A summary of things you should know about The Website Investor according to Jeff Hunt: Introduction In this episode Jeff Hunt gives an in-depth summary of his book, The WebsiteRead More
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]]>In this episode Jeff Hunt gives an in-depth summary of his book, The Website Investor, where he shares a guide to buying an online website business for passive income.
In his book Hunt provides a roadmap for finding highly profitable online businesses for sale and shows you how to get the most value out of them without having to start from scratch. The goal of the book is to help you estimate the value of a website, negotiate price with website sellers, differentiate between low and high effort web businesses, and hire the right virtual assistants to help grow your web business.
This book is perfect for serial entrepreneurs who are interested in owning profitable online businesses that have already developed a customer base without having to start fresh.
A lot of people are interested in entrepreneurship and buying your own business and because of that a lot of books are coming out on the topic. But really there are no books about buying online businesses and that’s really a shame. My book teaches people exactly how to do that.
A lot of people read through the whole book and then go back and use it as a reference. The important thing is that you take time to stop and ponder what it’s saying and how it applies to you and then take action on it.
In any enterprise of any size there is always a buy vs build decision. The key principle in the book is that investing is better than inventing in almost every case. The action item associated with that principle is to get out there and start looking and educate yourself on what’s available.
The first thing you will notice about my book are the stories. I have a number of case studies that are essentially stories of acquisitions that I’ve made. Those stories are there because it is helpful for people to get an idea of what their website would look like, pricing, etc. if they were to purchase one.
The second thing the book is all about is process. The book is a comprehensive guide on how to do it and it really follows the same kind of processes you would use in making any kind of significant purchase and starts with where to buy, how to search website listings, and how to narrow down those listings to something you would be interested in. It starts at the beginning helping people find where those opportunities are, and then it moves into how to evaluate. After you’ve picked a few that you want to evaluate then you need to dig in and figure out how much they are worth. So the book has a really nice chapter on how to value and put a price tag on a website to give you an idea of what you should pay.
There are chapters on negotiation because many of website purchases are negotiated and don’t have a hard and fixed price. And then we go over how to transfer the website from the seller to the buyer and making sure everyone is taken care of and everything is protected.
The book also covers lots of other topics like buying international websites, organizing yourself as a business, and how to sell a website if you choose to. We discuss the topics of apps vs websites and whether you should buy one or not.
As you read through the book you will get the idea that buying in to a website business vs starting from scratch is just a whole lot easier.
NOTE: That was just a summary. To get the full deep dive, play the audio clip at 05:55
“Be the nicest buyer.” – Jeff Hunt
I’ve worked for many years in middle management at IBM where we had achieved most of our career goals. We felt like we just wanted to give back some of the blessing we had received so my family and I sold everything we had and moved overseas to a western Asian country where we served for about seven years. Once the kids grew up we knew it was time to come home. When I got home I didn’t feel like I could return to the corporate world very easily with the seven year gap on my resume so with little cash I decided to start buying websites and since bought about 300 income generating websites. Along with the website investing I am also an advisor for an online business acquisition for a company called Cloud Income Properties.
I meet a lot of people who would be better off buying in rather than starting a business from scratch. I go to conferences and people are really attracted to the online business space because of the flexibility that it offers. What most people don’t realize is the online business failure rate is even higher than offline just because people don’t invest themselves into it as much. And so the inspiration for my book is introducing all these people who are interested in a business to this idea of buying a website. The other inspiration is to help myself because the more people who are aware of this possibility, the more websites come out of the wood work that are for sale that I can buy and add to my portfolio.
Managing by Harold Geneen
Buy The Website Investor by Jeff Hunt on Amazon today
Visit HeckYeah.org to learn more about Jeff and his book
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]]>A summary of things you should know about Zero To One according to Blake Masters: Introduction In this episode Blake Masters shares his book, Zero To One, where he andRead More
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]]>In this episode Blake Masters shares his book, Zero To One, where he and Peter Thiel reveal the strategy, secrets, and truth to find success that goes above and beyond.
In his book, Masters provides you with the insights of how Peter Thiel became so successful with his ventures such as PayPal. One of the core themes in the book is the distinction between competition and a business monopoly. Both Thiel and Masters believe that success is found in the absolute differentiation of one business to another and they pave the way for you follow the same suite.
This book is perfect for entrepreneurs who have an original idea and are seeking absolute command of a niche where competition does not exist.
We wanted to show clearly and forcefully what Peter knows about business and you can’t get this information form anywhere else.
You can read it front to back or read it as a resource and jump around.
I would tell people not to compete but rather do something unique.
In the first chapter we start by explaining what the title means. Zero to One is about doing new things, going from nothing and creating something where nothing existed before.
In chapter two we take a close look at the .com boom and bust of the 90’s which we think is how everybody today continues to think about business.
One of the core themes in the book is the distinction between competition and monopoly. Americans love competition and it’s become sort of like a secular religion but the message we portray in the book is that competition is not what you want to be focused on when you’re building a business. We think successful business is all about differentiation and differentiation at large is really monopoly.
About halfway, chapter six is called You Are Not a Lottery Ticket. This is a meditation on chance and luck and how far we’ve gravitated as a society towards explaining things purely in those terms. In America we are optimistic and chapter six is our call to reclaiming a definite attitude where we don’t just assume things are going to get better but we know that if you plan where you want to go then maybe you can actually get there.
We have a whole chapter on secrets which are our answers to what Peter calls his contrarian question, what very important truth do few people agree with you on. This seems like a very easy question but actually it’s really hard to answer. If you have the question you have to not only think out of the box but also have to be brave enough to tell someone that. Any truth about your business that no one else in your business knows we prefer to call that a secret because there is something about the terminology that captures people’s attention and makes them wonder.
In another chapter we talk about how to sell a product. Silicon Valley tends to be overweight product and underweight sales even though sales are just as important as the product. If you have a good product but not a good way to distribute it then you actually don’t have a good product. We make the claim that it is best to take distribution seriously and think of it as part of your product.
Chapter 12 is about computers and humans and how they relate to each other both now and in the future. We think that humans and computers are so different that they are mostly complimentary. We also think that the most valuable businesses in the coming years will be the ones who understand and leverage the complimentary nature of machines and humans.
Chapter 13 is a recap of the book formulated in seven questions that every startup has to get right.
We end the book with a chapter about founders and entrepreneurs. It’s important for founders to understand the position that they are in so that they can be affective.
“The smartphones that distract us from our surroundings also distract us from the fact that our surroundings are strangely old.” – Blake Masters
I live out in San Francisco with my wife and 4 month year old baby. I am the co-founded of a legal research technology startup called Judicata. Prior to that I was at law school at Stanford and worked as an early sales person at Box.
The book is based on a class that Peter Thiel taught at Stanford in 2012 call CS 183 Startup. Peter’s goal in teaching the class was to tell his students everything he knew about business. I took really good class notes and put them online and then they ended up getting read by hundreds of thousands of people and became basic required reading in Silicon Valley.
The Age of the Moguls by Stewart H. Holbrook
Buy Zero To One by Peter Thiel and Blake Masters on Amazon today
Visit ZeroToOneBook.com to learn more about Blake’s book
Visit BlakeMasters.com to learn more about Blake and his notes on Peter Thiel’s class
Follow Blake Masters on Twitter and Facebook
Download the full transcript here
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books: All In Startup by Diana Kander | Exponential Organizations by Salim Ismail | The Art of War for Small Business by Becky Sheetz-Runkle
Relevant advice and tips: 5 Important Things That Every Entrepreneur Needs To Know About Starting a New Business
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