#2 with Ramon Van Meer - Blogging His Way To $9M in Cash

**Shaan Puri** (0:00)
At this point, it's a money printer.

**Ramon Van Meer** (0:02)
I was very lucky that in content, you with a very small team, very low overhead.

**Shaan Puri** (0:08)
We're talking monthly, you're pulling in.

**Ramon Van Meer** (0:10)
Between four and 500,000 in revenue.

**Shaan Puri** (0:16)
What's up, guys? Shaan here. I'm doing a special little introduction to this episode from my phone because we got some good news. We broke into the top 10 on the Apple iTunes rankings, which is really crazy. And I thank everybody who downloaded the episode, subscribed, left a review, Venmo'd me a dollar. Everybody who supported the show, thank you very much. You know, the rankings, they don't really mean much. I'm gonna do the show anyways because I just like having conversations with smart people, but damn, it does feel good when something actually works and when people like listening to it. And I really appreciate that.
So that's good news. The other good news is that we're bringing on our first sponsor. You'll hear me talk about them a little bit midway through the episode, but I just think it's cool. We're the Money Podcast. We talk to people about how they made their money.
And it's only right that we make a little money ourselves, I think, that helps keep the show going and makes it sustainable for everybody. So big shout out to monday.com, who's coming on as our first sponsor.
I also like that it's actually a product that I use. In fact, like last week, I started using monday.com to organize the podcast because there was so much stuff going on. I got to book guests. I got to send stuff to the editor. I got to do this and that. Any project, it just starts getting super busy. And so, monday.com was a really good place to just organize everything, have my lists in a good spot. And it's got really nice design. And I'm a sucker for design. And so, this sounds like an ad. Now, this is not the ad. The ad comes later, but I really do use the product. And I'm glad that the sponsor is something that I actually use and really like. So, shout out to them for coming on board. This week's conversation was with Ramon Van Meer.
And Ramon is a really interesting dude. And this episode is gonna be different than most episodes. I would say that majority of the guests, when I have them on, they are intimidatingly smart.
When they're talking to me, it's pretty obvious within five minutes that I'm the dumbest person in the room. And I just try to ask questions so that let them talk and let them tell their story. And I just do my best to keep up. But Ramon is not a genius. And that's what I'll say, our buddy Sam, who introduced us, he says it differently. He calls Ramon like, like he just tells him you're so dumb, you're the dumbest smart guy I know. And he means it with love because what Ramon does is he doesn't overcomplicate things.
And you're gonna hear that in his story. For example, the essence of his story, and he'll tell you better than I will, but it's, he wanted to start a blog.
He just looked at what was already popular. And then he started a blog in that little niche. He bought a $49 WordPress template because he doesn't know how to code. He outsourced the writing to some freelancers because he doesn't know how to write.
And somehow, someway just did those simple things and built the most popular blog about a subject that he doesn't even really know. It's a soap opera blog, like Days of Her Lives, Young and the Restless, that's like soap operas.
And he's never even seen an episode of a soap opera. And so somehow this guy who can't code, can't write, and never watched soap operas built a blog filled with daily stories about soap operas. And the business started printing money, generating hundreds of thousands of dollars a month before selling it for about nine million dollars. And so Ramon is one of the most humble guys I've ever met in Silicon Valley. Very good at just keeping things simple. And if you take nothing away from this, it's to remember that you don't have to be a genius and you don't have to have some super complicated high tech business plan to make it work.
Sometimes if you just find a niche that has a lot of passion around it, you can build a very simple business and he's gonna tell you about that. So hope you enjoy the episode. If you do, leave a review, shout me out on Twitter, do something so that I hear you guys. That's what gets me excited to keep making this show happen. I don't have to do the show. I do it because I love it. And I really appreciate everything that happened after the first episode. All right, enjoy. Okay, ready to go?