What's up, everyone? This is Cortland from IndieHackers.com, and you're listening to
the IndieHackers podcast. On this show, I talk to the founders of profitable internet
businesses and I try to get a sense of what it's like to be in their shoes. How did they
get to where they are today? How did they make decisions, both at their companies and
in their personal lives, and what exactly makes your businesses tick? And the goal here,
as always, so that the rest of us can learn from their experiences and go on to build
our own successful online businesses.
In this episode, I'm excited to be talking to Dominique Wells, the creator of a company
called Human Proof Designs. Dominique came onto the IndieHackers website last August
and shared the story of how he scaled his one-man operation into a million dollar business
with almost a dozen employees. So I'm super excited to have him on the podcast to tell
a story.
Dominique, welcome to the show.
Hi, thanks for having me.
Thanks for coming on. So I got to ask, what's it feel like to have come on this journey
where you're the head of a one million dollar business? I think you said you're projecting
to do 1.3 million in 2018. What's that feel like?
I don't know, it doesn't necessarily feel that real at times. Like, when you first start
out, you think, wow, I'd love to I'd love to hit that range, or even half that range,
maybe even a quarter of that range. But when you're actually there, you just think, oh,
that's not how I was expecting it to feel. And it just feels like a large number. Don't
get me wrong, it's definitely a good feeling.
So you're not quite Scrooge McDuck diving headfirst into a pool full of money every
day.
No, that would be that would be interesting.
Your business is making over a million dollars a year, you said you would have been satisfied
making just a quarter of that. So what were your goals in the beginning when you were
first starting out?
It was more about the freedom than the money as such, although obviously, you know, the
money was the the tool to getting the freedom. So I didn't have particularly lofty goals.
I just wanted to be able to do this full time and make more money than I was making at the
time. And I think at the time, I was only making about 1500 to 2000 US dollars a month.
So I think I would have been satisfied with around say 3000 US a month. And I remember
saying to myself, if I get past that say 5000 a month, then I would just sort of hire someone
to run the business for me. And then I'll just go off and do whatever I want. And yeah,
so it was more just to have some comfortable amount of money and then the freedom to just
be location independent and financially stable.
So now you are in this position where you're clearly making a lot more than $5,000 a month,
you have the freedom at least financially to do whatever you want to train someone to
sort of replace you. But you haven't done that. Why not?
I have to some extent like if I if I wanted to say take one to two weeks off work without
the business, you know, without the wheels falling off, I think that's very durable.
The reason I don't is because well, I'm not sure what else I would do with my time. But
I think you you get used to working and you get used to the income levels. So even though
I'm doing more than those goals back then, I've leveled up my lifestyle. So I guess my
expenses are higher as well. So that you know, that keeps me working because I got to keep
keep making sure that everything is working and managing all of those expenses. But also
it's you know, you enjoy the work you do. And you kind of get addicted to growing the
business and you get addicted to maybe in my case, launching new services or just achieving
new goals, for example, being on more podcasts or speaking at conferences or hitting financial
goals. And so it just kind of drives you to keep going. And when you get there, you think
well, actually, I don't really want to just sort of, you know, take time off and go and
play golf every day because I get bored doing that.
Yeah, it's funny before you've really built the thing that you want to work on. It's easy
to look at it in almost a disconnected way. Just look at it as a means to an end or I'm
going to build this company and it's going to allow me to be free and then I'll go do
something else. But once you actually put years of time into building the company, it
becomes the end and you actually enjoy building the company and working on it. So that's something
that's pretty common for me to hear. And I don't think I've met very many people who
just exited themselves from their business and truly enjoy just not doing anything.
Yeah, I think if I was going to exit, it would be to do something else. You know, I'm only
33. So what am I going to do with myself?
So we've spent some time talking about your motivations and how you feel about the level
of success that you've reached. We haven't even talked about what your business does
yet. What is human-proof designs?
So we do some services for affiliate marketers. Basically, Done For You services is probably
a more accurate description. That includes Done For You website building, article creation,
SEO stuff, as well as the services. We have a training element. We have a course. We have
the blog with a lot of content. We have our own podcast. And then people who buy our sites
get access to a lot of training as well.
I think you're the first person that I've had on the Indie Hackers podcast who's working
in the affiliate marketing space. Can you explain to the audience what affiliate marketing
is exactly?
Yeah, it's basically... I think the easiest way to understand it is to think of Amazon.com.
And they have an affiliate program where they will basically pay you a commission if you
send them a customer.
So what affiliate marketers do, a common strategy is to build a website around a certain topic
and rank it at the top of Google and then review and recommend products. So one of my
first websites that I succeeded with was about shaving. And I ranked a website at the top
of Google for various search terms like best straight razor or what's the difference between
a straight razor and a safety razor.
And then those keywords, I would have articles that answered people's questions and recommended
various different razors which were available on Amazon. And then people would search for
those terms, they would read my article, they would click over to Amazon to check out the
products I recommended. And some of them would buy those products and then Amazon would send
me money.
Yeah, I think affiliate marketing is fascinating because if you think about all the different
aspects of running a business, building a product and researching what people are going
to like and how the product should evolve with what people's needs are, marketing that
product, selling that product, distributing it through various channels, et cetera, affiliate
marketing sort of takes that list and crosses out half of it.
You don't have to build a product anymore. You don't have to really figure out what should
go into the features, the details of that product because you're just selling somebody
else's product. You're selling somebody else's razors in your particular case. And I don't
think this is really talked about enough in sort of circles of people who have the skills
to build something. If you're a programmer, for example, you sort of just take it for
granted that you should build your own product. But a lot of times you end up focusing on
building to the detriment of marketing and sales. And I think getting into affiliate
marketing is a good way to learn a lot of those other skills because really you have
nothing else to do with your time besides focus on those things.
Yeah, definitely. And I think it's also a good way of researching more about opportunities
because in various niches that I'm involved in, I can tell what gaps there are in the
market because maybe I look for products to recommend and there isn't anything or I review
something and realize maybe it's not the best solution. So if I had the skills to then create
that solution, then I would stop promoting somebody else's product in that particular
niche and promote mine instead.
One thing that's worth discussing about affiliate marketing is that it gets kind of a bad rap
in some circles. I'm sure some people in the end right now are thinking to themselves,
oh god, not affiliate marketing. Isn't that just full of scammers and spammers and lazy
get rich quick schemers? What do you say to that?
No. I mean, yeah, for sure there are those people out there and I guess the affiliate
marketing or the kind of wider internet marketing industry has probably a higher percentage
of them than other areas. But to do affiliate marketing correctly, to actually make money
and not just try to make money and then fail miserably, you have to be honest. You have
to recommend products that are actually good. You can't just make stuff up and Google's
getting a lot better at detecting sites that are scanning and a lot of like Amazon kicks
people out of their program if they don't write authentic reviews and so on and so on.
So 10 years ago, I would have said it's a much higher percentage but I think that percentage
gets smaller every year. So there's nothing wrong with just writing an article that helps
someone make a purchase decision if you're being honest about it.
Yeah, exactly. There's nothing wrong with that at all. And I wonder what affect the
fact that being an affiliate marketer means that you don't necessarily need to create
your own product, you don't need to know how to code, just lowers the barrier to entry.
And if you lower the barrier to entry, then of course you're going to get more people
of all sorts and types, including some of the people who don't care at all about being
good actors.
Yeah, for sure. And I think how the internet and internet marketing evolved over the last
sort of 20 years in terms of people selling info products, I think info products became
this kind of thing where people realized, oh, it's quite easy to make money selling
info products. And I think a lot of them didn't really know what to sell info products about.
So they sold info products about internet marketing. And there's a lot of gurus out
there who basically just spun up these junk products promoting affiliate marketing. And
so that attracted a lot of these kind of get rich quick people who didn't really know the
difference between doing it correctly and doing it incorrectly.
But I think we're coming out the other side of that and seeing more and more emphasis
on quality and all of the proper business building skills that you need.
So for you to have a successful business teaching people how to be successful affiliate marketers,
I assume that you yourself had a background in doing the same. How did you first get started
as an entrepreneur? And how did that segue into becoming an affiliate marketer?
I read various books in my early to mid 20s. One of those books was the Rich Dad Poor Dad
books, which kind of awakened the idea that I could actually become an entrepreneur. It
didn't give me much of a blueprint, but it kind of made me realize, oh, this is something
I could do if I learn it. And then through there, I kind of journeyed my way to the four
hour workweek book. And that sort of pointed me to online as a place to make money.
And then I discovered a few blogs that just talked about internet marketing. And I had
no idea how any of that works. Like I didn't understand about getting commissions or email
autoresponders or anything. So I just sort of started learning from various like I joined
a few membership sites that taught internet marketing. And I read lots of blogs. And I
basically started out by building a few of my own sites. One was about kettlebells. I
remember was one of the first ones. And there was a shaving one I mentioned. And I just
kind of kept building sites that ultimately failed until I built sites that didn't fail.
So that's kind of, I just learned trial by error.
So give me the story of some of these sites that failed. And maybe you dive into some
of the lessons that you learned that helped you start building sites that succeeded.
Yeah, I think every site that I started and failed, I learned a lot. And I started iterating
quite quickly. So I think I went through quite a few different sites in the first six months.
One of the first ones I started was a quit smoking website. And that was because I had
basically just quit smoking. So I thought, Oh, okay, you know, that makes sense. And
that failed because it's a very competitive niche. And I just I didn't really know enough
about what I was doing back then. I didn't really know how to compete with the bigger
sites. And I didn't know how to promote specific products. And I kind of had this mindset that
I had to promote one specific solution, and had to kind of say everything else wasn't
really that good. And I had quit smoking by reading a book. And so I basically was just
saying, Yeah, you just need to read this book. It works for me. So it can work for you and
things like e cigarettes are not a good idea, because this book's better. When you know,
really, I should have said, Well, you know, e cigarettes could be good for you. And if
they are, these are the best ones. And all you could try this book, or you could try
this method, because lots of different things work with different people. So I learned two
main things there. One was don't go after a really competitive mission to was, you have
to be more open minded about what things you can recommend. And so the next site I started
was about kettlebells. And that one did okay, I recommended like various kettlebell DVDs,
for people that wanted to follow a DVD, I recommended different kettlebells themselves,
and various different exercises. And that was the first website where I learned about
trying to build an email list and trying to improve your conversions and things like that.
And then when I started the shaving site, it was like the first site I made that made
me over $1,000 a month. I don't really think I had any real breakthroughs with that one.
I think it was just I was just getting better and better every time I started a new site.
So it all came together.
Yeah, so you're putting together site after site, you're learning from your successes,
you learn from your failures, you're getting better over time. How else are you learning
during this time period? Are you reading any books? Are you listening to podcasts? Are
you reading blog posts or stuff like that?
All of the above. You know, I was devouring content wherever I could like, I was commuting
to work on the bus, so I would always listen to podcasts on the bus. This was 2012. So
I don't think I had, I don't think I had like mobile internet back then. So I was downloading
podcasts before I got on the bus and then listening to them and getting to work and
then my break reading blogs. And then yeah, I was always trying what I read. Because you
don't really know whether what someone says is true or not. Or if it is true, is it going
to work for you? So the best way to do it is just just try it. And then that's also
the worst thing because it can be very frustrating because you often have to wait a few months
to see the results because maybe you try something for ranking higher in Google, but Google
is not going to tell you. It's not going to rank you straight away. So you might have
to wait three to six months to know if that even is the right way of doing things. It's
the best way to do it, but it also takes time.
I want to sort of dive into what your life was like at the time and really just talk
about the logistics because you mentioned that you were listening to podcasts and audiobooks
on the way to work on the bus. I think a lot of people who are trying to start companies
are trying to balance starting companies in their free time with having an actual full-time
job, which is no easy task. So what did it look like for you in terms of juggling getting
these affiliate sites off the ground, making money online and learning how to get better,
and also having a full-time job at the same time?
I don't think I could do it again. Yeah, I think I became relatively, I wouldn't say
anti-social, but I definitely started turning down invitations to go to a bar with friends
and stuff a lot more. I actually started living with my then-girlfriend at the time, so that
made things a lot easier as well because I found if I lived with her, and this might
sound like I did it on purpose, but because I was living with her, I didn't have to go
out on dates with her as often because we still saw each other all the time. So we still
went out. I'm going to try and word this in the right way, but I didn't have to go and
travel an hour across the city to go and see her because we would just hang out. That was
one thing. Like I say, I was always trying to utilize any free time I had to think about
the business or work on the business. So for example, I had an iPad, and a lot of what
I did early on was writing blog posts. So I took my iPad to work with me, and if I had
say, just to give some context, I was teaching English in Taiwan. So I might have two hours
of class, and then I might have a 30-minute break before my next class. So that 30 minutes
would be, I would plan my next class as fast as I could, and then the rest of the free
time would be writing an article on my iPad. Then maybe by the time I got home, I had written
say three articles, and then I'd get home and transfer the articles from, like through
Dropbox from my iPad to my WordPress website, and I could then quickly format and publish
those posts. I basically spent pretty much all of my free time working on the internet,
on my business. Luckily, my girlfriend was very supportive as well, so she wasn't competing
for my time as much. It's something you said very early on in this podcast, actually, you
said, once you've found something that you want to do, it becomes easy to do it. I remember
she said to me that I was lucky because I found something I wanted to do. So I didn't
mind not going out with friends because I wanted to stay at home and work on my business.
So yeah, I didn't completely stop socializing because I would have probably had a breakdown.
But yeah, I definitely, any waking moment I had, I guess, I was either working on the
business or thinking about it, especially when I was in the middle of an English class
and I had some naughty 10-year-olds going crazy. That's why I did a lot of fantasizing
back then.
It was really simple to use, but for me, I didn't even know any CSS or HTML. But I learned
quite quickly. And I think within, say, three months, I could get a brand new website set
up in a couple of hours. But the way to succeed with a website is to have a lot of content
on it. So it was the content creation which would take time. So I used to try to write
– I think at one point, I was trying to write three articles per week for each website
I had. And I think I was working on three websites. So I was basically trying to write
nine articles a week. And I remember I actually had a big whiteboard in my bedroom and I just
had the article titles. Monday, I'm going to write this article for this site and this
article for that site. And Tuesday, I'm going to do this. So yeah, the actual setting up
a website doesn't take long at all, but it's creating the content which is what leads to
people visiting your website and getting the actual success.
That's pretty fascinating because if you compare to somebody building a SaaS product
or a mobile app from scratch, I've never heard of anybody just sitting down and doing
that in two hours and then moving straight into growth stuff like content marketing.
But that sounds like pretty much what you're able to do because you were doing affiliate
marketing. And so you didn't really have the temptation or the risk of spending too
much time on the product. You got to go straight into growth.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's a lot of research that goes into it beforehand. Like, is this
a good niche? What articles am I going to actually create? But a lot of it, I guess
you can iterate quite quickly because you could create a website, put a few articles
up and then if later you think, oh, actually, this isn't a good niche, you haven't lost
too much time, so it's easy for you to just start a second site, pivot to a slightly different
topic or something along those lines.
Yeah, you know, it's hard to overstate how much of a shot in the arm it can be to be
doing all this pivoting, to have such a quick feedback loop between you doing work and you
actually releasing that work into the world, seeing what happened and then going back to
the drawing board and trying again. It's like a little hit of dopamine every single time
you release. And a lot of people end up quitting early because they take the opposite approach.
They build one monolithic project for six months and they quit before it ever gets launched
because it's just a slog. You lose all motivation if you're not getting any real feedback. How
did all this iterating and pivoting on your websites lead to you starting human-proof
designs?
So I think it was probably not quite a year since I had started. And at the time I was
making somewhere between $500 and $1,000 a month online, which I thought was pretty good.
One of the websites I had had, I ended up selling on flippa.com. And that kind of opened
the door to me to browsing Flippa a lot because there's a lot of websites available for sale
there. And one thing I noticed on Flippa was there was a lot of junk on there because they've
actually improved a lot since 2012, 2013. But back then, it was kind of like the Wild
West. There was nothing really stopping someone from just uploading a website that was just
garbage, really, and making these false claims. I can't think of a specific example, but there
were all sorts of websites where someone would say, hey, this website is going to make you
thousands of dollars every month on autopilot because it's targeting this keyword that gets
millions of searches a month and you don't have to do anything and it will just bring
in money. And they'd be selling these websites for like, I don't know, $300. It was always
something $9.7K, like $1.97K, $3.97K, $4.97K.
And people will believe these claims to just buy these websites.
Yeah. To me, it was pretty obvious that the websites were not going to do anything because
I had learned the difference. But I was kind of flabbergasted that people were actually
just buying them. I guess for some people, they thought, wow, it's only $300. It's not
a big risk. And I was talking to a friend about it who also knew internet marketing.
And I was just saying, I could do a better job than that. And I'm not even like, I've
only got less than a year's experience. So I don't know why these people are selling
this junk. And long story short, my friend said, well, why don't you just start selling
legitimate ones? Why don't you start building sites around niches that are going to succeed
if the person puts in the effort and the work? Because obviously, I could research hundreds
of good niche ideas, but I couldn't put the time in to make every single one of those
sites successful myself. So there was kind of this gap where I was like, well, I could
give other people the ideas that I'm unable to use.
So I just thought, yeah, why not? I'll try that. And I'll start researching a few niches,
build a kind of beginner starter site, and put it on flipper. And very soon, I realized
I was competing with these scammers, basically. So I'm there saying, hey, if you buy this
site and work hard and follow my training, maybe you'll be making a few hundred dollars
a month in a few months, and you can scale that up.
And then all the people around me were saying, hey, buy this site, you'll do no work and
you'll be a millionaire. So I didn't really get as many sales as I expected. It was weird.
So that's when I realized, okay, I'm going to have to do a bit of product education and
making customers aware of where the value is in my sites. So I stopped selling them
on flipper and started selling them on human proof designs. And I started doing content
marketing and sharing case studies. So I did very much... I started basically just teaching
internet marketing. And it was like, hey, here's what I'm doing with my sites. Here's
what's working for me. Here's how you can do it too. Or if you want, you can pay me
and I'll set up the site for you and then you can get a head start.
So that was kind of... That was how we started. And then now we have all these additional
services because of just responding to demand, really. People would say, hey, okay, you've
built this data site for me. Can you also do more content for me? And at first the answer
was no, because I was just a one man band. Now the answer is like, yeah, sure, we can
do that for you because we have the team.
There's a lot there that I want to dive into because I think these early stages of your
business, these early decisions you make have an outsized impact on your long term trajectory
and ultimately how far your business can go.
The first thing I want to highlight is that you chose to browse Flippa. And that's how
you came up with your idea, which I think is brilliant. A lot of people have trouble
coming up with an early stage idea because they're not sure what they can build of value
that customers will actually want to pay for. But if you go to a website where a lot of
money is changing hands, if you go to a marketplace like Flippa, where buyers are connecting with
others, it's very obvious what people will find valuable and what they're willing to
pay money for. And you can look at what the sellers are selling. In this case, junk websites
and false promises of making millions of dollars. And you can see exactly how you can improve
upon that and iterate upon that and build your own better product.
How did you, after deciding to build these websites, iterate on your early idea? How
did it change and become the human proof designs that we know of today?
A fair amount changed, yeah, because when I first wanted to put the websites up, I didn't
want to include content on them. So I was going to obviously charge a lot less money.
But I felt like I can't do content at scale. So I was basically just going to research
the niche, pick all of the keywords that people were going to build content around, and then
design the website, which isn't particularly hard in WordPress, and then give people the
strategy and just sell it for, say, like $100.
So your plan is to do this one at a time. You're going to pick a new niche, design a
new website, write new content for every single customer that comes in.
Yeah. And we still do that. We never sell, we don't just sell different copies of the
same site to people. But yeah, the idea was I thought I can't just write all the content
myself. I can't do that at scale. I could build five websites a day if I'm just doing
a website, but I can't put like 20 articles on a site five times a day.
But I realized if people... I learned more about my audience because I guess I thought
what if people want to pay for a website? It's because they want to take a shortcut
in a positive way. They're not being lazy. They just think, okay, I'd rather pay someone
to set it up for me. So if I'm there saying, okay, I'm going to set it up for you, but
you still have to do all the content, a lot of people were like, well, to the point, essentially,
I'm just paying you to install the WordPress theme.
And obviously, my argument was, no, I'm kind of validating a niche for you. But anyway,
I realized, well, what if I just put the prices up and then invest the extra money in paying
writers to write the content? Obviously, that was... It cost me money then to build the
sites because I had to pay writers. So I started just building, say, five sites a month and
I'd pre-build them and then I'd advertise them on my website. Like, hey, these five
sites are available. But if you want, you can have a custom site.
And this was something that really helped in the beginning because a custom site was
essentially where someone says, I don't really want to have a website around any of the ones
you've got for sale around those topics. But could you build me one around this topic?
Or do you have any other topics that you're going to do next month? And that was really
quite helpful back then because if someone wanted a custom site, they would pay me up
front and then I would build the site. So it meant I wasn't forking out the money to
build the site in the hope that someone bought it. It was like, okay, I've got the money.
Now I'm going to pay the writers to do the content. So in the early days, I put a lot
of emphasis on the custom sites. It was the only real way that I could scale.
And then as the blog grew, I realized people were buying the pre-made ones a lot faster.
If I built five, they would sell out a lot quicker. And I thought, well, how can I scale
this? And then I thought, well, if people don't mind paying me for a custom site and
waiting for it to be built, maybe when I do these pre-made ones, I still don't have to
make the site in advance. I can just list the niche and list all of the statistics about
it, like why it's a good niche. And then someone can commission me to build it, which meant
that I could scale a lot faster because maybe I could list 25 different niches all at once,
but I would only build them once someone paid me.
And once someone bought a site, I would take that one off so the same person didn't...
So two people didn't try and buy the same site. And that was a huge game changer because
it just suddenly meant I could scale because if I sold 20 sites, I would then just go and
hire some writers to write for them and hire someone to help me build those sites. But
I already had the money. I already knew Excel was going to be there because I had this massive
fear of building out sites in advance and not selling them and having to wait weeks
or months to get the money back.
And this just happened over the course of about a year and a half, actually. I'm not
exactly sure how I came up with the idea, but a lot of the success I had in growing
the business was kind of having ideas and thinking, well, that might work, and then
trying it. Sometimes it did work and sometimes it didn't.
Yeah. So once again, a lot of great stuff that I want to dive into and extract some
lessons from. The first is that you kept coming up with these new ideas that all sounded pretty
plausible. People are scamming each other on Flippo. Why don't I sell them something
that's going to work? Sounds like a plausible idea. It turns out it's hard to outmarket
the scammers. They just make better promises than you are. Back to the drawing board, you
said I need to educate people and teach them how to make good websites themselves. Turns
out that when you try to sell that, your customers don't really want to be educated. They just
really wanted to make money online without having to do any work or learn anything. So
back to the drawing board again, et cetera, et cetera.
I think it really illustrates how as entrepreneurs, our ideas are just hypotheses. They may or
may not work. They're not guaranteed to work. So the best thing you can do is release as
fast as you possibly can, try to sell to customers, gather their feedback if they don't buy, figure
out what they find valuable, and then go and build that.
The other thing I want to talk about is the fact that it was literally your business to
come up with ideas and sell these ideas to your customers. A lot of people listening
in I think would agree that the main thing stopping them from starting a business is
they don't have any idea that they can get behind, that they think is going to work and
be profitable.
Dominic, can you share some insights on your process for coming up with so many ideas and
help the audience figure out how they can do the same?
Well, with affiliate marketing, where most people start is just picking a good niche.
They'll use keyword tools. So a keyword tool is essentially a tool that tells you how many
searches certain search terms get per month. Some of the better tools also help you figure
out how competitive they are because if you want to rank number one in Google, you need
to make sure that the sites that are already ranking number one are not impossible to outrank.
If you've got really strong websites like Forbes and entrepreneur.com ranking number
one, then it might be hard for you to beat them.
Then there's other things you can do like, for example, on Amazon.com, you can go to
their bestseller lists and just get a bunch of ideas about what things are selling well
in what categories. And then you can think, well, okay, this product sells well. How's
the competition look? Is there a gap there? Can I market it? Is there a space for me to
rank a website in Google? So that's kind of how I do ideation with affiliate marketing.
But then in the broader business sense, like if I was trying to come up with the idea for
a good SaaS or something like that, it's more about just being familiar with your particular
niche or with multiple niches because when you're familiar with them, you can see where
the gaps are because you may have experienced these pain points yourself.
So I'm not going to go as far as saying you should try and build a niche around your passion
because I think that's a good starting point, but it can be problematic. But I will say
the more familiar you are with particular niches or industries, the easier it is to
spot opportunities. And it's also an ongoing practice as well. The more you sort of think
about it or train yourself, the more you can spot these opportunities.
Yeah, the consistent thing in your approach is that you're always starting with your customers.
You're looking at your customers, you're looking at the market, you're trying to find the gaps
in the market. Where can you provide value that isn't being provided? And only then do
you think of what kind of solution you can build. And it's much easier said than done
to do it in an order because so many of us have our pet projects, our favorite ideas
for things we just really want to create. And then we'll figure out who buy it and why.
And I think that's the wrong order to do things. And another thing you do that is very hard
for people to do is find early customers for your websites. You had a lot of people on
Flippa again, competing with you basically telling customers lies and exaggerating the
benefits of buying their products. How did you cut through that noise and get your first
customers to your website?
I mean, competing with people making wild claims is fairly easy. You just have to be
honest and have integrity. And the people that you want to be your customers can spot
the difference. But how I kind of got in front of those people in the first place, it was
actually it was pretty slow going, like, particularly in the kind of make money online niche, or
the affiliate marketing niche, it was way more competitive than my shaving niche or
my kettlebell niche. And it took way longer than I expected to get traction. Unfortunately,
because I had these other sites making me money, it was okay, like there wasn't there
wasn't a time limit where I needed to make money in three months or I had to get a job.
So that that really helped. But in the beginning, it was pretty slow going. I didn't get that
many customers. What I did was because because this was a kind of I was living and breathing
affiliate marketing, I knew where my audience hung out. So I guess I did two or three different
things like I tried some things that failed miserably. Like I went to warrior forum and
did a warrior special offer selling my sites. And I didn't get a single sale. So yeah, not
everything was a success. But where I found the most success was I joined Facebook groups
from that were just relevant, like people learning affiliate marketing. And I was active
in those. And this was kind of at the dawn of Facebook groups, I guess. So a lot of the
groups were smaller. But that meant it was also easier to kind of get your name recognized
for, you know, you answer a few people's questions helpfully and suddenly people know who you
are. And when I was in those groups, I would just share my blog posts, like I would say,
hey, here's a case study I did about how I improve the conversions on one of my websites,
and people would would read it kind of similar to the way people share stuff on into hackers.
And then I also was reading a lot of blogs from other people in the niche. So people
who they were also sharing case studies about internet marketing. And fortunately, I had
an offering where I didn't really compete with them. You know, like some of them had
other services, some of them had training that they sold, some of them just wanted to
make money from affiliate commissions themselves, like recommending software. So I would read
their blogs, I would comment, I would subscribe to their emails, and I would reply to their
emails. And a lot of them were so busy, they get 1000s of people replying. So I wasn't
exactly able to build a connection with them. But some of the smaller ones, we were able
to sort of strike up a relationship just because I would say like, hey, good article, I've
got a question about it. And you know, it was just a natural process of building relationships.
And then I might say to them, can I guest post for you or hey, this is what I offered,
you think your audience would be interested in checking that out. And again, like, for
every person who was receptive to me, probably five weren't, but once enough people have
been receptive to you, then more people start noticing you and more people are receptive
to your ideas. And maybe they rejected your your your guest post request three weeks ago.
But now they're like, Oh, I know who you are. Now I've seen you on this other guy's blog.
So it just slowly starts to get traction. And you know, the first six to 12 months were
really difficult. But then after that, it got a lot easier. It was a slog. But if you
can kind of get past the point where you're too new for people to care, then suddenly
you can get traction quite quickly.
It sounds like a slog. I mean, you're emailing influencers trying to get guest posts, you're
running your business coming up with ideas for people and building websites for them.
You are still running your earlier affiliate businesses that you set up. And you're teaching
English at the same time. How does you manage the transition from this full time job teaching
English to finally working full time on your own business?
I was in a kind of fortunate position where I was able to reduce my teaching hours. Partly
it was because I was at a language school that wasn't doing that well. So if I said
to my boss, Oh, I don't really need to teach 30 hours a week now, like 20 hours is fine.
He might say, well, that's great because you've only got 20 hours. And then she ended up retiring
and no one wanted to take over the school. And so I was given a few job offers at like
similar schools because it was a chain. So one of the other branches offered me the job.
But I didn't really want to suddenly have to take on more hours. So I was able to basically
long story short, some of my students at the school that was closing, they didn't want
to go to a new school either. So a lot of them just said, well, can we just pay you
to come to our house and teach? Which was it was a good deal because they got to pay
less money for the class. But I got to earn more because we weren't the money wasn't going
to my boss who was then giving me a certain amount. So yeah, basically, I think I ended
up with something like 10 to 15 hours a week teaching. So that meant, okay, great, I've
got way more time now to work on my business. And then maybe one of my students after a
few months would say, yeah, like, they would just not need me anymore. Maybe they the kid
was going to secondary school or like high school or something. It got to the point where
I just kind of if I lost a student, I wouldn't replace a student. Because there's a lot of
word of mouth referrals. And I instead of saying yes, I can I can teach you. I just
started saying no, sorry, I can't. And one thing I did with the private students was
I made sure I didn't take any classes on a Friday. So I had one one day every week where
I could just have a solid work on the business day. And I started hiring more team members
for my for my online businesses as well. So that increased the productivity. So not only
was I created more hours for myself, but I was also hiring, like I was buying other people's
hours as well.
It's so funny, your full time job teaching these kids English was almost like its own
business really. And so you're running that business on the side of the business you actually
wanted to start human proof designs, but you just let it slowly dwindle down to nothing.
And there's a common thread here, which is that in your full time job, you're teaching
people you're teaching kids. But with human proof designs, you're also teaching people
you're teaching them how to build successful websites. What are some things you've learned
about how to teach people? And how helpful do you think it's been to sort of retain this
common thread of education and everything that you've done?
He had kind of ironic that I wanted to get out of teaching. And my way to do that was
just move into teaching.
Teaching people effectively is it's an ongoing practice for me, I think I get better at teaching
every year. So it depends on the person I found a lot. I love just being able to write
someone an email answering their questions, but not everyone wants to send me an email
with their questions.
Some people you can write a blog post, they'll just read it and be like, okay, I'm going
to figure this out from here. Other people need a lot more back and forth, a lot more
interaction. Some people prefer podcasts, some people prefer videos, some people hate
videos. Some people just want to send you messages on Facebook all day. Others, you
won't hear from them for a month and they'll just come back with a question every now and
then.
So that means that it's kind of difficult to create a one size fits all form of education.
So you either have to just do one form of education that is going to be effective for
all those people who sign up, like just kind of be like, okay, I'm just going to do a video
course. And if people don't like videos, then they're not my customer. Or you have to kind
of have a lot of different teaching methods.
You also have to constantly kind of evolve the content of your lessons, whatever the
format is, you're always going to miss something or there's the curse of knowledge where you
don't know what you forget stuff that is simple to you. But could be a huge question for the
person you're teaching. Like, for example, yesterday, I was I was on a coaching call
with someone, I'm working on a course teaching people how to buy and sell established websites.
And one of the people I was on a call with doing some research for the content of this
course, she mentioned she had a big, not fear, but a big like sticking point about selling
a website once she's bought one and grown one. And I asked her what that particular
fear or concern was. And she said, just basic logistics, like how do I pass the website
on to the new owner? And for me, I completely forgotten that for me, it was very simple
just transferring hosting or something like that, transferring a website from hosting
a hosting B, I can do it in an hour. For this person, that was like a huge question mark.
So I would not have really been able to teach that effectively, if I hadn't spoken to her
and taken that on board. So the best way to teach effectively is to like, you know, be
actually interacting with your students, you can't just create some information and say
here it is, go through that and you'll be fine. I mean, you can do that, but maybe you
can't charge as much for it because it's not going to get as big a result for as many people.
The title of the interview on the indie hackers website that you did last August was scaling
a one man operation into a million dollar business. Now, obviously, you're no longer
just one person, you started by yourself, but now you have almost a dozen full time
employees working for you. What's been the biggest challenge and scaling up and what
did that process look like?
Well, the challenges have changed over the years, I think, probably operations. So with
a service business, you know, there's there's the marketing aspect where you have to convince
people that you're going to do a good job. But then there's the actual fulfillment side
of things where they say, Okay, I believe you do this thing for me. And then you think,
Oh, now I've actually got to do it. And that's fine when you get one customer a week, but
when you get say 10 a day, there's only so much you can do. And hiring people was something
that was very, it was very unnatural to me at the beginning, especially as I kind of
was enjoying just being like a one man band in my affiliate sites.
Had you ever hired anybody or managed a team before that?
No, no, not at all.
Must have been pretty scary, then.
Yeah. And hiring writers was okay, because there's a lot of freelance writers out there.
So they're, they're kind of used to being hired. And you just say, Hey, here's the topics.
Here's how I want the article to look. And they're like, Okay, I got it. And they just
go off and do it. Whereas hiring customer support people or supervisors or people whose
job it is to like project managers, whose job it is to just move a website down the
production line from content creation to website creation and so on. That was really hard.
And yeah, like obviously now it's it's something that's actually fairly natural to me because
I've been doing it for two or three years. But at the time, it was I think it was a bigger
psychological hurdle than actual, actual hurdle like I didn't take action, probably for six
months, because I just didn't know how to go about it. And once I did, and I started
hiring people that I hired supervisors, and they started hiring people, I was kind of
like, Oh, I should have done this ages ago. But yeah, it just took me a long time to pull
the trigger.
I think that's something that a lot of people can identify with is somewhat counterintuitive.
You might think that people who want to start companies are people who are eager to hire
and manage other people. But when your primary goal is freedom, you want financial freedom
or creative freedom, you generally don't like being encumbered to other people and tied
to other people and hiring is in a sense just that. What was it that first got you over
that hurdle and convinced you to make your first hire aside from the freelance writers?
I was in a mastermind. It was like an online mastermind with a few others. And we met,
I think we met weekly. And one of them, he was very hire friendly. He worked for Microsoft.
And I don't know if that influenced it or if he just was good at hiring. But he was
like, Oh, you never hired anyone like aside from writers? Oh, man, like what are you doing?
And so he kind of was like, just do it. And he gave me some tips. He helped me take the
baby steps towards setting up a job posting that was gonna get good people versus bad
people. So yeah, he kind of held my hand through the first hires. And he also made me, I think
honestly, just his question, like you've never hired anyone. Like it kind of embarrassed me.
I was like, Okay, yeah, I should really, I should really do it.
What were some of those tips that he gave you? And what are some things you've learned
about hiring that perhaps other people listening in who are in the same position that you were
might be able to learn from?
So he told me to hire per project. So for example, if I wanted, if I wanted a writer
to write 10 articles for me, he said, just just quote a price for 10 articles. Don't
don't hire someone at an hourly rate. Because I knew, for example, let's say someone paid
me $100 to create 10 articles, I would be like, Okay, if I can get a writer to do it
for say 50, then I'm all good. Whereas if I charge hourly, I don't know necessarily how
much it's gonna it's gonna cost. And I would say, Yeah, but I don't know if I can get anyone
for that price. And he would say, well, post the job for that price and see if anyone applies.
So I was surprised. I was like, Oh, people applied. What are the tips? Yeah, he gave
me tips on just like filtering applicants, which is people like Chris Tucker have a lot
of good content about that. But essentially, one tip was asking, telling people when they
apply. And we do this no matter what job we're advertising for. Like we might say something
like oh, when you apply, tell me what your favorite color is. And like anyone who doesn't
answer that question doesn't get like we don't follow up with them because they either don't
follow instructions or they don't have a good attention to detail. So you know, maybe there
are some good candidates who we ignored because they didn't fill that in. And maybe we we
missed out on a good hire, but you have to do something to filter people. So that's what
we do and create good systems for plugging people into like with writers, we hire quite
quickly. And some writers go MIA fairly often. So we have a relatively, I wouldn't say a
high churn rate, but you know, almost every month we're hiring a new writer. So we needed
a system to train them quickly. So we made sure we had good documents, good examples,
good videos.
When we zoom out, you went from being an English teacher running an affiliate marketing side
business that was just making a few thousand dollars a month, to now running this very
well oiled machine where you're hiring people and the people you're hiring are hiring people.
And you're making over a million dollars a year. What were some of the biggest milestones
in going from point A to point B?
I think the first milestone for me was something I mentioned earlier when I figured out that
I could list sites in advance and have people pay me in advance and then I build them because
that really helped me scale. So it was like I figured out people weren't going to order
custom sites a lot of the time because they didn't really know what was a good niche.
So if I presented them with 10 options, it was a lot easier. The next big milestone was
in terms of marketing the brand, there were lots of mini milestones. For example, we got
featured in an entrepreneur.com article which sent a lot of credibility and a lot of traffic
our way. And I got featured on lots of websites from my peers. So those were just like the
culmination of that was a lot of mini milestones.
I think hiring my COO was a huge thing for me as well. That was in I guess early 2016.
He came on board full time, May 2016. And he was really strong in the areas where I
was weak. So he's not particularly strong in marketing, but he's really strong in operations
and hiring and training. So having someone just take care of operations and fulfillment
was and still is huge. I haven't touched one of the products that we've... I haven't touched
one of our services for about two years because it's just not what I do. I do marketing and
I talk to customers and stuff. So that was huge because that meant that not only were
we good at our current services, but we were good at rolling out new services. So if customers
were saying, hey, can you do link building as well? The no, sorry, we don't have bandwidth
answer suddenly became like, oh yeah, we could probably roll out a service in a few weeks
and we've got we know how to train people. Yeah, okay. Yeah, let's start saying yes to
people who ask that. So that really helped with scaling. And that's why instead of just
having one product, we now have about 12. So yeah, those were I think those were the
most significant milestones.
How do you hire a good CO? I imagine it's different and more challenging than hiring
writers or other contractors that you work with.
So I get this question a lot. And the unfortunate answer is he was one of my customers. So I
tell people how to go out and find one because he found me. But the key for me was that he
I wasn't trying to hire another me, I was hiring someone who had business skills. And
then I taught him like the nuances of our particular niche. So instead of being like,
hey, I want to hire someone who's good at internet marketing. And then I kind of hope
that that person can learn like operational skills. Instead, I hired someone with strong
business skills like project management, operation skills. And then I taught him because he started
out as one of my customers. So he understood a bit about affiliate marketing, but he was
a beginner. I taught him how to do keyword research and I taught him how how I give article
topics to writers. And then he built the systems to make all of that a lot smoother. So my
recommendation would be, yeah, look, look for someone that is already, they already
have the skills necessary to be a good CEO. And then you can teach them about the smaller
details of your your, your service or your software.
Yeah, that's a great insight. There's certain things that you want people to come to the
job already being proficient at. And there's certain things that you should be totally
okay with people learning on the job. And that might be different for every role. So
now you guys are at a point where your revenue is growing, your business is healthy. But
your expenses are also growing. You've got lots of people working for you. And I wonder
how you think about that. Does your revenue growth outstrip the growth of your expenses?
Do you worry about reinvesting your profit into the business and hiring more people?
What are your thoughts?
Yes, I know. So there's quite a lot there in that question. I wouldn't say it keeps
me up at night. But certainly, you know, it's a burden because now we have salary stuff.
So you know, whatever our sales are, we still have to pay them. So it certainly keeps a
fire under you. And it means that you have to figure out your systems and change things
so that your your revenue can be more reliable. Does revenue growth outstrip expenses? Sometimes
yeah, I mean, sometimes it's the other way around. So like, if I doubled my revenue next
year, I don't think I would double my profits. I think my profits would definitely go up.
Otherwise, what's the point in doubling the revenue? But I don't know to what extent,
like maybe if you doubled your revenue, maybe your profit goes up 30%. That might be a good
number. And that's just because if you're going to serve more customers, you need to
hire more people to serve those customers. You need to do more marketing. So maybe you
have things like Facebook ads to pay for or, you know, just other other expenses like that.
Maybe you need to move up to a higher tier of your software, email plan and stuff like
that. So it does affect your decisions, because it moves you more towards reliable income.
You might think, Oh, I want to invest, say, $10,000 in this thing or 20,000 or just 5000.
But let's wait till the end of the year because I want to make sure there's enough money for
bonuses and stuff like that. So yeah, it certainly affects things. I don't think it's necessarily
something to be afraid of if you want to have a team in place that's robust and can handle
things for you so that you're not just a one man band forever. It's kind of the necessary
way to do things. Like maybe sometimes I wonder if there's a sweet spot, like where I have
fewer people, but a nice profit? Or do I want more profit? But is that more profit worth
the extra headaches of having extra people? You know, is it better to scale back a little
bit? So maybe you have a little bit less profit, but you have a lot less burden or time constraints.
But I don't really think business lets you sort of have this perfect world like that.
So it's best to just figure out how can we serve more people? And can we make a profit
doing that? And if you do that, I think you're going to be okay.
What's great is that the customers you have for human proof design, so people buying these
websites that you're selling are entrepreneurs themselves. They're people who want to go
out and start their own business. They're learning from you how to do that. And I assume
you've gotten to see some of how that turned out. And so we have an audience right now
listening to us full of helpful entrepreneurs who like to start their own companies. Based
on what you've seen from your own customers, what advice would you give people listening
in who want to get started with their first business?
My advice is usually just start and don't be afraid to fail. So that's why bootstrapping
is a good way to do it because the financial risk isn't there. There's opportunity cost
with spending six months working on something that ultimately doesn't pan out. But there's
also opportunity cost with spending six months doing nothing. And at least if you spend six
months doing something that doesn't pan out, you probably learn a ton.
We put too much emphasis as well in trying to come up with the perfect idea, whereas
the idea doesn't have to be perfect. You just have to have good execution. There's a book,
I think it's by MJ DeMarco, and it's called The Millionaire Fastlane. He talks about the
execution of an idea is worth a lot more than the idea itself. So it's like a multiplier.
So if you have a great idea with poor execution, you might end up with a mediocre business.
But if you have an okay idea with great execution, you'll have a fantastic business. So the lesson
here is not just create. It's not to come up with poor ideas, but it's to just get started
and learn by doing and develop your ability to execute on an idea. Because then when you
actually do have that great idea, you're able to actually bring it into the world. So my
advice is to just start something because then you get better at everything that's required
to succeed.
Okay, I'm gonna hit you up with a rare follow up here. What about the people who have already
taken the first steps, the people who are super motivated to do this, they've launched
a product, they've read the books, but they're having a little bit of trouble along the way
and aren't quite finding success. What's your advice for people and that situation, Dominic?
That's a tough question. Because for some people, the answer might be, just keep going
and you'll find success, like with the thing you're working on. And for other people, it
might be, you should stop that because it's a bad idea. I don't really know without any
context. So I would say, like what worked for me was because I kept starting multiple
niche sites, I got better at identifying whether something was a good idea or not. So I was
able to look at some of the stuff I'd already started and say, yeah, this does have potential,
I just need to keep going. Or no, this is terrible, I should stop. So I don't really
want to say to people, just start something else as well, because not everyone has the
bandwidth to start multiple things. And if you do start something on the side, it takes
away from the core thing you're working on. But I do think stepping back and working on
something else or looking at something else, it does help you develop a better sense of
what you should do. So I do think that is good advice for people.
That's really interesting advice. It reminds me of this phenomenon where oftentimes I will
find myself giving better or at least more objective advice to other founders and helping
them with their business problems than I do to myself. I'm looking at the problems that
I encounter with indie hackers and other things that I'm working on. So it's something to
think about being able to step away and look at what you're doing from an outsider's perspective.
Yeah, that's a really good point.
Anyway, Dominic, thanks so much for coming on the show and sharing your story. I think
it's fascinating. And I'm really glad to get like a case study of affiliate marketing done
right on the podcast. Can you tell listeners where they can go to find out more about what
you're up to with human proof designs and also what you're up to personally, if you
share that kind of thing online as well?
Yeah, sure. So people can find me. Obviously, humanproofdesigns.com is the business we've
spoken a lot about. I also have a Facebook group, which is niche site entrepreneurs.
And like I'm active in there, so people can find me in there as well. Probably those two
places. Obviously, I also am active on indie hackers, like I have a profile and stuff.
So if someone wants to reach out to me there, then they can.
All right, Dominic, thanks so much.
If you enjoyed listening to this conversation and you want a really easy way to support
the podcast, why don't you head over to iTunes and leave us a quick rating or even a review?
If you're looking for an easy way to get there, just go to ndhackers.com slash review and
that should open up iTunes on your computer. I read pretty much all the reviews that you
guys leave over there and it really helps other people to discover the show. So your
support is very much appreciated.
In addition, if you are running your own internet business, or if that's something you hope
to do someday, you should join me and a whole bunch of other founders on the ndhackers.com
website. It's a great place to get feedback on pretty much any problem or question that
you might have while running your business. If you listen to the show, you know that I
am a huge proponent of getting help from other founders rather than trying to build your
business all by yourself. So you'll see me on the forum for sure, as well as more than
a handful of some of the guests that I found in the podcast. If you're looking for inspiration,
we've also got a huge directory full of hundreds of products built by other indie hackers,
every one of which includes revenue numbers and some of the behind the scenes strategies
for how they grew their products from nothing. As always, thanks so much for listening and
I'll see you next time.