Business Update: Online Business Owner.com

In November of 2022, I purchase OnlineBusinessOwner.com as a brand and business.

It’s been 10 months and I wanted to give you an update of what’s working, what’s not working and what I’ve learned so far.

If you want some background you can find it here:

If you don’t remember who I am, I’m Scott Oldford, an investor and advisor who owns 40+ online businesses, and this newsletter is dedicated to giving a behind-the-scenes look.

My intention for OnlineBusinessOwner.com was always to create a “hub” for Online Owners the same way Entrepreneur.com does it for all Entrepreneurs.

The growth plan wasn’t difficult, however, in building this it showed me what I knew about building something like this… if you were doing it as your only business it isn’t going to be easy.

The business model is pretty simple:

• Education for Entrepreneurs and low ticket along with membership based content that allows for Online Business Owners to scale.

and…

• Sponsorships and Advertising via Media Properties which include a Website/Blog, Newsletter, Podcast and Facebook Group.

I decided to focus on the 2nd part of the business model first, alongside of the building of audience.

My belief is simple on doing it this way. In order for a brand like this to succeed, there is no way we’re going to be able to use the typical “guru” marketing style that is based on scarcity, reactivity and fear. Nor is that the type of marketing I’d want to use for a brand like this.

Due to this, we have to use more intellectual and literal marketing and as we all know, when we do this, it will always hurt our upfront bottom-line. People think with their minds and buy with their emotions.

It’s been 10 months and here’s what we’ve done seen acquiring…

• Reactivated the email list, when we purchased, it has an email list of 25,000 Entrepreneurs and after our engagement and deliverability that number came down to about 11,000.

• We started emailing that list once a week with a digest and now twice a week. By the end of the year, we’ll be at a 3 times a week email that has 3 different themes.

• We started the OBO podcast which had over 100,000 downloads when we purchased, in doing this we did change the host and audience. As we go into the future, this will create our podcast network having a network of 10-20 podcasts.

• We started paid advertising directly to our newsletter and our average subscriber cost is $1.40 for our ideal subscriber. On top of this we embedded Online Business Owner into our other properties for growth.

• We spend time to understand and survey our customer and found exactly who they are.

• We redesigned the onlinebusinessowner.com website brining in the new brand along with publishing 2-4 articles per week and focusing on the next generation of SEO for the website.

• We decided to slowly grow the social media, however, this will be more into 2024.

• We grew the audience to over 50,000 Entrepreneurs on the email list and we believe that we’ll hit 250,000 by the end of 2024.

• We are in the process of launching our first summit, our goal is to have 25,000 Entrepreneurs signed up this one (www.onlinebusinessowner.com/summit/) if this goes successful, we will do this twice per year. It happens September 18-23rd.

• We are doing a contest that allows you to hang with me in-person if you win, for those that want to promote the summit.

• We built a VIP product for the Summit that is truly worth a lot of money.

• We obtained large sponsors for that summit, that shows that those folks see value in more engagement based

• We launched our expert-based product that allows for experts to be in-front of our audience (however, it took 4 iterations to nail it).

And… lots and lots and lots of things behind the scenes… Simply put… the team has been busy and we’ve been getting a lot of momentum.

2023 has gone a lot like I imagined it was, however, there are a few core lessons in all of the “wins”.

Lesson 1: The expert product that we built originally “Online Business Expert: Contributor” was not valuable enough.

The problem is simple. We didn’t have enough traffic or volume to compete with the price that we chose.

Through 4 iterations, we ended up launching The Wisdom Panel, which without Online Business Owner would have never happened. The Wisdom Panel allows for expert-based influencers, brands and businesses to get access to our entire network of blogs, newsletters and podcasts and combines authority content alongside of sponsorship content.

It’s a $35 - $125K investment, however, we believe we’ve nailed it now and have over 40 Expert-based Entrepreneurs inside. This created less revenue directly for Online Business Owner, however, it did give us a service that people really want and further it helped us supply original content that is actually really useful.

Lesson #2: Without a personal brand things are a lot slower to build

I knew this going in, as I didn’t want to be the singular face of OnlineBusinessOwner and as we go forward, our approach is to partner personal brands to help bring OBO to that next level.

However… the truth is… people don’t connect to brands, they connect with people. Due to this, it has 100% been more difficult to get traction in a lot of different places, however, it has provided a really cool benefit.

The ability to cast a larger net.

When you’re a personal brand, your total addressable market is the percentage of people who “like” you.

When you’re a business brand that total addressable market is much larger, hence the subscriber cost of $1.40 (which I haven’t gotten for my personal brand since 2016).

Lesson #3: This is probably going to be a “big” deal, however, in making it a “big” deal there is a lot of investment to occur.

I can see why someone hasn’t done this yet. It requires a lot of patience, investment, waiting and going against the typical rulebook for an online business.

We’ve been spending about $25,000/month in costs to run this business and help grow it since we brought it online and while we’ve generated some revenue from the upcoming summit, if I didn’t have the network I have the Wisdom Panel that we launched would of never been possible.

Why? Because without my personal relationships, along with us owning a bunch of other media, we would have had to charge maybe $1,000 bucks to make it happen and then we would of had a bunch of sub-par contributors.

So far, nothing that I’ve seen shows me that this is going to anything but an amazing business in the future and as we go into 2024, the road map is pretty simple:

1. Multiple Summits

2. More Content Published in “Real Time”

3. Segmented Content Network (Segmented Newsletter & Podcast)

4. Increased SEO Coverage

5. Audience Building (Audience Swaps, Paid Media, Sponsorships)

6. Product Development & Launch

However, as we go along another part of growth is taking Online Business Owner and pairing it with other things like this newsletter/media property www.onlinebusinessinvest.com 

Alongside things that we recently launched like www.onlinebusinessownerlegal.com.

We see OBO being the “core” brand while there are many other sub-brands inside of that brand. For me, it’s likely we’ll hit a few million in revenue in 2024 (if all things go well) and we’ll hit an exponential curve either in the middle of 2025 or early 2026 based on my experience.

Simply put… there’s a lot of carrying water, building bricks and chopping wood that is occurring right now.

In the beginning of OBO, I raised a small round and now, at a higher valuation will be raising more, simply due to the fact that the number one leading indicator that this is successful? The size of the audience.

If we nail that— we solve everything else. Also, if you have an online audience of Entrepreneurs and you’d be up for promoting the Summit (with a chance to hang with me and 9 others in Napa Valley) hit reply and let me know 🙂 

- Scott