Online Business Owner.com: 60 Day Update
Behind the scenes of the acquisition and scaling of OnlineBusinessOwner.com
On November 15th, I finalized the aquisution of www.onlinebusinessowner.com. You can read the in-depth “analysis” if you want a little more on the backstory…
It’s been 60 days and as part of sharing what I share on this investing newsletter, I want to give you an inside look at how things are going and how things are built— not just simply from the past, but in the present.
Here’s just some of what we’ve done in the past 60 days since acquiring Online Business Owner.
We hired a team which consists of the following
Operator / Project Manager
Writer / Editor
Podcast Producer
Podcast Host
Supporting that team is a team of 5 other people which work on a various businesses in The Wisdom Group, that allowed us to keep costs and new hires minimal.
In order to hire the team, I decided that the former operator of the business, was the perfect pick and it has worked out well. My writer and editor was my old writer from a company back in 2018-2019 (he is now full-time), my Podcast Producer is the producer for a few other podcasts we own and the Podcast Host is a former client that is the perfect “face” for the Podcast relaunch.
We redesigned the brand which allowed us to go from this…
To this…
We redesigned the entire website and all the copy of the website, that allowed us to be more on-brand, we’re about to bring this redesign live, next week. Further, we’ve extended many parts of the website that we believe will be a massive value add such as the blog/articles, podcast and expert directory.
We decided that we would wait to launch social media and instead focused on the website, blog and digest, right now all social media is dormant.
We sent the first email to let the email list (20K~ subscribers) know of the future and what it looked like. It has a 35% open rate, which is great as it wasn’t engaged beforehand.
We had our email deliverability experts, build an entire 3 month strategy for moving away from Campaign Monitor to our preferred ActiveCampaign to help on deliverability (it helps that we own 25% of an email deliverability company).
We created an entire Content Partnership program and onboarded 20 content partners, that helped generate hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue along with providing amazing content to the community. At the beginning, we were going to do two packages, however, everyone selected the higher package so we simply went focused with one package.
We signed up over 50 contributors, which will allow us build more diverse content, along with allowing us to grow through the audiences of these experts, these came from my personal Facebook Page and directly curated by me.
We decided that we wouldn’t sell any sponsorship spots until at least May, this is due to the fact that the cost of what we can charge in 6 months from now will be far higher than now, when approaching companies, it didn’t feel as if it was a “right now” scenario.
We built the entire 9 stage (2 year~) plan and developed it into sub-sections, allowing us to focus on what is important now, however, the potential for all that we are building is absolutely massive.
My first sketch of this strategy via my iPad…
We raised $400,000 to help build the company, this was done by selling a revenue share plus exit agreement. This allows for 100% control of the company, locking up any profits for the first year and was raised by 3 of my current business partners (and happened via a Telegram message).
As simple as this…
We built deep operational systems and SOP’s
We built an entire framework for others to promote OBO, including swipes and social media graphics.
We completely redesigned how the digest (emails) would look and their format to be focused less on curation and more on expert direction (make sure you sign up by the way).
We created a partnership with Entrepreneur.com to be able to publish those who are content partners on their platform.
We have some EPIC project management systems, along with dashboards to keep us running smoothly.
We had a lot of those who will become content partners pay in full, allowing us to develop the infrastructure even more deeply.
We’re running about $20-25K/month in costs from the start, excluding the costs of resources for The Wisdom Group— this will double in about 3 months.
I could go on… as there is so much in “process” at the moment.
In total, I’m excited and like all things that I spent time, energy and money on, I truly believe in the potential of this to deeply help the millions of online business owners across the world.
The roadmap is massive, however, the team is strong, the brand is great and I believe we have pieces to make this really “happen”.
As we go into February and March, many of the other parts will come online, including the podcast, the full version of the digest, the expert directory, online community and many other things we have planned.
The goal is simple: To create “the” place for Online Business Owners, no matter what the stage of your business.
That’s the update— a lot has happened in 60 days and it shows just how quickly you can move when you have the vision, people, experience and capital to allow for it to occur.
Want more behind the scenes updates like this? Shoot me an email or comment below and let me know :)