Greatest Hits #3 - Selling a Blog For $9m with Ramon van Meer

**Sam Parr** (0:00)
All right, everyone, we have a quick ad for HubSpot. But I want to let you know, I actually use HubSpot and I use their sales tool, which is what this ad is for. HubSpot sales platform, it makes it just easier to sell stuff, to do it faster, to look at your pipeline, to see what sales are going to happen. Just prospect to cold outreach and get more customers faster and easier. Plus, it's easy to learn and free to start. So you guys can check it out, hubspot.com/sales.

**Shaan Patel** (0:27)
This episode is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast. HubSpot Podcast Network.
What? What is the HubSpot Podcast Network? That's right. It's a new thing by HubSpot. They started with our podcast, and now they're branching into more and more podcasts with experts in different business areas. So you might have a podcast about marketing, or sales, or operations, or customer service.
And we're going to go over through the different podcasts on this network. Some are more entertaining, some are more informational, some are a good mix of both. That's what we try to do here.
And HubSpot's goal here is to have on-demand mentors. So if you're an entrepreneur, you're a startup, or you're scaling up, you're going to be able to hear practical tips and inspirational stories by listening to the different podcasts on their network. Which by the way, I think this is a smart idea. Too many brands just try to sell you their thing. HubSpot, I love their approach here. They're like, let's put out great, valuable, free content and help more companies succeed. And the more companies that we help succeed, the more we'll eventually come back to us, sort of like a good karma kind of thing. So listen, learn and grow with HubSpot Podcast Network, hubspot.com/podcastnetwork.

**Sam Parr** (1:30)
All right, so I love huge companies. I love big visions. I love all that stuff. But a lot of people complain to me when they listen to the podcast, they go, Sam, I like these big, huge ideas, these hundred million, billion dollar ideas. These are fun to discuss, yada, yada, yada.
But I wanted to know about something that I can just create a great living on, let alone, I mean, I don't care if it gets big. I just want to make a living.
And today is a great episode that addresses that. So this is an old episode that Shaan did a couple years ago.
And the guest is one of my best friends. His name is Ramon Van Meer. He created a content site that was making something like $400,000 a month in profit. And he eventually sold it for close to $10 million in cash. I was a small shareholder, and I got to see the behind the scenes on how he built it. And it was really cool.
And Ramon inspires me for a couple reasons. The first is that he's a immigrant, he's a single dad, and he came here without a lot of opportunity in front of him, and he kind of made it work. And Ramon's a bulldog, he just gets it done. So he's inspiring. But it's also exciting because I love content businesses a ton. And I know a lot of you love content businesses. And this story is about a content business. And not just any content business, it's about one that might shock you. It's about soap operas. Yes, soap operas. Ramon Van Meer built this company called Soap Hub. That was the most popular soap opera website, kind of like TMZ or episode recaps, but for soap operas.
It was the largest in the space. It was one of the largest soap operas blogs in the space.
It only took him about 24-ish months to build this thing. And in this episode, he goes through a lot of detail on how he got traffic. So we got a lot of traffic from Facebook groups, which is something that you can still do, by the way. Facebook groups crush it. They crush it for my company, and they're still great. And he goes step by step how he did that.
He also talks about how he hired writers.
He talks about how he monetized through advertising. It's just really fascinating. And this is the type of company that if you're listening and you're willing to spend 40 hours a week doing it, I would bet everything that if you give it six months of 40-hour work weeks, you totally can start a company like this that makes a really good living.
And so this story is great because we're gonna talk about small business. So something that grew to something like five million-ish in sales in a very short amount of time, and five million seems like a lot, but it started small, like a couple grand a month and then tens of thousands of dollars a month and whatever.