Exiting Doggypedia.org for $30,000

Three years prior to selling Doggypedia.org, I had quit my six-figure tech job to sell SEO for minimum wage at a local marketing agency.

I wanted to re-skill my career from sales to marketing but didn’t have any marketing experience.

And I figured if I wanted to learn marketing, selling marketing for a marketing agency put me in the best position to learn.

So I started selling SEO to learn SEO.

All of our clients were boring local businesses, so I took over the agency’s blog. 

After two years of working at the agency, I knew it was time. 

Time to do my own thing.

But before I left, I started a side project called Doggypedia.org to continue to level up my marketing skills and maybe turn it into a real business.

⚡ TL;DR

1. In 2019 I left the agency where I learned SEO
2. Grew Doggypedia.org SEO traffic from 0 to 116,000 organics/month in 13 months
3. Grew the Pinterest account to tens of millions of impressions
4. Grew the YouTube channel to millions of viewers
5. Tried to monetize the traffic & failed
6. Sold the brand for $30,000 to AlphaPaw.com

📈 Background

If this is your first piece of ContentDistribution.com content, here’s what you gotta know.

We’ve taken 5 projects from 0 to 100,000+ organics/month without building backlinks.

And we’ve documented exactly how we did it: 

1. 0 to 103,000 organics/month (first big win, where I learned SEO)
2. 0 to 116,000 organics/month (Doggypedia)
3. 0 to 119,000 organics/month (subscription DTC adding $135k MRR)
4. 0 to 166,000 organics/month (B2C SaaS)
5. 0 to 1,500,000 organics/month (100k+ paid subscribers for A16Z startup)
6. Baby fat graphs (not quite big enough for their own case study)

I started Doggypedia for a few reasons: 

1. Continue to develop my understanding of SEO 
2. Turn Doggypedia into a standalone business
3. If that failed, use it as a case study to grow my SEO agency
4. Tell Tinder dates I was a puppy influencer

This is part of a 4-part series of guides on how I built and sold Doggypedia:

1. Growing SEO traffic to 100,000+ organics/month
2. Growing YouTube to 3,400,000 views
3. Growing Pinterest to 44,000,000 impressions
4. Selling Doggypedia for $30,000

❌ Failing to Monetize

At this point in my career, I didn’t have the skills to create an offer that was engaging for my audience. 

But I knew that just because I couldn’t monetize my traffic, that didn’t mean someone else with a better offer couldn’t monetize my traffic. 

So I turned to Facebook to humble brag about my failures and try and get some consulting work. 

Basically, “Comment, and I’ll put you into my marketing funnel”

The Facebook Gods blessed me with reach that day.

Also apparently I am Facebook friends with Sam Parr from My First Million.

Because Sam saw it and tagged his friend Ramon.

And Ramon DM’d me to start a conversation.

My plan was working.

🤝 The Negotiation

But Ramon didn’t want the SEO consulting I was trying to hustle.

He wanted to buy Doggypedia.

Website acquisitions are valued on a multiple of profit.

And Doggypedia had a negative profit.

Fortunately, Ramon didn’t want me to pay him money to buy Doggypedia.

But unfortunately for me, Ramon did want to use a standard (revenue per month) X (30-40x) to determine the value. 

This meant ~$150/month of Adwords revenue was worth ~$6,000 to Ramon. 

I needed to get the price higher using a model I could defend.

1. The cost of buying a comparable website
2. The value of the traffic to Alphapaw’s acquirer 
3. The cost to pay someone to replicate the results

I couldn’t find any data on #1. High-traffic low-earning sites are unusual.

I didn’t have a framework for modeling #2 in a believable way. 

So I focused on #3. 

The cost to pay someone to replicate these results would cost a lot more than $6,000.

Most SEOs have taken zero projects from 0 to 100,000+ organics/month.

So even if Ramon had the money to pay someone, chances are he would spend all of it with bad SEOs who can’t hit 100,000+ organics/month.

And based on this logic, Doggypedia was worth closer to $30,000 than $6,000.

Didn’t work.

Turns out that people who buy websites don’t operate on logical arguments.

They operate on math and numbers. 

So I tried one last argument in a language he would understand. 

“I bet my best alternative is way higher than $6,000”

Getting more bids

I set the sale price for $15,000 and received over 72 inquiries. 

Muahaha. 

Perfect.

If Ramon didn’t buy it, someone else would. 

It didn’t take long to find someone serious. 

Their profile has $800,000+ in verified purchases on Flippa.

And looked like he was ready to go.

But I didn’t want to sell Doggypedia to Harri, I wanted to sell it to Ramon.

If you haven’t heard of Ramon Van Meer, you should.

His story is basically the American dream:

1. Grew up a poor foreigner 
2. Immigrated to America alone and still poor
3. Started the biggest soap opera website on the internet without ever watching a single soap opera
4. Sold SoapHub for $9m
5. Bought AlphaPaw for $300,000 and grew it to $35m/year in three years
6. Angel investor in the Hustle (acquired by HubSpot)
7. Just recently became an American citizen

Go Follow Ramon on Twitter.

Ramon is a really nice guy.

But not nice enough to sell him Doggypedia for $6,000.

So I kept the conversation with Harri going to keep my leverage up while we continued the negotiation. 

But after I got a verbal commitment from Ramon at a price point I was willing to sell for — I went dark on Harri.

Sorry, Harri. 

🚀 Learn: My third project to go from 0 to 100,000+ organics/month happened while finalizing the sale of Doggypedia. Read the case study.

In a last-ditch effort to save the deal, Harri increased his bid to $40,000. 

💰 The Sale

Logical arguments didn’t work to drive the price up from $6,000.

But having a best alternative offer at a 5x higher price did.

After we nailed down the terms via email, I flew to San Francisco to complete the transaction in person.

The timing was perfect.

I had a few clients in San Francisco.

DoNotPay, which I was in the process of scaling from 0 to 1,500,000 organics/month.

And XQ Institute, a non-profit Co-CEO’d by Laurene Powell Jobs.

I had a friend in SF who was helping me R&D an e-commerce product I was ideating. 

I was also meeting up with the Fam in Mexico the week after.

So I flew to San Francisco to stay with Ramon for a week.

It was a ton of fun.

I rode the BART and saw a Biggie subway ad.  

Got sweaty with Ramon in the garage gym. 

Played laser tag. 

And completed the transaction.

On March 19th, several days before the state of California locked down to prevent the spread of a viral epidemic scientists were calling COVID-19.

Read all of the installments in the Doggypedia series.

1. The 3,400,000+ views YouTube account
2. The 44,00,000 impression Pinterest account
3. The 100,000+ organics/month website 
4. How I sold Doggypedia for $30,000 (you’re here)

🤯 What Happened Next

My goal was to continue to work with Ramon post-acquisition, and unfortunately, it didn’t work out. 

I probably should have tried harder to make it work because today Ramon is at a $50m/year run-rate.

But I got super busy scaling our engagement with DoNotPay:

1. Grew the content team from 1 to 45 writers & editors
2. Published 8,000+ pages of content
3. Grew organic traffic to 1,500,000 visitors each month
4. Drove 100,000+ paid subscribers
5. Enabling DoNotPay to go from the seed stage to a series B from A16Z in 18 months

🚀  Learn how we added 100,000+ paid subscribers for DoNotPay with SEO.

I didn’t launch the e-commerce product I was working on, a travel standing desk.

I heard Naval talk about product / market / founder fit on YouTube.

And decided to ship something that better aligns with our journey.

So we shipped Workello, the internal system we built to hire good writers on auto-pilot as a standalone SaaS. 

Today Workello has helped 150+ teams skills test 63,000+ of their applicants to identify and hire the top 1%.

🚀 Signup for Workello for free in 30 seconds

Our work taking 4 brands from 0 to 100,000+ organics/month and our engagement for DoNotPay has led to working with category-leading brands like ClickUp, Privacy.com, Skiff.com, and FreeKick Bank. If this sounds like you, check out our case studies and then book a call:

1. 0 to 103,000 organics/month (my first big W)
2. 0 to 119,000 organics/month  (Subscription DTC)
3. 0 to 166,000 organics/month  (B2C SaaS)
4. 0 to 1,500,000 organics/month (A16z startup)
5. Baby fat graphs (not quite big enough for their own case study)

We have a superpower to help companies win big at Search, but every month I talk to founders who have awesome products, and huge ambition, but are just too early in their company’s journey to engage us.  

In early 2022 we launched the Content Ops Framework for agencies and early-stage startups to use our systems, processes, templates, and SOPs with their staff. 

And since launching, we’ve helped 4 ambitious, early-stage brands hit the 100,000+ organics/month club.

🚀  Learn more about the 100,000+ organics/month club.

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