Famous Five:
- Favorite Book? – The Power of Habit
- What CEO do you follow? – Elon Musk
- Favorite online tool? — Slack and Gmail
- How many hours of sleep do you get?— 8.5-9
- If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – “Keep going for it”
Time Stamped Show Notes:
- 01:04 – Nathan introduces Stephan to the show
- 01:56 – Stephan bought Samples.com 3 years ago and Getitfree.us for 6 figures
- 02:31 – Everything started with Samples.com
- 02:48 – Stephan left Switzerland when he was 19 and spent 10 months living in tent
- 03:31 – Stephan and some of his friends were running ad campaigns on the internet
- 03:55 – Everything is lead generation with Samples.com
- 04:03 – They acquire users for $1 and they get $1.25 in return
- 04:30 – Stephan was making a 20-30% margin at first
- 04:59 – One of their large clients called and asked for more targeted leads who offered $8
- 05:46 – Stephan came out with a decent approach to find targeted leads
- 06:22 – Stephan was spending $10K for ads
- 06:51 – Stephan had a business partner and they had some cash flow to begin with
- 07:14 – The model of Samples.com was good because they can get their ROI fast
- 07:34 – Samples.com is still running
- 07:55 – Stephan continued the question asking model for the targeted market and scaled it
- 08:26 – The lead value is more of a composition of all the answers
- 08:46 – 2016 total top line revenue was $39M and total ad spend was around $20-25M
- 09:18 – Samples.com currently has 25 people
- 09:25 – Stephan spent the bottom line money on investing on the Zeeto site
- 09:42 – Stephan is currently breaking even with Zeeto
- 09:55 – Stephan still gets his salary from the company
- 10:23 – Zeeto’s model is taken from Samples.com’s question-model
- 11:10 – Zeeto is similar to Google Adsense
- 11:20 – Regular CPMs from Adsense range from $5-20
- 11:33 – Zeetos’ CPMs range from $400-2200
- 12:00 – From Nathan’s research, podcasters earn $15-20 CPMs
- 12:11 – Nathan shares how he asks his advertisers about their CAC and his audience
- 12:44 – With Google Adsense, there will be around 3 ads per page
- 13:27 – The technology around Samples.com and Zeeto is considerably pretty hard
- 14:43 – Facebook and Google has all this data regarding leads that other big companies don’t have
- 15:13 – Zeeto’s goal is to help publishers have a better revenue model
- 15:21 – Zeeto’s product has just been launched
- 16:32 – Stephan sees Zeeto as an additional feature to the paywall
- 17:01 – Zeeto is incremental
- 18:18 – It will be more complicated for Zeeto to write questions for each of the articles rather than by being an addition to the paywall
- 18:24 – “Questions are built to be more broad”
- 18:59 – Stephan doesn’t know what is really going to work yet
- 19:25 – Stephan’s goal this year is to see where they’re going to fit in
- 19:50 – Anything that will drive people to the web will work well
- 20:19 – Stephan’s sample call-to-action
- 20:34 – You can make custom questions fitted to the website
- 20:46 – The goal is to optimize questions for the best response rate
- 21:22 – Zeeto was built from scratch
- 21:54 – Nathan struggles with which of his advertisement he should show to his new subscribers
- 22:00 – Nathan sends them an email autoresponder
- 22:27 – Zeeto has a user group that has interesting attributes
- 23:07 – 3 advertisers are not enough to do it efficiently
- 23:14 – Zeeto now has 200 advertisers
- 23:37 – Zeeto is completely free and they’ll send a check for the revenue share
- 25:05 – The Famous Five
3 Key Points:
- It’s easier for people to give out their details in exchange for something free.
- To collect your targeted leads, you need to have focused questions.
- Stay encouraged and Just keep going for it!
Resources Mentioned:
- The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences
- Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE
- Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience
- Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments
- Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible
- Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books
- Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives
This post first appeared on Why You Should Turn Down A $14m Acquisition Offer With Derek Blueford, please read the originial post: here