transfer. And then like within a couple years, this amazing directed consumer, you know, really high uba dot margin business just completely shuts down. Well, it's not just that. It's not just about voice. It's about like this business is not a right, really good content business. If you build it, they will come.

You can be obsessed with Israeli food and write the best Israeli content. But if nobody's searching for it, you're not going to make any money. So what this business is, is not a content creation business. This is a determine where the SEO volume is, the search volume is, and make content on those keywords. I don't care if you're interested in them at all, right? But make content for the high volume keywords. Make it technically perfect.

right with the right keyword density and the right authority and all that stuff so it ranks on the high traffic pages. It's surgical and technical and actually has nothing to do with Israeli food. It just happens to be about Israeli food. And if you don't understand that going into this business, you're going to get crushed.

Interesting. Yeah, I mean, this SEO, liver died by the SEO stuff. Like I learned that personally, like back 15 years ago, we had a business that was totally SEO dependent and then we had a baby and we didn't pay attention to it as a family business

my wife and I. we didn't pay attention to it for nine months and then we came back and we had gotten bug splattered by all these other folks that come in and spent all this money on SEO and the thing never recovered. We never got back to first or second rankings

for some of the stuff. By the way, while we were talking, I googled Israeli baking blogs and it's all the stuff you're talking about, Bill. There's just like the SEO varmits are all in there, like putting all this spammy looking stuff in there. And by the way, no ads.

That was one of the things I saw that was really interesting. for once I found a Google search that they're not putting ads on. So I don't know what's going on there. I know what's going on there. Google will not put ads on SERPs that are not above a certain search volume. There you go. Okay.

Well, I learned something today. But yeah, that's something I'd be really curious about this one is like, what's the trajectory of the site and are you going to have to be trying to do a turnaround, which more power to you if you know how to do that. Like SEO, SEO keeping it there is much easier than SEO, like changing the directions. just like a small business, it turns out. So taking a small business that's losing money and making it break even, that's one hard thing to do. Taking that business again and then causing it to make money and grow, that's an order of magnitude harder.

So, yeah, that's why people like to buy businesses that are growing that are flat already or flat already rather than ones that are shrinking. Cool. So what do we think about the price on this one? Should you buy it for three times run away? I think it'll probably trade for maybe two to three times. I think this business will probably trade. The fact that it's older, domain age matters a lot in SEO. Yeah.

Yeah, I think this business will trade. I don't know if they get full ask, but it'll probably trade. Seems like a tough one to find buyer business fit. I don't know if you've heard that phrase, Bill. I've heard that phrase. I actually think there's a ton of buyers who are fit for this because there are a ton of SEOs as a person, as a title. as a job description.

There are a ton of SEOs out there who have five sites in their portfolio and would love a sixth. And assuming this one is not a garbage one, it's probably perfect for that. Yeah. By the way, this is 100% one of the deals that somebody listens to the episode and then we get like four DMs. It's like, I looked at that one. Here's the three problems with that they don't show up in the teaser.

And so I'm curious what they are. By the way, this is like kind of publishing the wrong thing on the internet. Like for us, like we're guaranteed to find the answer because we just put it out there somebody will tell us throughout the radio. That's right. We just say it's great, and people are like, well, actually not. Well, actually, Gurdley, it turns out that Costa Rica Casino is a brothel. So, nice episode, jerk.

So for those of you, not long-time Lester's last year, we looked at a Costa Rican casino for our Christmas special. When I described this, it doesn't sound like it claimed to be a restaurant and hotel and casino. know, and then somebody DM to me like a month later, like, oh, I listen to your episode. Yeah, that's a brothel. It's like, oh, no. It's terrible. Okay, so last question, structuring. So, like, if you're going to buy this, it seems like one where some seller financing and earn out is definitely impossible. I mean, it doesn't sound like this is a big Capac business. I would be shocked if the owner doesn't completely own everything. Yeah, how would you guys think about structuring this? Honestly, I don't think this is going to trade with any of

those any bells and whistles. I think it's going to be cheap enough. I mean, it's a small enough business, right? It's not a huge amount of money. It's a couple hundred grand. I think this will trade cash up front for a high two's multiple. Because Bill, you could basically, you could basically get in and like maybe underwrite it off of like the long tail, you know, of some of their content, like almost underwrite it as though you never publish a new piece of content. You know, what is the, what is the shelf life? And like, it's fascinating to hear people who, buy content this way. Like, you know, how to, like the YouTube video, like one of the most Google search things is like how to tie a tie, you know? And if you have like the top hit on that page,

it's worth something in perpetuity as long as you don't screw it up. To me, this, like, if I was looking at it, I would almost have to treat it like a bond, not like a growth stock, you know, and just say you buy it for what you think like a discount to the residual cash flow will be over the next couple years. And that's the only like safe bet here. That's the only margin of safety because you really, I don't think you can like underwrite growing this unless you just absolutely know what you're doing, which I don't. So, yeah, there are people out there though that do. Like there are people who are SEOs and know exactly what to do with this. And there's, there's a whole section of diligence on like how to diligence a site and potential and,

and is it in Google's penalized on Google and it's never going to grow. There's a whole, this is a whole category of diligence. And if you're going to buy this site and you don't know anything about SEO, you should absolutely hire someone who can do. SEO diligence and not try to do it yourself. There's a bazillion things. It would never even occur to you on how to diligence this stuff. Yeah. Or pick a bit different industry to be in.

Or that. Or that. The thing about this that I just keep coming back to is it's so freaking competitive. 100%. Yeah. We talk about this all the time. Like, you want to get rich, pick the right game to play. Yeah.

It doesn't matter how smart you are. It doesn't matter how lucky you are. Just go play the right game. And this definitely, unless you know what you're doing, sounds like a really hard game. Agreed. For comparison, I was just curious about their traffic. I know we're going to wrap up.

But have you guys ever heard of Minimus Baker? That website, it's another food blog that I think is fairly well known, but it's like all vegan. I think it's like 10, you know, something like five or 10 ingredients or less. You can do it all in one bowl and like it's, you know, in under 20 minutes or something like that. But I was just looking up some of their stats. They're getting like 5.9 million views per month, you know, and they have like very

explicit. We do no sponsored content. Like, we're totally above board. And I think, like, the thing that that draws to mind for me is people have, like, really good BS radars. And if you try and migrate something that was, like, all no BS to anything that is, like, you know, affiliate sponsored, you're going to lose your audience really, really quick. Because they're going to be like, well, you know, clearly this is, you know, not on brand. This misses the voice. I just, this scares me.

It's interesting. like want to get the NDA. If I knew anything about SEO, I'd want to get the NDA and just like understand more about how this business makes money. But if you've made it this far, please take this episode

or your favorite episode we've ever done and that's our ask for our audience, send it to a friend and say, hey, you should check this out if you liked it. And we would really appreciate it. And also reviews and subscriptions are very appreciated. The other thing you do is go take all of your devices and have them subscribed.

We get like $50,000. downloads a month right now. I can tell you that at least a couple hundred or for me because I have all my devices subscribed to us. So everybody needs to do that as well because downloads help with getting us up on the ranking charts and more people seeing what we're doing. So thanks everybody for being here. We'll see you next week.