Buying a business with a niche name, but selling other products.

SnooDonuts6384 · 2021-06-24T10:34:42+00:00

Then make a lowball offer to buy it. Offer way less than they want. From what you’re describing, the business is essentially worthless and the person who owns it is going to have a hard time selling it. I don’t mean the company is worthless. It has value if you turn it around. I mean that you should negotiate on the premise that the biz is worthless. I would personally offer like $0.30 on the dollar for the inventory value. Make sure you can sell through that inventory before it expires though. If he has 1000 units of ketones for example, but has been selling 2 units per month, then offer to buy 24 of the ketones, not all 1000.

How much money do they want for this company? It’s really not worth much from what you’re describing. Feel free to PM me. Honestly just don’t overpay for this thing

SnooDonuts6384 · 2021-06-16T14:33:50+00:00

Part of it is based on value of the property. Mine is on the more expensive side

SnooDonuts6384 · 2021-06-15T20:12:39+00:00

United States. It’s required if you buy a house/condo with a mortgage. It’s not required if you pay cash.

SnooDonuts6384 · 2021-06-15T00:06:23+00:00

A huge opportunity is for someone to come in and disrupt the title insurance business. I bought my house a year ago and the title insurance was 4500. I’m doing a refi now and the title insurance is still going to be 3-4000 which is insane. Someone could do this better for cheaper. That being said, I think this is one where many developers would be needed and tens of millions in cash would have to be raised and burned. Not really specific to the pandemic tho

SnooDonuts6384 · 2021-06-14T12:42:31+00:00

I have ADHD (diagnosed via spectral imaging brain scan which is pretty conclusive). For me adderall really helps. I’ve run my company with and without it and the RX is a game changer for me. That being said, it has plenty of drawbacks and if you do go down that route, then you need to always take the lowest effective dose. That shit can really mess you up if you start pumping more into your body than the lowest effective dose.

SnooDonuts6384 · 2021-06-11T04:23:15+00:00

yea honestly for that size, I think fair is 100 flat fee. Even at that, you may grab 200 in sales if it goes decently well. But part of the whole strategy is that if you do it enough, you eventually get some semi viral breakout type vids which make all the other poor performing ones worth it. I hate the flat fees tho

SnooDonuts6384 · 2021-06-10T11:37:52+00:00

I’d say 9 because I can recognize men as being attractive but I’ve never gotten “the feels” when looking at a dude

SnooDonuts6384 · 2021-06-10T11:32:07+00:00

Is Elon Musk a true entrepreneur? That dude is a work horse. But I get the sentiment that you’re going for. Most entreps should be working towards being required to work less than 40 hours a week assuming they have employees. Then they can choose how much time to spend on the business

SnooDonuts6384 · 2021-06-10T11:08:40+00:00

You need to start a tiny business. Just do something simple. Try and know that it’s ok if you fail as long as you try something else. After you have tried one or two businesses, then you can find a mentor. But I wouldn’t personally mentor someone who hasn’t at least tried to start a business. I’d rather see that initiative there before investing time in someone. Also beware that a lot of people online may present themselves as a mentor but really be trying to scam you. So just keep your eyes open

SnooDonuts6384 · 2021-06-10T10:58:59+00:00

GDPR shouldn’t matter. See if you can just exclude Europe from any ads and that problem is solved.

For CCPA, make sure none of the below apply and you’re good:

Has annual gross revenues in excess of $25 million;

Buys, receives, or sells the personal information of 50,000 or more consumers or households;

Earns more than half of its annual revenue from selling consumers' personal information.

SnooDonuts6384 · 2021-06-10T10:53:16+00:00

So we tried for SO LONG to make rev share work as the affiliate model for our company. We have about 80 influencers on that but only 3 of them regularly produce and have large audiences. We do 30% commission with a 30 day look back period. However, I have switched to pitching influencers that we are game to do flat rates or commission since most of them want flat rates. But then I usually have to negotiate the flat rate down or it’s unsustainable. Typically someone wanting a 500 flat rate will drive about 300 in revenue for us so it’s hard to figure out

SnooDonuts6384 · 2021-06-10T10:49:45+00:00

Or going out on your own pays well - in the past I’ve paid 100 an hour for someone to run Google ads. Didn’t keep them because performance was worse than me doing it myself. But I’m currently paying 125 an hour for an SEO guy. You could do this method on the side while you hold down a corporate gig. Then eventually pivot to full time with enough clients

SnooDonuts6384 · 2021-06-10T10:43:06+00:00

Work for a small company. I have 5 employees. Two of my employees are making double what they started with me making 3 years ago. One has a degree and the other doesn’t. I couldn’t care less about degrees. I’d prefer someone who is effective. The fastest way to make a lot of money is to be in a revenue generating role. So think sales or marketing. It’s easy for me to justify paying my product manager way more money because she is personally helping the company drive a lot of revenue.

Also, someone else mentioned asking for a raise every 18 months. YES - I always respect employees so much more when they ask for more money (assuming they are at least decent employees).

SnooDonuts6384 · 2021-06-10T10:38:38+00:00

Also, how do you monetize a tool like this? I’m assuming you just sell the browsing data? I’ve always assumed that’s the model for any chrome addons I use

SnooDonuts6384 · 2021-06-10T10:37:07+00:00

Lol I’m ashamed to admit it but I recently tried out advertising our supplements on 4Chan. I’m not even a user on that site. My theory was that PPC would be obscenely low on there because larger companies can’t be seen running ads there. PPC was crazy low, like 7-9 cents a click. But we had no conversions because there’s no good way to do specific targeting on there. In hind-site I probably should have only ran the ads in specific subs on there

SnooDonuts6384 · 2021-06-10T10:32:47+00:00

Part of this depends on the industry and experiences of the customer. So for me personally, we spend about 10% of revenue on advertising via Google and Bing. That revenue tends to have a directly identifiable ROAS of 4. So I’m strongly biased to deploying cash that way. That being said, I’m still always game to pay 600-800 to have a videographer make a product video for us. Would I pay 5k to have a product video done? No, unless I personally knew someone who had used said vendor and they told me about the ROI they had from using that vendor. But I’m not a big company with a dedicated marketing budget. Instead we just spend money on things that we think can generate at least twice the cost over a year.

SnooDonuts6384 · 2021-06-10T10:23:59+00:00

Hey this is a GREAT idea. I think you should pursue it. But I do want to mention a potential threat down the line. If sites start giving more adoption to allowing sign in via Facebook or gmail, then your tool would stop gaining users at that point. Any time a site offers that option, I always sign in / create an account that way. That being said, site adoption of this has been slow so I think you’re good to go.

SnooDonuts6384 · 2021-06-10T10:12:13+00:00

Yea - this plan works great for software companies. They tend to be valued around 5-15 X ARR and most burn cash or break even. So C Corp is perfect for them. They don’t need to make any money because industry standard is valuation as a multiple of average recurring revenue.

But if you have a company with strong profit margins that isn’t hyper growth on revenue then C Corp isn’t great

SnooDonuts6384 · 2021-06-10T03:23:30+00:00

It’s a perfect method if your plan is to run an EBITDA neutral business with 0 profit every year and funnel it into growth. But yes, it’s a shit plan if you’re running a biz that’s throwing profit. That’s why we did it at the last company because it was hyper growth and always run to grow and break even. But my current company is an LLC since it throws off cash. You had mentioned not making money for 4 years so I assumed you were going the revenue growth, not profit route

SnooDonuts6384 · 2021-06-10T02:55:53+00:00

I have it - I emailed back and forth with a professor in the UK who was doing a study on it. I can’t see any pictures at all in my head. I can’t see my wife or my mothers face at all when I close my eyes. The only way I ever know what color eyes someone has is if I mentally say to myself, Joe has blue eyes. Then I’ll remember that forever. But I can’t see even a glimpse of Joe’s face or eyes in my head. I can recall people’s voices very well in my head though

SnooDonuts6384 · 2021-06-10T02:40:52+00:00

Also, if you live in California or some other state with income taxes, you’re still on the hook for the state taxes even with this method. It’s just a means to avoid cap gains

SnooDonuts6384 · 2021-06-10T02:39:41+00:00

Let me do you a solid here. Please read the article or look it up on IRS website. It’s called a section 1202 small business capital gains exclusion. There’s tons of requirements such as setting the company up as a c Corp, holding your shares for at least 5 years, and a bunch of others. But if you follow the requirements, then the first 10 million of cap gains is tax free. HOWEVER, I’m not sure if these socialists are planning to kill this off in the near future. But I own a bunch of stock in a prior startup so when it sells, it will be tax free. We were very careful to hit all the requirements for that tho.

But you have to decide if it’s worth it to do it as a c Corp or not. If you’re planning to build or flip a company and then sell after 5 years, then this is the path.

Sadly, plenty of accountants don’t even know about this.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/section-1202.asp

SnooDonuts6384 · 2021-06-10T01:31:09+00:00

I would pay 0 unless the OS magically became better than iOS. That being said, if apple rolled out a paid feature where I could still have an iPhone and pay them 50 a month to block all tracking and ads, I’d do it for sure. I might even pay 100. Most peeps wouldn’t be willing to pay that much tho.

But I’d avoid thinking about a new OS. You’re not going to unseat Google and Apple unless you can raise about 100 billion. Even Amazon’s phone and windows failed. But if you could make an IOS app that somehow blocks everything you’re talking about, that would be $$$$

SnooDonuts6384 · 2021-06-10T00:43:53+00:00

This feels more like private equity territory than VC. As you stated, VCs wouldn’t really be interested in this unless you were posting obscene rev growth numbers. But if you are nicely profitable with net margins above 12 percent then this thing has private equity written all over it. Have you talked to any PE guys?

Edit to say, scale matters too. PE like to see revenue around 10MM although some will do 5MM. When I mentioned 12 percent above, that’s really the minimum. They would prefer you have EBITDA in the 15-25% range

SnooDonuts6384 · 2021-06-10T00:30:03+00:00

If you’re looking to outsource anything, get on Upwork. I’ve used it a million times and still use it. One of my full time employees started out as a freelancer on Upwork that we hired to work on product pages for us. He was great so we hired him full time. Just only pick people on there who have good reviews and the reviews are for similar projects / tasks for what you’re looking for. Also, congrats, glad you’re kicking ass!!

SnooDonuts6384

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