WEBVTT 00:00.330 --> 00:04.110 Now I'm going to give you a case study of an earlier business of mine. 00:04.140 --> 00:12.060 That was an absolute wild ride because it was an early business of mine and because of that, I wasn't 00:12.060 --> 00:19.890 good at marketing, planning and because of that, literally on like day one or week one, the entire 00:19.890 --> 00:25.730 marketing strategy that I had going into this business turned out to completely not work. 00:25.740 --> 00:32.790 And what made it a fascinating experience is all the wiggling in and out and all the strategy changes. 00:32.790 --> 00:38.850 And there were a ton of marketing errors and marketing recoveries that I'm going to share with you now. 00:38.850 --> 00:40.380 So this is the website for it. 00:40.380 --> 00:45.600 Now the website is poorly designed and the business itself is essentially dead. 00:45.630 --> 00:50.880 It's just that the website is up this website now it probably makes me like $25 a month or something, 00:50.880 --> 00:52.740 so it's kind of a dead business. 00:52.740 --> 00:55.710 But now I just want to walk you through this case study. 00:55.710 --> 01:00.130 So in the beginning it started out as a Meetup.com competitor. 01:00.130 --> 01:04.330 Meetup, of course, is the site where you can organize events about anything. 01:04.330 --> 01:10.180 In this case, it was competing with a part of Meetup which was focusing on hiking groups, a lot of 01:10.180 --> 01:10.720 hiking groups. 01:10.720 --> 01:11.620 They just use Meetup. 01:11.620 --> 01:16.900 And I just wanted to poach the organizers and the groups and I thought it would be easy to get them 01:16.900 --> 01:19.630 because they have to pay on Meetup and on my site. 01:19.660 --> 01:22.120 It would be for free and I would monetize with ads. 01:22.120 --> 01:28.900 That's what I thought that was a mistake because you don't want to compete with a loved giant competitor. 01:28.900 --> 01:33.910 Not everybody likes Meetup, but overall they are a liked company. 01:34.030 --> 01:40.570 I just couldn't poach the hikers or the hike leaders because all the time people were like, they were 01:40.570 --> 01:44.560 asking me like, Well, your site helps me organize hikes. 01:44.560 --> 01:48.010 I just use Meetup and the $12 fee every two weeks. 01:48.010 --> 01:49.180 That's a nominal fee. 01:49.180 --> 01:50.530 It's not a big fee for most people. 01:50.530 --> 01:57.280 So I went into this business and like very, very early on, I was I realized I am in the wrong business. 01:57.280 --> 01:58.510 Like I made a mistake. 01:58.510 --> 01:59.890 How do I wiggle out of this? 01:59.890 --> 02:02.890 Because my idea to poach hikers wasn't working. 02:02.890 --> 02:10.090 So I started thinking hard and I started creating these really cool themed hikes. 02:10.090 --> 02:16.060 Like one hike was like a hunt for shipwrecks along the San Francisco coast, and we were looking for 02:16.060 --> 02:17.080 shipwrecks to drown. 02:17.110 --> 02:20.440 There actually are like three shipwrecks you can see during low tide. 02:20.440 --> 02:22.630 So it was very kind of cool and adventurous. 02:22.630 --> 02:27.400 And a lot of the days they were like the coolest sounding events in the city that day. 02:27.400 --> 02:32.590 They were like historical hikes and very interesting things that many people didn't even know existed. 02:32.590 --> 02:38.500 And that got me actually a lot of attention and publicity just through the uniqueness, uniqueness, 02:38.500 --> 02:42.820 and because of the uniqueness, I was able to stand out. 02:42.820 --> 02:46.570 But because I led the hikes myself, that business wasn't scalable. 02:46.570 --> 02:48.340 So that wasn't the end. 02:48.370 --> 02:53.050 That was only like, okay, I'm getting some money from the people joining, I'm growing. 02:53.050 --> 02:58.000 But I couldn't keep doing this long term every day and grow it into a good business. 02:58.000 --> 02:59.860 So I had to think of something else. 02:59.950 --> 03:08.200 Luckily, because I got all those mentions from getting publicity on news sites and blogs and all that 03:08.200 --> 03:13.810 about the cool hikes, my site started becoming authoritative in SEO and it started to rank for a lot 03:13.810 --> 03:20.290 of keywords that gave a beginning to a new phase of this business where I realized, Oh, I can just 03:20.290 --> 03:21.310 make new pages. 03:21.310 --> 03:26.110 And whereas early on it's really hard to rank for SEO. 03:26.140 --> 03:30.460 Once your site is authoritative, it becomes actually easy to rank for SEO. 03:30.460 --> 03:37.990 So what I did is I algorithmically autogenerated 300,000 SEO pages that were meant to rank for keywords 03:37.990 --> 03:44.260 like hiking in San Francisco, hiking in LA, hiking somewhere else, hiking in this all kinds of wildlife 03:44.290 --> 03:47.950 keywords, nature related, keyword, everything related to the outdoors. 03:47.980 --> 03:55.330 The problem was that because these pages were auto generated, the pages were what's considered thin 03:55.330 --> 03:55.840 content. 03:55.840 --> 03:59.530 There wasn't any original content on the pages. 03:59.530 --> 04:02.630 And for a while that worked out. 04:02.650 --> 04:08.140 But then one day I opened my Google Analytics and I was hoping the traffic went up because it was going 04:08.140 --> 04:09.310 up, up, up, up, up every day. 04:09.310 --> 04:11.950 And then boom, the traffic dropped like a rock. 04:11.950 --> 04:15.430 I got penalized by Google and it never really recovered. 04:15.430 --> 04:20.620 So I had to move on from that business because Google penalties are just brutal to get to recover from. 04:20.620 --> 04:27.670 And anyway, I didn't want to keep doing the self-led hikes and I couldn't poach from Meetup, so my 04:27.670 --> 04:29.710 marketing strategist kind of got exhausted. 04:29.710 --> 04:36.580 And even though everything kind of worked a tiny bit, nothing worked great. 04:36.580 --> 04:38.530 But I learned a lot about events. 04:38.530 --> 04:41.500 I learned a lot about SEO and all this. 04:41.530 --> 04:47.500 And so that actually was the business that I ran before the problem.com business. 04:47.500 --> 04:52.950 And it gave me all these learnings for marketing in different aspects. 04:52.960 --> 04:57.760 You see, there was like literally three businesses inside of this one business, so I got a lot of 04:58.150 --> 04:59.710 hard experience. 04:59.880 --> 05:04.200 Actually doing the marketing in different situations over time. 05:04.200 --> 05:07.260 That made me stronger and stronger and stronger in marketing. 05:07.260 --> 05:10.740 And this was maybe 2010 something around that time. 05:10.770 --> 05:11.660 2009. 05:11.670 --> 05:19.470 So you see, it took a while, but over time, all that experience eventually led to success with marketing. 05:19.470 --> 05:22.680 But it did take all this time and a tremendous amount of failure. 05:22.680 --> 05:24.780 I mean, there was so much struggle in this. 05:24.870 --> 05:27.870 I tried one thing didn't work, another thing didn't work, another thing didn't work. 05:27.900 --> 05:31.050 Another thing had to quit the business, but learned a lot.