My First Million - From $300k to $35M+ Selling Dog Ramps with Ramon Van Meer, CEO & Founder at Alpha Paw

Episode Date: October 21, 2021

Ramon Van Meer (@RamonVanMeer) joins Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) to discuss why he prefers to buy businesses rather than build them, his best tools for new business research, how to make sure you’re not buying a lemon, learning to code in a week, and much more. _____ * Do you love MFM and want to see Sam and Shaan's smiling faces? Subscribe to our Youtube channel. * Want more insights like MFM? Check out Shaan's newsletter. _____ Show Notes: * (00:56) - How to write a viral tweet thread * (06:40) - Why buying businesses can be better than building them * (14:58) - Ramon’s soap opera gossip website * (28:05) - How to make sure you’re not buying a lemon * (38:15) - How Ramon learned to code in a week * (42:50) - Shaan and Ramon play “would you rather?” * (49:30) - Shaan agrees to a boxing match with Sam _____ Links: * Centurica.com * Helium10 * Alpha Paw

There was a cup on the table, I remember. We were drinking water, a little paper cup. We were at this burrito place. And you were like, if I could buy this cup for five cents and sell it to you for seven cents, that's my passion. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off on a road. Let's travel.

Never looking back. Ramon, he is back. The guest from episode two, which was one of the best episodes ever. of this podcast. And then it was taken down for a bit. I don't know what happened. There was something. We got to take it down,

make a little edit. People started hitting me up. Hey, what happened to Ramon's episode? That's how much people cared. They wanted to know. People were just keep track because that episode still in the library.

Something happened. Some people noticed, which was amazing to me. And now you're Twitter famous. Yeah. As of today. Well, because of you and Sam. Yes, because you and Sam retweeted me

and I got like almost 8,000 followers. overnight. I went from 2000 to 11,000 within 24 hours. Wow. Well, it's not just because we retweeted. I refute a lot of stuff. You told a great story. I'm just actually going to, I'm going to find the hook here because you did a good job. Did Sam write this for you or did you have him edit this? Because this was so well done. I felt like you can't, this can't be your first thread and you started off this good on your first thread. How did that happen?

No. Well, it's Sam dripping off the whole tweet. So Sam actually. helped me, okay, this will work. This is the concept. This is a little bit like how you format it. Then he gave it a little bit like I would start with this. I will do it with this and I will explain that. Then of course I explained it. I sent it to him and he said like, yeah, this looks great. How would you have started it normally? And then I'll show, I'll read what the end result was. What would you have normally said? Or what do you remember what your V1 might have been? Yeah. Well, like you, you and I are friends. So you also know me personally. Typically, I would not start off with like I bought something for just little X and now we're doing Y.

I will not. Too braggy. Yes. But, you know, Sam said like, no, that's, you need to do that. And, you know, it's true as well, right? So why not just explain it? That's what people get people interested. And now I think we have 7,000 likes and a bunch of like a thousand plus tweets.

Here's what you said. You said, two and a half. years ago, I bought a dog ramp business for $300,000. Already interesting, what the heck is a dog ramp business. Since then, I've sold $35 million of dog ramps. Boom, that's the hook, right? Yes. This little thing turned into a big thing.

And then the promise, why you should read this thread. I'm going to explain why I bought it, how I scaled it, and why I bought a business versus starting from scratch. But first, dog ramps, question mark. And then that is, and then the little hand pointing down, like, come read more. that is you didn't take my power writing class but that is exactly what you would have been my star student in this if you had done this as the example because it has all three elements right what I call the frame I bought it for 300k and I've sold 35 million so that's the wow factor why should I pay attention to this and why do I stop scrolling right so you have a scroll stopping number 35 million dollars of dog ramps you have a curiosity gap which is what the heck is a dog ramp and how did this guy do it And then you have a promise, which is I'm going to tell you, A, B, and C, but first, dog ramps, which is like, you gave them a lightweight entryway that they have, even if they don't want to know how you bought it, while you scaled it, all the operational stuff, I do need to know what the heck, dog ramps, what the heck. And so beautifully done.

And then you tell the story. And the story is kind of amazing because people know that I don't talk about what my e-commerce business is, but they know that I have an e-commerce business. What they don't know is that it started because we were hanging out in your backyard. And we were talking and the whole time we're talking, your phone is just going, to ting, to ting. It's like the, and I didn't even know what this was. It's the Shopify. Shopify is like notification sound.

And you didn't even notice it because it's always just normal to you. Your phone was sitting on the table. And I was like, do you need to get that? Like what is that sound? And you go, oh, sorry, that's like sales. And I was just like, you know, people love this idea of make money while you sleep, like passive income. Oh, make money while you sleep.

That is a sexy idea. Yeah. This is even better. It was like, you were just chilling and having fun and money was just being made for you on the side and just like a little to Ching every five minutes. And it was literally in that moment, I was like, I'm going to do this. I'm going to start an e-commerce business because I can't sit here and just let Ramon have all the fun. This is too good. So you inspired me to do it for sure.

That's awesome. Yeah, I had to turn off that notification because it drove me crazy eventually. Like, ching, chiching, every time there's a cell. But it was fun in the beginning, almost like that, you know, endorphine release each. time. Exactly. And if you're on YouTube, if you're watching the YouTube channel, which is just, I don't know, what is it, YouTube.com slash My First Million, I think, or HustleCon, something

like that. Just search my first million on YouTube. You'll find it. But you can see the ramp behind Ramon. So he's got all the products behind you. So the company's called Alpha Paw. That's your thing. So we're going to talk about a couple different things.

I thought it'd be fun, have you on your substitute teacher for Sam. And like any substitute teacher, the class always has more fun when the sub comes in. So that's what we're going to do. I think we're going to talk about a couple things. I want to talk to you about kind of buying and selling, buying businesses rather than starting businesses. So how you do it and we'll go through some examples maybe of what's out there. And then we'll jump back and we'll dig into kind of like your story.

So how the heck you got started. But I first want to give the people and myself really kind of a crash course on this process of buying businesses. Because I was amazed when you told me you bought this business for $300,000. And did you buy this off? of Flippa or Quietlight or what did you end up buying this? Yeah, I bought this on a similar broker like Quiet Light. They're not around anymore, but it was a similar broker. Not as Flipa, but it's more of a broker.

And when you bought it, I was sort of like, what the hell? Like, who does that? I didn't even know anybody who does like off these like random websites. Like, I can see you buying something for a few thousand dollars, but 300 grand I thought was a lot. And I was like, dog ramps, what the heck? And you had told me then that you're like, yeah, the business is doing good. and the person really wasn't doing any marketing or they didn't run any Facebook ads, I think,

was the case. And so you just saw like a clear growth lever. So break it down, like, why do you do this? And then how do you do this buying businesses thing? Yeah, me personally, I think it's also like, what's your personal preference, what's your skill set? Some people are really good at going from zero to one are really builders. Others are really good at going from one to 10 and those are, you know, scalers. I'm not really good at building. I'm better at scaling. And so I like to, buy versus built because it gives you a lot more speed. It gives you history and data. And it's similar like real estate where I try to find crappy houses that you need to fix up, but in a good up-and-coming neighborhood, if that makes sense. Right. So good market. Yes, good market. There's a

market fit. You know, if this house was amazing, you would be able to rent this out for two, three, four times more than the current owner does. It's the same with websites. So I look for websites that have a good product mix, product fit, has history. It doesn't have to be going really well. I'm not looking for websites that are overly optimized. So I tend to not buy websites from other internet marketers because they already did all the things that I probably would do for it. So it's not really room for growth. What was the person like or what was the business? like when you bought the dog ramp business. So describe kind of what you saw and what made you decide. Yeah, I'm going to buy this one. Yeah, it solved a real problem. I wasn't aware that this is actually a

problem. I have a dog, but I have a pit bull. I don't have a small dog. Ben, so there's a real problem for a niche audience that you really can target on Facebook. Those were the good old days that you really could niche target still on Facebook. It had not a lot of competition at that time. Not a lot of people were promoting ramps on Facebook, Instagram, or even Amazon. The website was a very crappy websites where I knew that if we switched to Shopify, if we increase or improve the copy, the pictures, et cetera, the conversion rate will most likely increase. This case, the two founders were not doing any Facebook ads.

There was no paid acquisition happening at all. And even though they had a decent site customer database, They were not emailing even existing customers, let alone trying to capture, you know, a card abandonment. So this was a good market, which is pets. Yep. It's, you know, a house that you said, okay, if I renovate the kitchens, the floorboards, the countertops, which is like redoing the website and the branding of it, the copywriting. And then lastly, they're not even trying to rent it out.

They don't rent. They don't post it on Craigslist. They don't have flyers out in the neighborhood saying, come rent my place, which is they weren't doing paid advertising to get customers. So you saw it, you bought it, and you grew it. What's another example? So let's walk through some real examples. And then you tell me kind of like what you like or dislike about some of these businesses. Because I know you did some research on what's out there today.

Yeah. So for example, there's one out. It's sort of a crosswork puzzle website. So think of when I think a lot of people play these wards with friends games or Scrabble games. And then there's a website out there apparently that you can just put. your letters and it will give a bunch of words recommendations. Cheat codes website, yeah. Exactly. And I kind of love it because it's so, there's no, nothing to do. Like you, I think

there's probably a database that's already pre-billed that you can buy. You build it basically once, and then it's just trying to get SEO traffic, you know, to your website. So, for example, there's one for sell now for $9 million. They started it in 2017. It does $3.5 million. in revenue. And because there's no really team needed, it's like it's almost all profit. It's like three, around three million dollars of profit. And it's just, you know, printing money, basically. I like these type of niches where not a lot of people think about, but there's definitely a huge search volume. What would you do? So give me two pieces on that. So the first is with something like this, would you, how would you try to grow it? Or would you, would you not buy this because you say,

I don't know how I would grow this where I get a faster payback on my money. So what would you do? How would you think about the growth levers for this one? Yeah, that's a good question. I will personally not buy it at the moment because the price tag. Typically, I only buy things in a couple hundred thousand dollar range, not millions. Without knowing too much of the current business model, I definitely would try to increase RPMs, meaning how can we squeeze more advertising dollars out of the same traffic?

They get like tens of millions of visitors a month. And I looked at a couple of similar websites, and I think there's a huge opportunity by placing ads differently, just to increase RPM. Similar, if you have an e-commerce, you want to increase conversion rates. If you have a content site, you want to increase RPMs, meaning how to get more people to click on the ads or things like that. Right.

So I would do that. Secondly, I would look and do research like for sure, If there's a huge segment of people that love Scrabble, what is this like, what other games do they like? And maybe build a sub-assister website that does, I don't know, like what's it called? Sudoko or whatever. So that's the two things that I would, if I would buy this type of website. And basically, when you buy something like this, most people say, I don't have $9 million. And I think when you started doing this, when you first started looking at these,

websites, you also didn't have enough money to buy one of these. So tell the story of like how you first started going to these websites, even when you didn't have enough money to buy one of these companies. Yeah. I've actually bought and sold websites that started with buying something for $500 and sold it for, you know, $1,500. I started on Flippa 12 years ago. And, you know, I've bought a pinata website that sells pinyas. You can send a picture of Sam. It makes a pinata of him. Yes, a company in Texas would make a piada and then ship it directly to the customer.

So I bought that for $5,000 that I scraped together, improved the website, traffic, and made my money back in two and a half months, and then sold it a month later for $22,000. Right. So it's not huge numbers, but those really, you know, helped me to grow a little bit and really get a little bit. lot of experience. When I started soap hop, I actually saw a similar website for sale on FLIPA that was for sale for $100,000. It was in the daytime TV era too. And the topic was about daytime TV. Of course, I didn't have money. I had like a couple thousand dollars. I was not able to buy that. But what I did is like, hey, let's see if there's something there. Let's do a small test, build a fan page, see how the engagement goes, and then see if there is something there,

and then grow from there. I guess we should explain. You created, if people have listened to Episode 2, they know the full story. We won't go to the full story again this time. But your claim to fame, what Episode 2 is about is telling the story of how you created a soap opera content site, like a soap opera website that was basically just saying, hey, you're watching days of our lives or you're watching, you know, I don't know, the young and the restless. here's the recap, here's the spoilers of what's coming next.

You kind of built like a spoiler site for daytime soap operas with like who the heck thinks of that. And then you ended up selling it for nine or ten million dollars cash. And that's like an amazing, amazing exit. And this is from a guy who has never watched a soap opera episode in his life. So I think people love that because it was so, A, random, but B, interesting and relatable, how you did that. And it sounds like one of the ways you were getting business ideas was you were going on these websites. And I think you had told me at the time, you're like, I saw a website for sale that was also in the daytime TV niche that was like $100,000 for sale. And you were like, cool.

Like I don't have $100,000. But if this is worth $100,000, maybe I can make something like this. And then you went through this process where you said, okay, how can I test these ideas? Because when I met you, I was like, all right, what's your passion? You know, Silicon Valley style? And you were like, you know, what problem you really want to solve? What topic? What industry really passionate about?

And you were like, there was a cup on the table. I remember we were drinking, we were drinking water, a little paper cup. We were at this burrito place and you were like, if I could buy this cup for five cents and sell it to you for seven cents, that's my passion. Like I like to buy things and sell things for a little bit more. And I'm basically an internet marketer. And I don't care if it's cups or dog ramps or soap opera spoilers. It doesn't matter to me.

I love the process of like business and selling things. And I was like, that's amazing. You know, I love the sort of self-awareness and honesty. and then when you were testing ideas for before you created the soap operas site, you went on Facebook. And if I remember correctly, you basically made like 30 fan pages or something like that. Because at the time,

you could promote a fan page on Facebook for like cents. You could go get a bunch of likes of your Facebook page. And a lot of likes weren't worth too much, but you could kind of test what topics are people most engaged with. What topics if I post content in this page will I get a bunch of likes for? And I think it ended up. being like the top three were something like, what was it? It was like right wing politics, like soap operas. And what was it the last one? It was like wrestling or something like that.

Yeah. Wrestling was really popular. Soaps and politics, cars were also pretty high up. Right. And then you were like, you know, I hate politics. I don't want to do politics. What's the next best one? Soap operas, okay. Hire this woman in the Midwest to write blogs every day about soap operas and then drive traffic maybe. Let's go sell some paper cups. Exactly. And I just didn't really overthink it. I didn't wrote a business plan.

I just like went on Upwork.com. Hey, looking for a writer that can write soap opera spoilers. Put a very simple blog up just to test to see would people go from Facebook onto a blog and write a story. And that's how it basically started. And then, you know, started with 10 cents a day from making. from Google AdSense and then a dollar day and then $10 and that's how it grew. Right. Okay.

Let's look at a couple more deals and then we'll jump around again. So give me another one that you saw before you came on the pod that you want to talk about. Yeah. So this is one I just saw an hour ago. I just thought I was interested, interesting. It was a goat milk soap website. They sell goat milk soap. What the heck is that?

Yes. So apparently goat milk soap is a better for the environment and it's, better for, they say it's cruelty-free because apparently a lot of soaps, the traditional soaps, they do testing on animals, et cetera. So they claim, and like, forgive me for people that, you know, know about goat's milk soap. This is the first time I heard about it. And that's why that intrigued me. This could probably be a product that people that use this are very passionate about it, same like, you know, people that are into keto are super passionate. Or, You know, there's tons of these examples where it's a pretty small niche,

but people are so passionate that they will spread the war for you. So this is why website, you can find it on Flipa. Just search goat milk soap. And I'm looking at the listing. It says four years old, monthly profit, $20,000 a month. It's got a 29% profit margin. And it's selling at a 1.8x multiple, right? So, okay, so what is that?

So let's say 20 times 12. We don't do public math, but we do type things in to 40. 240 times 1.8. So it's selling for 400 something thousand. Is that right? Correct. 425 is the asking price. Right. Okay. Amazing. So walk me through. How do you think about something like this? Yeah. So first, I will do a little bit of research about the product. Does goat milk really work? Is it more of an gimmick? Or is it actually solved a problem? Or are people really, you know, interested? Is there a need for this? And again, if it's a gimmick, that's fine too, right? This is not like a, oh, the answers, no, we'll not buy it. It's just important to know. Right.

Back to the pinata example. Exactly. How many? Because it's very important too for like not all bit ideas have to be a hundred million dollar idea. Like I think a million dollar a year business is amazing as well. Right. So maybe goat milk soap is, you know, a very passionate niche product.

I will do research like, okay, how many people in the U.S. search for it? You can use Google Trends or you can use all kinds of search volume trackers that you can see how many people are searching for this keywords. I will look on Instagram. Are there like, is there a rabbit fan base, you know, like goat milk, you know, fans or Facebook groups? Then I will also look on Amazon. Is this sold on Amazon? If yes, how is the trend and what is the sales?

And then you can use a tool called Helium 10 to see how much revenue a listing is doing. It's, by the way, really amazing tool to do research. I do the same for pet products. I look what is trending on Amazon, what is blowing out the water as far as sales, and then I will do research if we should also start selling that. Then I look, of course, on the business stuff, like business is the trend up or down or flat. And also, like, most of the business I bought were either flat or down, because that's how, you know, you get, you know, a good deal.

So even if it's flat, even if it's not trending up, I still would, you know, potentially buy it. What is important are the traffic channels diversified? Is 100 or 90% coming from just Facebook or is it just emails or is it just SEO? That could be a little bit, you know, risky, especially if it's all paid traffic from Facebook because all the e-comer founders or listeners on this podcast will know, you know, Apple can make an update and suddenly, you know, they're paid traffic landscape change. So I'm looking for diversified channels. Then, of course, I look at revenue profit margins. So you can really calculate like, okay, if I pump, is this going to be more of an skill where I can pump more money into Facebook?

I put a dollar in. I get $3 back. Or is this more like of a long-term play? where I have to create SEO content that is less costly, but it's a longer game. And then also what's important to understand what you're buying are the trademarks, are their patents, is their email subscribers? So in this case, they have 43,000 email subscribers. There's 33,000 SMS subscribers. I think there's a social media. All these things, in my opinion,

are valuable because that's the same with when I bought Alpha Paul had a huge Instagram following, a huge Facebook following, they had an email list. They had trademarks and patent. All that was, you know, uh, included in the sale. And if you, those are great. Those are the assets. And so let's take a business like this. Let's say it's $400,000 listing. How does it work? You know, if you don't have 400 grand lying around, you know, in a briefcase like a, like a, you know, evil, evil genius. What do you, what do you do? How do you buy a business like this if you don't have 400 grand lying around? Yeah. So you can use SBA loans to buy internet businesses. SBA loan is basically a business loan, small business loan that I don't know when they started

a few years ago, where they now also fund internet businesses. And you can borrow up to 90%. So technically you can buy something that is for sale, for sale, for 400,000 and you only have to put down $40,000. And the interest rate is pretty low. It's anywhere between five and seven. So it's higher than a mortgage, but it's much lower than a traditional, you know, a business loan for people like us. Then the second thing you can do, when you see the asking price of $400,000,

you can always, there's a cash upfront offer. And then you can offer like, hey, I always. pay you $250,000 cash up front at closing. The remaining 150k, I will pay you spread out over the next 12 months interest free. So every time I buy business, that's never 100% 100% cash on closing. I always have 60 to 80% cash on closing and a remaining is either seller's note or an earn out. And that keeps the seller, you know, helpful because they're, you know, they need to help you out. Plus, it lowers the amount that you have to loan. So let's just say, let's just do a little loan calculator.

So the SBA loan is what, 10 year loan, something like that? Yes. So 10 year loan. So let's say you did the full amount, no seller financing just for simplicity. Simplicity here. So you put down 40K. You're going to take the other 360K as a SBA loan. And let's say you're paying 6% a year for 10 years.

So your monthly payment on that loan is going to be $4,000. This business makes $20,000 a month of profit. So you take the $20,000 a month of profit. You pay back your loan for four. You're left with 16K of profit every month right now. So you could buy this today and be making money. And so that difference, I'll say 16K, you only put down, you know, you only put down $40,000. So it only takes two and a half months for you to get all your equity back.

And then you're profitable every single month. then you could reinvest some of that into growth. So that's like a pretty sweet deal. And that's more than most people are making at their quote unquote safe job. Correct. And SBA, the beauty with SBA loans, they, of course, they look at your personal credit history and et cetera. But they really look and make a decision, the lenders on the business.

So they will never fund you if there's too high of a risk, right? If they think like, oh, if we cannot, you know, the borrower, cannot pay the interest month over month. So it's amazing, too. Actually, he spoke with Joe Valley from Quietlight Broker today, and he told me a story. There was a woman. She bought a business for $1.25 million with an SBA loan two years ago,

and just closed and sold the same business for 5.5, I believe. It was in the five range. But put only 10% down. So she didn't even put $200K down. But her return was, you know. Four million, yeah. Yeah. So if done right, you know, SBA loans is a really great tool, a good leverage tool to get into internet businesses or buy a business.

Amazing. Yeah. Yeah. It's one of the tricks. Now, what do you give people a sense of how do you know make sure you're not buying a lemon? Yes. That's, I got a question a lot. So when you go to flipper.com, I would be careful because flipper.com is a marketplace.

anybody can just upload their listing or their website and basically claim whatever. It's on you to do due diligence. If you go to a broker like quiet light brokers, they basically do all the vetting for you. They will look at the business, is everything legit? So the risk is much smaller. But regardless, if you're new to this, if you are, you know, it's your first business, you can hire a due diligence company, Centurica's, Centurica.com, is one. I think those are the biggest well known. You pay, you know, it depends on the listing

price, but it's as cheap as a couple hundred dollars and it goes up from there, but they do all the due diligence for you. They look through all the traffic. Is it legit? Is it legit? Is whatever, everything they claimed is it all legit? And then they can come back to you with like, well, we looked at all the data, all the numbers. You bought it for 1.2, but we think it's actually worth 900K because these are the reasons. So definitely recommend going with the due diligence company Lexingtonergo. Gotcha. Okay. And give, okay, so these are business you could buy. What was the first kind of like, how the heck did you become you, right? So how are you figuring out how to do this? Give people kind of the, not, not, you don't go deep into anyone, but just describe kind of the journey

and then I might poke into some that sound interesting. So, okay, you're, you're, you're born. I don't know, I don't know when you got your entrepreneurial start. What was the first kind of like entrepreneurial venture? Were your new teens or 20s or what? My first real business was an construction business. I've done things before that, but it were like nothing really significant. But I think the way how I started the construction company is really my DNA, if that makes sense. Because if I look back, a lot of other companies, I started basically the same.

I didn't know anything about construction. And the story, I will keep it very quick, but I think it maybe could be helpful for people that maybe are overthinking steps or overthinking things. I was out of a job, was 20 years old, had to pay my rent, co-work of my mom, said, I need a painter to paint the inside of my house.

I can pay you X. I forgot the number, but it was like a month's worth of money that I made in three days. So I thought, oh, this is amazing. I can, you know, be my own boss. It's a lot of money. The harder I work, the more money I make. That was really what they treat me, right? Like, if I can do this in one day, I will actually, you know, make the same amount of money than in a whole month. So you got paid on your output, not your input. Correct. And as you know, like in my high school,

drop out, right? So there was not that's... What year did you actually drop out? officially 15, but I stopped really going when I was 14. Okay, so that's basically ninth grade, right? That's the U.S. 9th grade. I don't know what it is there. Okay. My mom actually got a letter from the boards of school with an official waiver, like, okay, your son doesn't have to go to school,

because in Holland you have to go to school mandatory to 16. They actually gave me a pass because no high school wanted to accept me. But that's a different story. Such a good guy. on Sunday night, she paid me out, I said, this is amazing. So on Monday morning, I came up with a name, house improvements or home improvements, one of those two, built some, designed a couple very ugly business cards, made a one-page website, and put an ad out on the Dutch version of Craigslist.

And I thought, you know what, let's just not do only painting, let's do like, we do everything. construction like remodeling from A to Z whatever I thought like you don't know how to do any of that by the way no no I don't know anything I barely was able to pay so what gives you that confidence to say I'll renovate everything A to Z and yet I don't know how to do anything A to Z I think that's the naive thing part of me that I still have is like let's just see first if I can get a job and then figure out like how to solve or do the job and so an hour later or two hours later I got an email from a guy saying, hey, I'm looking for an electrician. And I am rewiring the whole building, blah, blah, blah. I say, sure, no problem. I will see if the one. I'm a ninth grade dropout.

I'll be there in three hours. I got this. I went out to bought an official construction outfit. So I really looked like a construction guy or like, you know. And I went there the next morning. And disclaimer, of course, I will not have done things that will, you know, potentially kill people. But I just wanted to see like, you know, I don't know, like maybe it was something simple. So he gave me the tour and it was like, I couldn't even understand the words he were saying like, oh, we need to wire this and we need to do it. And the floors were open and the walls were open. And I was still playing along, but in my mind, I was like, there's no way I can do this. Plus, it's dangerous as fuck.

He went out to run some errands. I waited for him because I didn't want to be like, you know, an asshole just go, let's. So I waited for an hour. He came back and I was like, listen, I'm going to be honest. I don't know shit about the construction company. I don't know shit about Electra. I just started yesterday.

I want to build a construction company, but I don't know anything. And he was, because he was an entrepreneur, he laughed his ass off and he actually gave me work. He said, like, you're hilarious. Just help me with, you know, getting, you know, supplies. Yeah. And he paid me the same amount of dollars or euros hourly rate than he would have done before. I think also, by the way, if we have young listeners, I think it's so important to do those things when you're young.

Because if I would do it now, I'm 40 years old. Not endearing. I don't think it's not endearing. It's not like, oh, I. appreciate your hustle. No, it's like, hey, you're a con man. Yes. So if you're young, take advantage. You know, Sam was also really genius of doing that as well, right? Like, you can't just get away with so much more of showing hustle. But also, like, I think he appreciated that I waited for him and just be like honest. Like, hey, listen, I don't know shit about this. But he gave me a really good tip. He said, in order to own a construction company, you don't have to know everything or do yourself. If I were you, find freelancers. You focus on getting the projects and then you outsource it to freelance.

So that's what I did. And found an electrician, freelancer, plumber, you know, everything you need, a whole crew that you need. And two weeks later, I got a second job. And I didn't do anything. I just had my... Dispatched someone there. Yeah.

Yeah. I sold it for 10K. My cut was like around 5K. and that's how I basically grew the construction company. And within a year, a little over year, we were like a 20 to 24 people, depending on how many projects we had. And at that time, we did close to a million dollars

or million euros, sorry, a year in revenue. And you're like 19, 20 years old, something like that at that time. Yeah, 21 when we were a year in. And so what happened to that? Happy ending or sad ending to this story? Well, very quick, maybe story about how I scaled. The scaling part, I think it's also could be helpful for people, is that the big problem with construction is every, like, the job is two weeks and you have to find another job.

The job is four weeks and you have to find another job, right? So it was really hard to keep the guys busy and really, you know, make sure that the projects align, if that makes sense. So I thought, hey, who can I find, what can I do so I don't have to find jobs. jobs anymore. Real estate investors, they buy apartment buildings all at once. They all need to be renovated at once. So I went to local real estate meetups. That was actually horrible because I was a really out of my place. I was way too young. I was like a blue collar guy with all these fancy pants. But one thing leads to another that I met the biggest real estate investor in my region that I

lived and he was like literally built buying apartment buildings at the foreclosure every month between 20 and 100 buildings at the time. So now he became my client and he was my client to the end, basically. I never had to search for a new customer. So that was all the good news. Then I made a bunch of mistakes. Cash flow projection was one where construction you really, it's a similar, a little bit similar like with e-commerce, I think you could grow yourself into bankruptcy, if that makes sense. Making, for example, you with a construction, same with e-commerce, you have to put a lot of money up front. I have to pay every Friday the crew. I have to buy the supplies, but I only get paid all the way at the end when the project is done. So the faster you grow, the more projects you have,

the more money you have to put out in the open and you have to wait for it. So that started, that was really, and I was just not good at cash flow projections. Well, I just didn't do it. And another thing that really was bad was growing too fast that I have to hire. People that I normally would not have hired and really lost grip of the business. That makes sense. And, you know, it started to break. And I had to close the company after three years, more or less.

And our mutual buddy, Suli, was at my house this weekend. And he said something like, I don't know if maybe you already, maybe this is the guy you already talked about. But he said, he said you had some like mentor kind of help you early on, somebody who really changed the course of your life. I don't know. Is he talking about that guy who gave you that first kind of insight to hire freelancers or is there somebody else that he's talking about? No, it is a different story. Okay, tell that one. All right.

That story was before my construction company. I was almost 18 or around that time. my mother kicked me out the house. You have to figure your shit out. So I have to pay rent. So I had to find a job at a local Best Buy, the Dutch version of Best Buy. A couple weeks in, I said like, this sucks, right?

Like long hours, whatever. And there was a guy coming in in a nice expensive suit. He wanted to buy something. Was not in stock. He gave me a business card and said like software solutions. and I didn't know anything about software or programming or whatever, but I knew... Or solutions. Or solutions, whatever.

I didn't know anything. But I just knew like, okay, hey, there's a lot of money to be made and a lot of opportunity in... Because this was like the early Internet days, right? Like, you know, I'm an old fuck, right? This is like before 2001, before the Internet bubble, if people remember. And so I didn't know what he was doing, but it was. something in software and solutions. And you knew it was good because he came in in a fancy suit or you separately had been thinking

about the internet? Separately been thinking about because I always was like trying to, you know, oh, let's buy this type of product in Germany and then tried to sell it in Holland. Like I was always trying to build these, doing these schemes, legal, of course. But internet was just like this whole new, like for me, my, like, this was like amazing. There's so much opportunity. And so I knew that. I just didn't know like exactly what, how to get started, how to even, you know, write a line of code or whatever.

So I started stalking him. I said, hey, and this is again the benefit of being young. Like, hey, I want to get a job at your company. And he said, we're not hiring. But I kept stalking him respectfully, but I did talk stalking him for months, like three, four months. to a point where he said, you know what, I'm so sick and tired of this in a good way. Let's make a deal. If I'm going to give you a book, on Friday, we have an internal exam for programmers.

If you pass that exam, the company will hire you and give you a six months internal program to become a Microsoft developer. But you have to promise me if you fail this exam on Friday, you have to leave me alone for the rest of your life. That's okay. Let's do it. they know what it was expect. He gave me a book about Microsoft Database Access Access Database Program. Study that if my life was depending on it, did exam, and I passed. I didn't pass A-plus, but I passed enough.

And so they gave me a job. And for the next six months, they trained me. I was able to become a Microsoft software developer within this company. They gave me a lease card. They gave me a laptop. They gave me, like, phone. Like, it was insane. So this guy really changed my life because I think learning how to code really is helpful also in other ways in your life.

Like, because it really, you analyze problems in situations just different if when you know how to code. That makes sense. And you're, but today you don't consider yourself like a coder, like let's say for your e-commerce website. You're not the one going and making changes. Do you do it like sometimes? early on before you hire people, do you just do stuff yourself or no? You're just saying learning it back then and using it back then and learning how to think that way was helpful.

Yeah. And at that time, I had to learn visual basic. That language doesn't even exist anymore. So it's like I know how to read PHP and HTML and, you know, I know how to do it, but I'm like, I never do it, basically. I think it's more of breaking down what was so frustrating if it's a programmer, like finding bugs. So you have like, you know, a 10,000 line code. And there's one thing breaks. You have to go through like all the codes. But it really trains your brain like,

okay, how to really try to narrow down what it could be and where the problem could be. And that mindset you can use in all kinds of other, you know, real life situations. So I don't a program right now. Okay. Fair enough. And we got five minutes left. You had a game you wanted to play at the end. Let's do the game. Okay. So I wanted to ask you, it's very silly. And why did you want to play this game, by the way?

Because I think your audience would like to know these questions like, would you rather? So to root your rather. Let's give the people what they want. Yes. All right. So here's the first one. Would you rather be the CEO of Apple or the president of the UFC? Ooh, okay.

President of the UFC, like Dana White, too much travel. I'm traveling. I'm on the road all the time dealing with all kinds of event planning. Like when I threw my wedding, I was like, this is the only event I'll ever throw like this. And for the UFC, every weekend they throw, you know, a mega wedding. So no way I'm doing that. I also wouldn't really want to be the CEO of Apple. So I'll take the job.

I'll go buy your company for half a trillion. I'll buy my company for half a trillion. And then I'll peace out. All right. That's awesome. I saw this on a meme, actually. Would you rather have dinner with Jay-Z or take $500,000 cash? $500,000 cash, easy.

What would you do? Would you take dinner with Jay-Z? I feel like you might be a, I want a unique experience person, no? Yeah, I will take the cash to it. There was a whole debate, like people saying, like, you should take Jay-Z because he's going to let's say $50,000 cash, $50,000 cash, I think is a closer bet here. Yeah. Then I will, in the situation I'm right now, I will.

take the dinner. If I had no money, I will take the cash. Right. Yeah, yeah. I'm in the same boat. I think the dinner is most likely going to be kind of lame, but, you know, I get a good story. Who knows? Maybe maybe we hit it off. Maybe he's interesting. $500,000. That's, you could go buy your charity dinner with Jay-Z for $90,000 and have the rest left over for goods after that.

Or you can buy a goat milk soap website. Yeah, exactly. I mean, with the 500. That's the question. Would I rather have that goat milk business? business today or just dinner with J.C. tomorrow. I'll take the goat milk business today. Thank you. Yeah. Let's do which rather, which rather bootstrap bootstrap a million dollar business or VC back 10 million year business. I think I would rather have a VC back 10 million dollar year business. I'll tell you why. I think that once you can get a business to 10 million dollars, I think the odds of

you being able to get it to 50 or 100 are quite high. I think Z. zero to 10 is a lot harder or more likely to to round down to zero, then 10 will stay at 10. So I think 10 million, really what you're saying is, hey, just stick with it for a little bit longer and you'll be at 30, 40, 50, 70, something like that million within two, three years. So I think that's the case. And then I'm actually, a lot of people think VC means your VC forever and that you're in this endless chase. They're like, well, the VCs say you need to grow. the VCs say, you know, you'll have to raise your next round. My experience with VCs has actually been quite different, which is VCs give you the money.

They might want you to do something, but it's your call what you do. And like, you can raise one round and never raise again from VC or you can raise one round and grow at the pace you want. They might strongly advise you to do something, but it's on you to say, look, are you going to fire me? Do you have the power to do that? Are you going to fire me? If not, then I'm going to need you to, you know, shut the fuck up and stay in the backseat

and like, let me do what I'm going to do here. So I think the $10 million business is just better than the bootstrap to $1 million. Then very quick, for the listeners that have an idea, but not the capital, would you tell them to try to get VC money or try to get the company started, get some revenue and then do the VC route? Yeah, I mean, this is going to sound cliche, but it's true and whoever is doing this needs to hear this, which is, the raising money is not the is not the goal like so a lot of people are like hey I want to talk to you like I'll invest in a company and they'll say I want to talk to you about you know what metrics we need to do to be able to raise an A in nine months or you know we're starting planning for our series B I want to talk to you about what metrics we need to do to hit the B and I'm like I understand what

they're saying and it's good to be thoughtful and plan but there's a sort of implication that raising money is the milestone. And it's like, oh, what business? What does this business need to do to be able to achieve this outcome? And it's actually the opposite. It's, I have a business outcome I'm trying to get to. I'm trying to get to $10 million in revenue with 20% EBIT. I'm trying to get 20% market share in this market or 5%.

I want to grow 20% a month. You have a business outcome in mind. And then you just say, do I need more money to make that happen? Yes or no. Money is the fuel. It is not the destination. It is not the point. of the journey for raising money.

And so I would just say like, yeah, when you start, when you have the idea, the goal is, okay, well, I need to get like one customer, 10 customers, 100 customers, 1,000 customers. You start doing that. And then at some point, if you get stuck because you lack the money, meaning you truly, you need to go buy inventory or your paid ads are working. You just need to spend more to get to the next milestone. Then you raise the money. Don't raise, don't raise as your excuse to go do the business.

Yeah. And you also see a lot of deals or people approaching you and, you know, me in a little bit lesser way. But I do feel like there's a lot of people think they need money to launch a business, but actually don't. Because they think, oh, it needs to be pretty or it has to have all these functionalities. But maybe they could just like start with one functionality and just have, you know, a fiber designer, just do it. And, you know, do it. And, you know, do it. it's at least get started. Yeah, my favorite people to fund are people who have created a company and like made all the mistakes, ended up with a small win where they got a taste of winning, but you know, not not enough to go retire on a yacht. Because the next time they start, they're like not going to waste those six months on design mockups and branding and getting the trademark and all this other stuff. Like they know what are the traps and they know what you really need to do versus what you think you need to do. And there's a big gap there. usually even if somebody tells you, experience is the best teacher because the voice in your head,

typically, from most entrepreneurs I meet, the voice in your head typically is giving you some bad advice your first time through. And it's okay. Like, just go do it, learn those lessons. And then the second time you're much better off. Yeah, I agree. Then last question, would you rather do a boxing match against Sam or do an Ironman with me and Suley? both I'd rather do the boxing match with Sam because that sounds more fun and exciting than like an endurance race but yeah so I would do a boxing match with Sam I think that'd be great you know I've always wanted to like feel what it's like to be in a real fight like I think I got into like one or two little altercations when I was younger like in high school or middle school but it was always like I hit the kid and then he he ran away or like yeah he hit me and then it got broken up and it's like, it never was like, okay, let's do this. Let's get, let's start. No one's going to break this up.

And the point is to actually get in a fight. So I would do it, although Sam is definitely like, you know, on horse tranquilizers or whatever, like horse, you know, growth hormone or whatever he's taken. That guy's built like an absolute monster right now. So, you know, I need a little training period, but I would do it. Actually, a lot of people, because he's been posting videos of me and him sparring. You know, he wants to become a business influencer now. To his credit, by the way, he posts videos of you hitting him and him going down.

Normally when people post a cherry pick what makes them look good, he does the opposite. He posts of you hitting him at liver shots and him falling down over and over again, a compilation. Yeah. And also to his credit, he started four or five months ago. Not super serious, not that he's doing it every day. But he actually got really good, really fast. You know, I've been training much long. But a lot of people on the Twitter comments actually are voting for you versus Sam.

So maybe we should give the fans what they need. Let's give the fans what they want. Yeah. We need like a Kickstarter or GoFundMe or something. It's like if certain number of people vote for this or buy the pre-buy, a pay-per-view, $5 pay-per-view of this, we'll do it. We need like whatever, $10,000 pre-bys. Okay.

10,000 pre-bys, that's the goal. 10,000 pre-bys of a $10 pay-per-view and then we'll do it. Okay, let's set it up. And then you can hear you come here to Austin. Give me like, I don't know, four months to train. And we'll fulfill the training. Four months to train.

Yeah. 46. Each one can get one good trainer, boxing trainer. Do you do what you want to do boxing or MMA or? No, boxing is simple. I don't have time to learn five martial arts. So we'll get to the point where we're both shitty at boxing and then we'll do it.

Yeah, let's do it. I think we should do it. And then maybe Suli and I can box too as the pre-lilms. Yeah, we should get. On the card. It's a CEO boxing tournament. Yes. And we stream it.

And we do it in a really small ratchet like boxing gym here. So we can go there. And then we'll just stream it for the people. 10,000 pre-bys. That's a lot, but I think it's doable. I think it's doable. I think it's doable. Especially if we can get to support of your listeners.

Yeah, we're saying it now. People will just have to see. We'll just have to get them a link. And let's get him a link and let's do it. Yes. All right. I can't wait. All right. Perfect.

Okay, I got to run. I got to do a call with this guy. Ramon, thanks for being on. Where should people find you? So now your Twitter famous. So is it Ramon Van Meir? Is that your Twitter handle, right? Actually, I feel so dumb.

I don't know, actually. Let me see. because I barely used it since until yesterday. Yeah, at Ramon Van Mere, all together. At Ramon Van Mier, go by. If you have a small dog, like I have a multi-pooh, I have four of your ramps in my house because it's a lifesaver. Otherwise, your dogs get, like, you know, injured backs

and they're jumping off couches and stuff like that. That's like, imagine jumping onto something or off of something that's three times your height, right? That's what they're doing. And so these ramps are onto the bed. onto the couch, upstairs. You know, that's how I use them. So go by some ramps from Alpha Paul.

Thank you for the plug. Thank you. It was good talking, and I see it at the boxing match. Amazing. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. On a road, let's travel, never looking back.