Founder's Story - How Two Farm Kids Mastered AI & Niches to Build a Multi‑Million‑Dollar Web Portfolio | Ep214 with Matt Raad Founder & Co-founder of eBusiness Institute

Episode Date: May 7, 2025

Matt Raad (CEO & Co‑Founder of eBusiness Institute) and Liz Raad share how they went from farming and zoology students to buying, scaling, and exiting online businesses. Learn why “page‑five” passion sites can be goldmines, how AI accelerates growth, and the blueprint for low‑risk, high‑cash‑flow digital entrepreneurship.Key Discussion PointsFrom Kangaroos to Cashflow: How Matt & Liz leveraged rural roots and early manufacturing M&A mistakes to discover online’s superior risk‑return profile.Valuing Digital Assets: Why net profit × 1–5× multiples, recurring revenue, traffic quality, and audience/community strength are your core due‑diligence metrics.Finding Diamonds in the Rough: Hunting bargains via Flippa classifieds and private outreach to page‑5+ Google sites—plus the art of negotiating with cash and escrow.com.Build, Automate, Flip: Renovate niche blogs with SEO, monetization (ads, affiliates, sponsorships) and AI‑assisted content editing to boost profits.Scaling with AI: How ChatGPT, Claude & Gemini are slashing team sizes, turbocharging site builds (ten‑minute bootcamp wins!) and cutting content costs.Exit‑Ready Growth: Why hitting 7‑figure ARR unlocks private‑equity interest, and how leadership + repeatable processes maximize your sale multiple.Key TakeawaysStart Small, Win Big: Learn website building, buy a sub‑$5K site, and experiment with AI—no big capital required.Audience Is Asset: Communities trump page‑one rankings; loyal followings drive recurring, scalable revenue.Due Diligence Matters: Practice on low‑risk deals, use escrow for safe transfers, and know threshold profit multiples.Niche Is King: Passionate micro‑niches host undervalued sites ripe for 10× upside with the right know‑how.Exit Strategy: Buyers buy growth potential and proven teams—build with scalability and clear leadership in mind.Closing ThoughtsReady to quit the nine‑to‑five grind? Tune in to discover a battle‑tested playbook for buying, scaling, and exiting online businesses with Matt & Liz—plus actionable steps to launch your own digital side hustle.Our Sponsors:* Check out Indeed: https://indeed.com/FOUNDERSSTORY* Check out Northwest Registered Agent and use my code FOUNDERS for a great deal: https://northwestregisteredagent.com* Check out Notion: https://notion.com/founders* Check out Plus500: https://plus500.com* Check out Rosetta Stone and use my code TODAY for a great deal: https://www.rosettastone.com* Check out Square: https://square.com/go/founderAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

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Plus 500, it's trading with a plus. Hey everyone, welcome back to Founder's Story. Today we have Matt Rod, the CEO and co-founder of eBusiness Institute. And Matt, I'm really excited to dive into how you are talking through people about making money online, starting businesses online, buying and selling online companies.

It seems to be, you know, these are the things that are really taking off. At least recently, I'm seeing a lot of people talking about this. Um, and as we know, it's a global marketplace and a lot of people don't want to have the typical nine to five job. I experienced that. So let's first start off with your story and what was the spark for you that made you say I want to be an entrepreneur and this is the industry I want to go into? Yeah really really good question. I guess it's very appropriate Daniel I'm on your podcast in a founders story. I think in this instance our actual founder story is probably most important because people look at what Liz and I do. Liz is my wife. Like Daniel said, we buy and

sell online businesses and it's obviously the place to be. But backing up to our actual story, I met Liz at uni. We were studying zoology, so red kangaroos here in Australia, which sounds totally bizarre. And ever since then, our life has just been very unique compared to most people. Neither of us ever wanted a nine to five job. We both come from rural, like from farms in rural Australia. And we decided somewhat stupidly at the time to buy a small manufacturing business as soon as we got finished university with the help of friends and family, and we absolutely loved it.

But we made a lot of mistakes. It was going bankrupt. We got the wrong advice when we bought it. So to this day, we're really passionate about teaching people to do good due diligence and looking at our founders story, I guess it was very challenging. People see what we do today. but this was 30 years ago. This bit sounds like I'm making it too simple, but we were very successful with that business eventually.

It took 10 years to get that one right. In that meantime, we bought and sold other businesses. We were exporting to America, we were making parts in outdoor power equipment, and we bought and sold other wholesale import businesses, distribution businesses. And we're always buying and selling these businesses that revolve around physical inventory. And so what happened was we felt trapped. It was really difficult because we were hugely in debt for the whole, you know, that 10 years or 15 years actually,

we were massively in debt to the banks. And maybe if you're listening to this, you can identify, I know a lot of people, you know, invest heavily in real estate. It's the same kind of thing. We're investing heavily into stock heavy businesses. And in that time, what we started doing was we were hanging around mentors. We had private mentors who are also buying and selling businesses.

And I think it was by doing that, and we got into mergers and acquisitions. We started helping them buy and sell multimillion dollar businesses. And that just opened up our eyes. We literally were working with people that were in our opinion, living the dream, basically using businesses as assets. And what they taught us was go for high cashflow businesses. And that's the, that's the trick to all of this. And they were literally making millions of dollars a year, working two or three

days a week. And I think that's what, that became our goal obviously. And that's what set us on the path, meeting those guys, working with them and seeing that it could actually be done. That was absolutely eye opening. So we learned a lot through that. And I think one, to this day, the power of high cashflow businesses,

once we saw the online space, it was an absolute no-brainer. Online businesses are very high cash flow, the kinds that we buy, and for that reason, we see them as much lower risk compared to what we used to do in the good old days with bricks and mortar businesses. Yeah, I'm glad you bring that up because I think everyone wants to create the next beverage or they want to create their next product product But not realizing that they're going to not make any money for a very long period of time No matter how much revenue they're bringing in because it's all in this inventory and manufacturing And all these things that your capital stuck So when you're looking at an online business, are there parameters like EBITDA or?

business? Are there parameters like EBITDA or margins or what do you look at in terms of like okay I think this is at least viable in the due diligence? The main thing we're looking at it is the EBITDA or the net profit for websites to keep it simple. They've basically valued exactly the same way as a traditional bricks and mortar business. Typically anywhere from one to three times multiple, three to five times multiple of the profit. If they're a much higher quality business and a much more automated, um, and, or, you know, our recurring revenues, but it thumbnail, you know, quick valuation of most online businesses.

If you're listening to this and you're used to how you value, you know, any business, it's always a three times multiple. So if it's netting around a hundred grand a year, it's probably worth around $300,000. And that's what we're looking for. But what we're also doing, Daniel, really important people hear us, you know, listen, I buy and sell online businesses, the sorts of they think we're buying and selling e-commerce businesses because of my founder's story there. That's definitely what we don't do that. We, we avoided that. We, we made a pact with each other.

When we got online, we are never going back to physical inventory businesses. If we, if we can help it and we never have. So we never bought e-commerce style businesses. We buy businesses that make money off selling information products or advertising or sponsorship packages, which is a really big thing these days. And, and or traditional affiliate style businesses, which are still very, very popular these days. They can still make great money. And in particular, what we like, I guess, is niched online businesses that have

unique communities or audiences behind them. It's all about the audience now in this day and age of AI and the way that the search engines are working. So are you finding that, are you buying businesses that have like a complementary community to another business that you've already bought? Like over time? Or you just is it kind of like you know this this industry over here I like this on this or are you putting them together as a as an ecosystem? Ideally yes that that is I mean when you're starting out you just buy anything that's got a good profit and good recurring revenues and good traffic.

So that's the other thing we look for when you're asking before in due diligence. It's all about the traffic and the profit. That's probably our main metrics, but we love doing exactly what you just mentioned because that's what we used to do. And our mentors used to do with bricks and mortar businesses is going to a niche. So for instance, we would help these guys buy as many wholesale import businesses in the electrical components niche, electronics or whatever. We do the same online.

We go into one vertical niche and we try and buy your businesses have complimentary audiences. But there is also merit in having websites in different niches as well. And we own a broad range of sites across a broad range of niches. But for us these days, particularly this last year or two, the way the online space is working, it's all about community audiences now and all things being equal. I guess that's one of the other main things we're doing our due diligence on now. It's about the audiences because with AI and the way our AI search is working, people are following, yeah, the audience or the community is hugely valuable. And it, and it means you can have recurring revenues particularly if it's got an email list or a big or like even a social media following and we can

create multiple followings as well that becomes assets in and of itself as well now. So when you when you look at the company and thank you for explaining that are you looking at these digital assets I guess I'm just making that up but these digital assets that they have, are you seeing, okay, they may not know that they can monetize it this way, but we know we have monetized it this way. So when you're going through the due diligence

or going through the phase of trying to figure out if it's even worth buying, how do you look at those things? Yeah, that's a key point. And that also explains why what you're saying is spot on. Um, it's also why we find, or we love buying, do I say bargains? I don't know. Well, diamonds in the rough in passion, what we call passion niches.

So niches where, you know, people that don't typically know how to make money online love to blog about, for instance, like food blogs, travel blogs, gardening blogs, photography blogs, how to play guitar, all the classic evergreen niches have been around for many years. Believe it or not, these sites are quietly, the big ones now are worth millions of dollars. We know, like, go and speak to any website broker. You know, these days I'll tell you, yeah, we're selling food blogs for millions of dollars, which never happened when we first start online. So we've been doing this for nearly 15 years now.

But one of the advantages of going for these passion niches is that people will set these websites up. They chip away at them for a couple of years, and then they basically lose interest because they're not making much money, but they've actually created a lot of assets there. There's age, that's an asset that's worth money. They've created a following, which is worth huge amounts of money these days. And they've created valuable online real estate. So a great example of like what you're saying is we have a young couple who are, they're actually coaches for ours, but Nathan and Alexa, they learned off us many years ago and they want to do the

laptop lifestyle. They're a young couple. They'd traditionally tried real estate investing, but they just maxed out with the banks. They had no money. Nathan was an electrician and Alexa worked in customer service. So they started buying and selling these passion sites, got really good at renovating them and they found that they could work in the gardening niche. They owned a couple of sites in the gardening niche.

They're not gardeners. They're literally living on laptops. They were, you know, traveling around the world, doing the young person thing where the visa would run out and they'd have to move to the next country, so they're three, three months at a time in a country on a laptop, they are definitely not gardeners. So they'd hire experts to write the articles, but they noticed that there was this neglected site here in Australia.

It had been around for 14 years and they could see the guy had stopped blogging on it. So they reached out to him and said, Hey, do you want to notice, you're not working on a site you're interested in selling? And he said, sure. I was just going to close it down about $400. So they bought it for $400. And that site now, because they've assimilated it in with their team and their other gardening site, they've got a much bigger gardening site. That site is making $4,000 a month net in peak gardening season. So they renovated it, add more content and now they get sponsorship. They've gone to local trade shows, big gardening companies are paying to

advertise on there or to just, you know, sponsored posts and things like that. And I think that's a great example. It's just in this humble gardening niche. And exactly like you said, Daniel, the gentleman had, he just was bored with it. Never made that much money. Um, and it's just a great example. These guys knew exactly what to do. They knew all the keyword research and you had to grow it. And now that wasn't a get rich quick thing. Please don't think they just immediately started making that. They had to work at that. That took about a year or so to

build that up. But in the meantime, they're in multiple sites that are doing, you know, they've got one in crochet, another couple in gardening. So for them, it's just, they've got the team already in place and that's what they do. This reminds me of in 2020, I wanted to travel for free. I'm like, you know what, I just want to travel for free. So I'm such a huge proponent of what you're talking about. I bought into a Facebook group for $300.

It was like $250. A travel group that had 90,000 people. I then went while I was on vacation, I reached out to a hotel and said, Hey, I have this group. I want to review your hotel. Will you let us stay for a few nights. They let us stay. We got upgraded to a written on Four Seasons presidential suite. I mean, this is because nobody was traveling. Nobody was traveling at that time. But we took like about a year to build that up and then we built other sites. And then like you said, I'm a huge proponent of what you're talking about. And I love the fact you're bringing up this is your people like you're saying they're looking for the,

they wanna get into something that's making a million dollars today, which we know, highly unlike this, you have so much cash to spend, but finding these diamond in the rust where, these websites that people have been blogging on that they're not really using, these assets that they don't even know how to make money on is just a waste of their time.

I think that is huge. This is the website. I mean, the internet probably has millions of these. I'll just say it does. That's the exciting thing. And the main risk is your knowledge risk. You just got to know what you're going to do with it and be thinking out five years in advance.

That's the thing. And you know what else is really exciting, Daniel? This is how the small guy can end up selling out to the big guy, because we can buy these assets up, build them up, and then we sell out for much bigger numbers. Because with business valuations, what we learned all those years ago, and what everyone knows is,

once your business gets over a certain size, the multipliers jump up, and the big buyers start coming in like the private equity firms and the high net worths and stuff. And that's the really exciting space. So once you get over a million dollars with online businesses, it's a really interesting space for acquisitions and things like that and generating wealth because you can flip websites at a very high level. But that's why we love teaching people.

This is the way we get them to transition from corporate careers and stuff is you can't really lose by having fun with this doing like you're saying, buying these smaller niche sites that people have neglected. There's no real downside to you as the buyer because you're getting them cheap. You should, you know, you buy them small, keep under 50 grand, keep under $10,000 and just build them up, learn your digital skills that you need in this day and age anyway. And then you can hopefully sell out

at a much bigger price down the track or you keep for the cash flows. It's a really cool strategy if someone's looking to not immediately quit their jobs, you know, do as I guess you call it a side hustle, you know, over time. And that's where we've seen some absolutely fantastic success stories. I love this side hustle. I love when people tell me, you know, I was able to replace my income and then I'm left over. So when somebody comes to you with the nine to five or they're like, look, I hate working for this corporation, Matt, I know I have skills that I've been building, I want to leave what is like two or three things that either that I need to know or I need to do in order to leave?

Awesome. My favorite topic is firstly, don't quit your job because it gives you financial stability, which helps with your mindset. You've got to carve out time to learn first how this online space works. And my number one bit of advice just we've been coaching people for more than a decade now, we've got huge success stories with it. And the thing that we noticed gave the, gives the best result, the quickest is learn how to build a website and just understand how all this space works.

So like Nathan and Alexa, they could very quickly, cause they built lots of websites, they could very quickly look at that gardening site and go, Oh, I know how to renovate that. I know how to renovate that. I know how to fix this. We know how what to put here and how, and then more importantly, how we can monetize it. Most passion site owners don't really monetize very well either. So your first step is learn in the evenings, which is a lot of fun.

Stop watching Netflix for a while. Just turn off, you know, carve out a couple of days or in the evenings, treat it like a part-time diploma or something that you're going to study. And then the next step is, is, um, buy or build a very small site first where there's very low risk. So you can't really make too many mistakes, but the upside is, is huge. If you get it, even if you just get it to making a couple of hundred dollars a month, that's a major win.

Because believe it or not, the same skill that gets you that first couple hundred dollars a month is the same skill sets that we used on $10,000 a month websites. So learn and start small. That's probably my main bit of advice. So let's say they do those things. I'm fired up, my site's making money. I want to start buying other types of sites. Is there a certain place or way that you find these diamonds in the roughs or these sites or these digital assets that you find works the best either for you or your students? So we start everyone out on the world's biggest website, brokerage site now called flipper.com.

And the reason it's really good is because it does list sites under $10,000 that actually do make money. So you still need to learn how to do due diligence. Sorry, that's the other key step you should learn in life as well if you wanna get good at this is obviously due diligence. It's something that we made big mistakes on in the early days and particularly with bricks and mortar businesses. But that's the other beauty of going onto a place like Flippa.

You can start out small and do practice due diligence. There's lots of other website brokers out there. Now, obviously buying off a website brokerage means you're not always going to get the best bargains, but we do have clients that get amazing websites. So we just had a client recently buy a really cool snowboarding site for, I think it was $12,000 and it's making a thousand dollars a month semi passively. And it's all about snow at the topic of snowboarding. And it was started by an expert snowboarder and it's got a really good following. Um, and so you can't, and that was bought on flipper and no one else beat on it.

No one saw it because on flipper, the inside secret is the best listings on there are the ones that are in the classifieds. Once you know what you're doing, people seem not to hunt through those enough. They just look at the, it's like an auction site or the one that demonstrates all the statistics and everything. If you look in the classified listings, that's where you can find the diamonds in the rough. But once you get experienced and you've practiced, our go-to, our favorite strategy is still to this day, and it's how we bought bricks and mortar business is where we developed the strategy is literally what we call the private approach. In good old days, it was door knocking.

We'd drive around industrial areas where there's factories and things in the afternoons and we'd just go and door knock or go and identify businesses to see if they wanted to sell. We do exactly the same thing online. So we look for run down websites in our niches that we know, and we'll send them emails and say, Hey, would you be interested in selling? Uh, they'd even don't have to be run down websites, but when you know what you're doing and interestingly, people find this surprising, we don't even approach the sites that are on page one of Google or anything, often we go to like page five, six, seven, eight, nine, the really low ranking sites

because you can pick them up for bargain prices. And if you know what you're doing, you can fix them up. So there's lots of opportunities for private approach. Once you know what you're doing, that's for getting the diamonds in the rough of the bargains. Uh, so when, when you look at this private approach, I'm very fascinating. I've used Filippo before as well, but I at this private approach, I'm very fascinated. I've used Flippo before as well. Oh. But I like this private approach and going five plus into Google because I think I stop

at like maybe two. But yeah, right. Yeah, I mean, like the opposite. If you're already on page one, how much more upside is there? But if you're on page five, there's a lot of upside. So when you're looking at these, I would imagine that most people are one afraid to reach out for whatever reason, maybe they don't know what to say. And then two, how do you offer?

I would think that many of these sites are not making money. So if a site isn't making money, how do you know what to offer them? Yeah, it's a really good question. And I guess coming back to like Nathan and Alexa, it's a really, you know, they, they did exactly that. We look, the reason we go so deep into Google, like five to 10 pages back is there's, there's no competition there. There's no one else approaching those, but people just think those websites are dead,

which they kind of are a bit that little gardening site, literally the guy was just going to close it. He was just happy for 400 bucks just for someone to take it over. You don't always get that. Obviously some of those sites will be making money. It's, it is interesting. Some sites on page five still make okay money. Um, and people know there's always people that overvalue things, but

then we just gently educate them. If we can jump on the zoom and chat to them, what we say to them, look, we're real, we're cash buyers, typically we pay three times the zoom and chat to them, what we say to them, look, we're real, we're cash buyers. You know, typically we pay three times a profit and they say, well, I'm not making very much profit and go, oh, well, there you go. So it's not really worth that much. Do you want out or not? Um, and sometimes people are just happy to sell it for a realistic price.

If they're not realistic, that is the biggest problem. The challenge with this, um, if they're not realistic, we just move on to the next deal. That's, that's the bottom line. Being blunt about it. We, you know, you can't convince someone to sell their baby for, you know, if they think it's worth too much, but typically we will say to them, look, go and look at Flippa, you'll see what sites like yours are selling for. We're here private now.

We can do the deal tomorrow. That often gets people across the line. You say we here private now. We can do the deal tomorrow. That often gets people across the line. You say we're cash buyers. We'll do it tomorrow. You know, the money will be in the bank account. Um, we use escrow by the way, escrow.com, which is really handy way to, um, uh, buy websites when you're doing private deals, but in essence, that's how that's what we're doing.

I don't think people understand how important escrow.com is. Oh, okay. Okay, I'll take it for granted. But yeah, yeah. It's very good. Yeah, it's like in the old days when we buy bricks and mortar business, you put your money into the lawyer's trust account. Escrow is an online version of that where the money's held by escrow.com until both

parties agree that the assets have transferred and then the money transfers to the seller. So it works really well. We've been on six figure deals and we've had to back out of the deal and we've just said to escrow, no, we haven't proceeded with it. And the way escrow checks it with online business is actually really easy because they just see if the domain name's transferred transferred and if the domain name hasn't transferred, you can back out of the deal.

Yeah. These are things that, like you said in the beginning, these are the things if you, when you mess up, it could be huge. It could be a thing like that could be like you could lose a hundred thousand plus dollars, a thousand, some $3,000 could be a whole year salary for some people and depending on where they're at in the world So yep, you know leveraging these tools and I think now with with AI and the ability at least generative AI Create content like you could automate so many things You don't have to have a huge team or maybe they had a huge team that doesn't really need to be there anymore. You can really create a lot of profit or profitability. How are you looking at this? Yeah, that's this is the really exciting part. And obviously, this is rapidly evolving. I've

got to say even as we record this Daniel, even in the last two months, we are blown away in our in our team. We're all testing all the different tools because all of us in our team and our coaches, we all own content sites or buy and sell websites or variations of those. And we're using Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and we're all getting different results. And now we're using a combination of them all. It's very... Pat, it's a very exciting time. And the good news is already for us and our clients,

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with AI, but now it's the other way around. We can edit old human written content with AI and make it a lot better. So it's a really interesting space. And I'll just come back to something you said there when we're talking about escrow as well, just made me think, uh, like you said, things, if you don't know what you're doing, you can lose money if you're not careful, but this is the beauty of, if you're listening is please don't rush out there and buy a six figure website straight away or anything.

Just buy a little site under $5,000. That's normally our starting point for everyone. Why? Because you can, you can hunt around. There's always sites for sale on Flipper right now. There's probably hundreds of sites for sale. They're under 5,000 bucks. And that way you learn how escrow works and all those things work.

And jumping back to what Daniel and I are talking about now, if you've never used AI with websites on a $5,000 website, there's no downside. You can practice to your heart's content. That's a great place to learn how all these AI processes work. And you'll be very excited. We said, Daniel, we just ran a bootcamp this weekend where we run this challenge. It's really cool challenge where we get our clients. So the whole group is about a hundred people at this bootcamp.

There's an online bootcamp and they have to build a website and, and they've got 10 days to do it. So we started this a decade ago. Guess how long it takes now to build those websites by the next break. Fully done. Yeah. Literally 45 minutes to the next break, fully done. Yeah, literally 45 minutes to the next break. And whilst we're presenting, people say,

I've done it, have a look, and it's fully written. Not fully written, but it's got like the home page, your about page, and a few articles, because we say to them, you're allowed to use AI now. So we've got, and it's always the young people, all the millennials, sorry, the gen Gen Z is and stuff literally and I think the record the record for us was it wasn't actually this year it was last year was 10 minutes just drafted up done and and the site was about extreme ironing so really

niche we said go niche and and he showed us the keyword research it was volume for it everything apparently it's a sport, extreme mining, who would have thought. So in 10 minutes. So that's the power of learning these tools on small websites and getting out there and having ideas. So if you're a bit older like me, and you haven't grown up with computers,

again, I think this is a really important skill to learn for the future, the way the world's going. You need to learn how to use AI. Why, why wouldn't you use it? Learn it on your own little side hustle. I think that can be a very effective strategy for the future. Well, Matt, this is super exciting. Who would have thought about extreme ironing? I think you got me really excited because there's, I think there's so

many different niches, there's so many different niches, there's so many different things that people do that I would never think of, but have a, a very, it's like, you know, riches and the niches. Like it's like, it has a great community of people. They are hyper focused on it and they love it and they are passionate about following it, but there's barely anyone or places for them to even go yeah but this has been great I'm fired up I can't wait to join and I'm gonna go on to Google four five and six right now because I want to see if I can buy something this week that's my

goal almost using very small maybe maybe $400. Let's see if that works. Why not, right? But man, this has been really great. If you want to get in touch with you, they want to find out more. They want to join one of the boot camps. How can they do so? They just come to our website, ebusinessinstitute.com.au. It is a.com.au. We have lots of American clients on there though. And we've got a free masterclass. So we actually go through actual examples from students, recent buys, and we show our strategy of what we're buying, how we're buying them, how we're valuing them, and the sorts of niches that we're going into. So there's a free masterclass on there.

There you go. Free masterclass. How can you beat that? But Matt, this has been great. I'm very excited for the future and how many more people can be a laptop entrepreneur traveling the world, doing what they love, not having to work for corporations who maybe don't believe in them or don't give them the respect that they think they deserve. So I'm very excited for this, by the way.

Creating entrepreneurship creates a lot of revenue, jobs. It's the future. So I can't wait to see in a year from now how this is going. I can't wait to be a student and I wanna get started. So thank you for sharing that. And thank you for joining us today on Founder's Story. Thank you so much, Daniel, for being here. Real pleasure.

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