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In this episode, Exit’s Steve McGarry, sits down with Yaro Starak, the founder of Blog Mastermind and the co-founder of Inbox Done. Yaro shares about the process of buying and selling websites and the strategies that go alongside becoming a successful business for successful business people.
The Starting Point
Growing a trading, magazine, or blog and essay edit website company became Yaro’s bread and butter. It gave him the impression that a site can be an asset or property that people can sell. Looking for site point market places are significant for growing business related to buying and selling.
He started it as a hobby blog website with Magic The Gathering as a means to connect to the community for two to three years. He then proceeded to put up an editing company. And then the realizations of using this as a revenue source hit his mind when he started earning from these mini-projects.
He sold his first website three times the amount it makes in a year, and that is when he realized that he could make a living with this system. Yaro received a year’s worth of salary by just selling one website. He then purchased his first website to gain more experience and learn more about this industry.
Yaro shared that he was inspired by Rich Dad, Poor Dad, who says, “Invest in where you want to spend time learning.”
On the Process
Yaro views selling websites as pieces of property and a customer source for an existing business or what he calls revenue stream.
It requires getting ready for projects or packages. Buyers need time to practice information processing. He did that to help website navigators provide prospectus or details of the site – what it produces and how it generates income.
Users can choose to publish an article or create more ads. Information circulation is also a crucial part. The community is the best place to share the value of the site. Presenting the time and money investment required makes a faster transaction.
Steps To Help Make and Purchase Good Deal
Yaro shares that it is always good to start by thinking of the shoes of the potential buyer. Analyze your business and think about how income is produced and how it generates money. Think about what else you can do to improve and keep the revenue from coming into the company.
It is also always a good idea to share with the potential buyer what their day is going to look like upon purchasing your website. Like how long he needs to spend answering emails, who to contact, and where to put most of their efforts into. He also shares the ideal amount of how much to sell each website for.
Barriers To Overcome When Buying and Selling Websites
People are afraid because of money. They are scared and wary of how much money they should spend when purchasing a website. There are also times when other buyers beat you to a buy you wanted because you were too slow to decide. But the most common fear of most, if not all, is the fear of getting conned or deceived.
It is easy to overcome these fears, but there are tricks and strategies that one can do to avoid them.
Remind yourself that there is always going to be competition. Wherever you go and whatever you do, there will still be someone smarter and quicker than you. You need to adjust and learn from these experiences.
See the values in the assets where others cannot. It is always a good plan to look for acquisitions and systems that you can improve and grow. When purchasing, start with something that you are most comfortable with.
It is best to buy a starter website with some traffic and audience so you know that you can grow it and build it. Use it as much as you can, in the beginning, to learn how your website works. It is easy to fix something if you know firsthand where the problem’s root is coming from.
Always look for an advantage to bid against other people. Find a niche where you can be more comfortable to become more confident and act more competitively.
Yaro also shares that what makes him successful in his venture is how he finds strategies comfortable. Know how to handle the site before buying it or calculate an appropriate amount before buying it.
He shares that one of the most important things you can do as a seller is to become a seller buyers can trust. Create and form a team of competent and willing to learn individuals with the same goal as you.
Always be on the lookout for alive and active forums and if the numbers look great, make an offer. Always act fast.
What He Is Doing Now
He bought a two-forum package worth 12 thousand dollars. He followed his blueprint, where he studied all of its strong points and weak points. Yaro also hired a team to help him manage his websites, from creating banners to getting more advertisements.
Once everything was up and running and going smoothly, he sold everything off except for his blog for a whopping 150 thousand dollars in a span of four years.
He says he just followed the strategies and blueprints that he has been sharing with other passionate business owners in order to achieve a six-figure payout.
Today, his primary venture focuses on email management for business people, which his team called Inbox Done. He also created online courses or programs, helping entrepreneurs to level up their venture to increase revenue streams. He plans on taking online training to the next level.
Never stop searching for the best strategies to improve your business. Always be on the lookout for new knowledge and gain more experience from other like-minded people. If you are passionate about something, you can always start from there. Once you get the hang of this business, you can venture out and learn more about other niches.
PODCAST TRANSCRIPT
Steve McGarry:
Hello, welcome to The Exit – Presented by Flippa. I am your co-host Steve McGarry here. And on this special episode, I sit down with Yaro Starak. He is an incredible entrepreneur, the co-founder InboxDone, but before we get into this really powerful interview, definitely be sure to check out my previous interview with Melissa Kaufman, the co-founder of The Garage at Northwestern. It’s a really great interview. We talk a lot about the research around young entrepreneurs and some of the characteristics that really pop out early on. So definitely check that out with some of the links that are in the show notes here and description wherever you’re listening to this.
So jumping into today’s interview, Yaro is an amazing entrepreneur that has bought businesses and sold businesses. He’s done great content. That’s actually how I found out about him was Googling around and I found that he was one of the top ranked bloggers about buying and selling businesses. And right now, Yaro is a co-founder of InboxDone. He coaches entrepreneurs. And anyone who is selling an online training or an info biz, he takes their business to the next level. Definitely check out all of the links to Yaro’s blog, as well as his online training and things like that in the show notes in the description wherever you’re listening to this podcast. So without further ado, let’s jump into my interview with Yaro.
What’s up, everybody? I am here with Yaro Starak, the founder of Yaro.blog. How are you doing, Yaro?
Yaro Starak:
I’m good, Steve. Thanks for having me.
Steve McGarry:
For sure, for sure. So I actually came across Yaro’s blog quite some time ago when he was talking about buying and selling websites part time. And that peaked my interest because not only are you emphasizing the part-time aspect, but you’re also emphasizing some high six figure numbers. So we had to jump onto the podcast and talk about how you kind of look at doing this part-time. So before we get into that, let’s kind of go over your story, Yaro. How did you get into this space?
Yaro Starak:
Yeah, it’s a long story now. I started in ’98, so there’s 22 years of various internet businesses there that I could talk about. But the website buying and selling story is very much connected to my kind of start startup phase for my experience online because I was initially just a young guy trying to figure out how to make a living on the internet, just playing with it. And that led to starting a hobby website about a card game called Magic: The Gathering, which is still extremely popular nowadays. Now it’s an online game with a professional tournament league. But back then I was playing with friends and at some tournaments as well.
So I was a typical kind of a magazine website content. I was writing content other people were writing. Loved it for two or three years. Then I kind of lost interest in the game and moved on to an essay editing company. It was sort of my first, I call it my first real business because that’s the first business that I made a full-time income from. And I focused on that after graduating from university back in Brisbane, Australia. So I kind of got into it because of both of those websites. I mention them both because the Magic one was the first website that I actually sold. And it was the first site that I kind of experienced or even contemplated the idea that a website is an asset, a piece of property that you can sell. So that was kind of an aha moment.
And I’ll be honest. This was so early that Flippa was called the SitePoint Marketplace. So for the real oldies, they’ll know why that was, and that’s not where I actually sold it. I’m not even sure if I knew about that website yet. So the idea of buying and selling websites was very [inaudible 00:04:08]. It’s like I don’t think anyone was talking about it as a thing you can do. And certainly the big companies were being sold all the time, but not sort of like me owning a hobby website. And I sold that eventually to a person who was in my community. So they were a reader of the website, a person who traded cards. I had a little forum where people were buying and selling and trading cards. So I won’t share the whole story of how that got sold, but basically found this buyer, concluded the deal.
I made 13 and a half thousand dollars from selling a website that kind of made me about $500 a month. So I was really happy, especially because I was moving on from the topic, but moreso it’s the most money I’d ever made in one transaction. Prior to that, I had part-time jobs and I’d make that much money in one year of working. And that opened my eyes to it. So as I grew my editing company, there was always this potential as well. I could sell this business at some point. It wasn’t necessarily my first goal.
But fast forward five years and I was actually running another business, the one you mentioned now. I was in the blogging space and I was just really getting into that. I still had this essay editing company. It was paying me just the basic kind of salary at sort of entry level income source. And I was like, you know what? I love blogging. And I love that space and teaching and podcasting and being a content creator. And I saw that as my future. So again, I was like, “I should just exit this essay editing company.” And that’s when I started looking for a buyer for that as well.
But while that was all happening, and this is sort of overlapping stories here, I did really get into SitePoint, which by then had been rebranded to Flippa, as we all know it today. And there was this period for a couple of years where I was running a blog, own the essay editing company. And then I’m like, “This is crazy. I’ve got some spare cash. What could I invest in?” I loved the idea of buying websites. So I don’t know if you want me to continue, but I can then talk about my first purchase of a website as well, which kind of happened randomly, not through Flippa, but it was again another eye-opening moment that not just can I sell these assets, but a website is a piece of property, but it’s not just that, it’s potentially a new customer source for an existing business or a new revenue stream as a new startup business you buy.
So there’s all kinds of benefits I hadn’t really thought of at that kind of granular level. And like you said, at the start, I kind of never thought, huh, people take money that they’re earning from whatever they’re doing. It could be, their job could be their small business and they invest that money, whether it’s buying a property with a mortgage or putting into stocks.
And I remember, actually it’s funny. I read, I think, Rich Dad Poor Dad for the first time, the very famous book that kind of pushes a lot of people towards property investing. And I remember reading that and one of the points was you should invest where you want to spend the time to develop your knowledge, or you already have some kind of knowledge and skillset. And I’m like, Hmm, well, I’m not really interested in learning about the suburbs of where I live and the property demand, supply, rent, all that kind of, it was all physical real-world property. But I loved websites and I’m like, “Well, if I kind of follow the advice of this book, I should invest in an area where I have knowledge,” which at that time I’d spent a good almost 10 years then essentially growing websites, managing websites, building little teams to run websites for me. So that’s when I thought, well, I should invest there. And that’s when I started really using Flippa.
Steve McGarry:
Nice. Nice. And in terms of that, I like that you touched on literally that one transaction was a year’s worth of part-time salary. And I think that’s a great kind of segue into what do you think is the first step that a lot of people need to get over when they’re, let’s say, someone listening to this has a blog that they’ve been managing, it makes a couple hundred dollars a month with your example. What is the first step to getting ready to sell that project that they’ve been building over time? Did you put together anything like a package you were going to offer to buyers out there? What would you say for a beginner that was listing in? What would that initial step be to get ready?
Yaro Starak:
Yeah, that’s an important question. And that it evolved for me over time, as I got more practice at both being on the buyer side and seeing information other sellers provided and then being on the selling side. That first time when I sold my card game website, obviously, I didn’t have guides. There was nothing out there that was sort of teaching you how to sell a website. So I was very much making it up as I went along and I definitely produced a basic prospectus-style document, which to be honest, was more like an email detailing important things. And for me it was a logical decision to think, okay, if I was going to buy this website, what would I care about knowing? So I really thought about the shoes of my potential buyer. And I thought, well, I know everyone cares about income first, obviously. What is the income? How is the income produced? Most important questions there.
And in your mind as a buyer, you’re thinking, can I do what is stated that is needed to do to keep that income going? So for me, it was not just this website makes $500 a month, it’s $500 a month because you’re publishing an article a week and you’re dealing with the questions in the forum, moderating. There’s these tasks that keep the business going. So I kind of wrote all that out. I talked about how it makes money. Some of it was advertising. Some of it was selling cards themselves. Talked about the management of it. Mentioned little things like there was some volunteer writers. So the content didn’t have to be only on the owner’s side, there was other people willing to write.
And then I talked a little bit about kind of a day in the life of the owner, so you can kind of experience. So when you wake up, you might have to respond to a few emails, check in with your ad revenue, might be some questions like a moderation needed in the forums, deleting some spam posts, that sort of thing. And just kind of outlining all of that. And then and I’ll be honest, that was kind of basically it. The other hard part for me was how much to sell it for. Again, there was no kind of guides for coming up with a price. So I literally pulled this number of three times the yearly profit is what I would try and sell it for. So at the time it kind of made about $5,000 a month if I took out the small expenses I had. Oh, obviously you have to list expenses as well. How much does it cost to run the website? So server costs, is there any software you’re paying for and that sort of thing.
And that was it. And it was really just a case of circulating that information to people who are actually ready showing interest, not people who are randoms. You just wouldn’t send it everywhere because it’s kind of private. But anyone who emailed back after I reached out to them and said, “Yeah, I’m actually interested,” I passed it on. And then the next step would obviously to get on a phone call and continue that discussion.
Steve McGarry:
Yeah. Yeah. Well said. I like a prospectus.
Yaro Starak:
Yeah. I mean, obviously that got more advanced over time. And that was a smaller website, as the value of the asset got bigger and more detail had to go into that prospectus, better presentation and so on.
Steve McGarry:
Yeah. Yeah. It makes sense because it’s almost smoothing the transaction out even more because people can see this is the exact amount of time investment I’m going to need to make in acquiring this asset and bringing it on. So the easier that you can make that, the better and the faster the transaction. That’s really pretty impressive that you did that because there wasn’t a rubric back then. There wasn’t anyone really talking about it that much. And I think that that’s really cool that you managed to put that together all on your own and get that into the hands of a buyer. And I liked that they were from your community too, for the first site. I think that speaks a lot to how you were doing the sourcing to find a buyer. I think that that’s really cool.
And one constant that I think you might like that I’ve seen across all these conversations is people bring up what you touched on, which is one business that you could buy could facilitate a need of a bunch of other businesses that you have. Or one business you currently own, if you bought a new one, it could facilitate your portfolio however you see fit. And I think that that is something that everyone has mentioned. So clearly there’s a trend there where it’s an alternative mindset that you’re coming into it with where you say, if I have a… Let’s use the example of a Magic: The Gathering, because I like that. I have a card trading exchange or marketplace, I’m going to buy a Magic: The Gathering blog because it just makes sense to the people that are reading that blog will get value from my current business.
And I think that that’s a really great mentality of how to go out and look for something that you could add as an additional revenue stream for a current business. And depending on the size of your business, I think you could do smaller acquisitions and things like that. But when you did the jump into this, what was the kind of big barrier? Because I know you’ve created quite a lot of great content around helping people do this. What did you see was the kind of restricting element to getting into this space? Was it people that were nervous about the amount of money that it costs them to get involved? Was it the diligence aspect that they were worried about getting something that they couldn’t turn around if it was trending downward? What was your experience with that? Was it with people signing up for your course or reading your content?
Yaro Starak:
Yeah, I mean, it’s been a long time as I’ve been talked to people over the years and it’s funny, no matter what year I talk to, the same question would be the first fear as you’re talking about, the kind of stumbling block. And it’s always, well, there’s too much competition, especially when we all know about Flippa. So we all go to Flippa and everyone thinks, well, if anything good comes up, they just won’t have a chance to get it because someone else will get it. I had the same fear, even the first time I went in there and that was a long time ago.
And I think it’s funny because it is something that you would experience, for me, 10 years ago, the first time I’m going in. Five years later, five years after that, there’s always competition. There’s always interest in something that’s valuable like a website. What I think is a natural, maybe a strategy, which you just talked about really to dealing with that is the fact that you can see value in an asset where others can’t. And this is obviously an analogy for physical property buying as well. The fixer upper is this kind of diamond in the rough for certain people, but other people are like, “I don’t want to do that.”
So I went into my own experience, when I started looking for websites, thinking that way going, “I have a strategy to look for a type of website that gives me an advantage to go after,” but not just an advantage, just a comfort zone, because at the end of the day, we’re talking about fear here. You’re afraid other people will beat you to it. You’re afraid you’ll buy the wrong website. You’re afraid the money will disappear as soon as you take over it. But that was where one of my biggest fears the first time I bought a website was that I buy it, I look at it and then I check the income and the day after I bought it, it goes to zero, or it goes for 50% less than what the person claimed or showed me when I looked at their prospectus.
So I think, for me, that’s why looking for a type of website or a system that I understood was a big part of the strategy and I think still should be. And even if you take a step back before that, if you don’t have an answer to that question, if I said to you, what type of website are you comfortable with? Do you like an advertising focus website or a physical product like an e-commerce website or a website that’s a blog, a content-driven website, or even just what’s the monetization strategy? Are you good with affiliate marketing? If you don’t have an answer to that, then that’s probably the first thing to do is get some experience there, which you could do by investing in a website. I mean, that’s one of the great things is you don’t have to enter like I did buying a multiple thousand website. You can buy a $1,000 website. Spend that savings you might save up over a few months and buy a starter website. Maybe it doesn’t have much income at all, but it’s got traffic. It’s doing something that you can then look at.
Because I think for a lot of people they’ve never owned a website that actually has traffic and has an audience that people react to it. So just owning an asset that does that and seeing how it does that, checking the Google analytics, seeing if there’s an email list that’s growing, these basic metrics. You go, “Okay, I understand how this works.” Maybe I start to learn a bit about the target audience as well. Hopefully there is some revenue, even if it’s small, it’s like, “Oh, I see. We’re making $50 a month from selling advertising or something like that, or selling this affiliate product.” Then it’s like, oh, okay, learning, getting comfortable.
And that’s basically what I did, but obviously my training was the running of my Magic card game website, and then the running of my essay editing business, and then the running of my blogging business. So for me, to deal with that fear and as a strategy to have an advantage… And when I say that, it’s not just an advantage for your own comfort zone, it’s an advantage to bid against other people because that’s ultimately what you’re afraid of is the competition. If you feel like you have a strategy in place, so you know how to run a business website, or you can slot it into your portfolio and immediately have a runoff benefit, which just to give a practical example, as a person who had a blog at the time, still do, but had a blog back then very much focused on advertising and affiliate marketing. I knew if I bought another blog on a similar topic, if it had X audience, it probably meant X dollars increase in advertising and affiliate sales, not guaranteed, but I felt comfortable with that.
So to me, that meant I could potentially bid a little higher than other people who were maybe brand new to that space and go after at that type of website. So that was one of my strategies looking for blogs.
My other strategy ties all the way back to my card game website. I had a forum, as I mentioned earlier. It was a trading card forum. People bought, sold and traded cards. And I love the fact that they would go back to that website every day and I’d make money from advertising because they just would create page views. They were traffic basically, and it was user-generated content. So my goal, besides looking for blogs, was looking for forums, user-generated content websites. So that’s kind of the start of my official Flippa strategy at that time. So obviously there’s a story I could share there, but that was kind of the way I dealt with that common fear. And I think it’s great advice for someone who is new is find an area where you can have a comfort zone and advantage so you feel comfortable making a higher bid perhaps, or going after only a certain type of website.
Steve McGarry:
Yeah. And what was the initial strategy? You touched on it there. What was the initial strategy that you were going into Flippa with?
Yaro Starak:
Yeah, so I experienced just before Flippa, like I said, my first purchase was actually not on Flippa. So I had the sale of the card game business. Then I got into blogging. And while I got into blogging, I met other bloggers, virtually so to speak. And there was a guy named Michael who had a blog about small business. And one night I was just talking to him on the chat platform. And he said he’s thinking of getting out of this topic and wants to sell his blog. And honestly, I would not have thought of buying it if, A, it didn’t match the same niche. I was in the business space. He had a business blog. B, I had experience selling my card game business. So I kind of knew how that transaction process worked. How do you hand over money for buying a website? What due diligence do I really need to look at?
So I went to bed thinking, “I’m going to make an offer for this.” I had him hand me the same information that we just talked about. How does it generate revenue? How much does it generate? What’s the daily day in the life of owning this website, this blog? And it was totally familiar to me. It’s like, you got to publish some blog posts and make some money from advertising and affiliate income. And that’s it. And then I knew it was on WordPress and all these sort of nuts and bolts components, my comfort zone as a blogger. So I woke up the next day and said, “Listen, I want to make an offer.” It was, I think $2,000 at the time was definitely a low ball offer if we think about today’s kind of numbers, but at the time there were not any kind of examples to look at.
And it was funny cause we ended up doing the deal. He said it was maybe $300 a month in revenue. So it was a good deal for me, but he was also happy to do it because he wanted to make sure the site continued in good hands to quote what he was looking for. So we did that transaction and I wrote about it on my blog saying, “Hey, I’ve just bought a blog and this is what’s happening.”
And then I had other blogs write about the fact that I acquired a blog. It was like one of the first ever mergers of two blogs in my space. So it turned into a press event, which would never happen today because it’s obviously so commonplace. So back then it was kind of like it’s when eBay and PayPal merged, it was like my blog and this other blog kind of situation.
And that was great. But then that made me realize, obviously, I took over the website, I saw my income remain stable and I was able to increase it. And I had some other challenges running two blogs, confused me in terms of which blog do I write content for because they’re similar topics. And I eventually brought on other writers to make that somewhat more clear for me. But more than anything, it was like, okay, this is an awesome revenue generating strategy. So that’s when I said I’m going to start watching Flippa for two things, blogs about business so I can do a repeat of what I just did. Just plug it in, make more advertising, put a team in place to produce content, have a manager. And I was already eyeing someone to potentially be my asset manager who would look after all the websites that I would buy.
I had strategies for increasing revenue, which just came about from running my own blog, knowing I could charge more if I put the banner here or look for additional advertisers, create more banner spaces and so on. And then my second strategy was to go looking for forums just because I love that user generated content aspect. Wasn’t caring about the topic so much. It was the structure of the website. It was a forum, an active community, a certain number of new posts every day was my core metric I was looking for. I wanted to make sure it was healthy and alive.
So then I just started literally every day waking up and logging onto Flippa and just looking at the new listings and trying to find myself… And get in there quick because that’s the thing. I remember I missed one deal because I was too slow. I literally was there and then it was gone within 24 hours. So I knew from that point forward, if I saw something that the numbers look good on the listing on Flippa, make an offer straight away. You got to get in there fast.
Steve McGarry:
Yeah. Yeah. Love the community and forum approach. I think that’s really smart, really smart. And it’s a great example of how you… A $2,000 deal, I mean the average mom and pop investor has that amount of money sitting around on average and they could easily do something like that, hire somebody maybe on Upwork, a freelancer or something like that to help with the content generation. And you have, like you said, stable and then increased income because you started very much what I was mentioning before, you had a blog and then you acquired another blog and that generates more income. So really love that strategy. I think that’s really cool because and it was a press event because it was in a niche and there weren’t many acquisitions in that niche. So it makes sense that there was a nice little bump there from-
Yaro Starak:
Yeah. That was made me famous for one day anyway.
Steve McGarry:
Thanks. Well, that’s a good transition into what you’re working on now. So I did get a chance to go through your blog and see that you’re helping entrepreneurs create online courses. Is that right?
Yaro Starak:
Yeah. Well, I should just tie up the bow here of the buying and selling story just quickly because I know we’re running low on time. I did end up buying a forum inside Flippa, just to clarify. I upped my game. I actually bought a $12,000 collection of two forums and a content site on a topic of miniature motorcycles. So that was a really cool experiment in the sense that I had no interest in the topic. If people don’t know, these are proper motorcycles that you ride, but they’re maybe two-thirds smaller than a full-size bike. But there’s a huge community of them. And in this case it was an Australian-focused community, which was an advantage for me because I was, at the time, based in Australia. And I was able to kind of connect with the buyer in the sense that this will be an easier transaction from one Australian to another, same time zone, same sort of company structure, easy to transfer ownership, that sort of thing.
So the only thing that was scary was I was investing $12,000, not $2,000. So it was a little jump ahead in that case. But I went through with the transaction and followed the blueprint, increased the advertising revenue once I took over. Put a manager in charge of the website and added it to my portfolio, which by then was essay editing company, two blogs, and then adding these miniature forum sites as well. And then to sort of really complete the picture, I ended up selling all of these, except from my blog website. I sold the essay editing company. I sold the miniature motorcycle forums a few years later. I let the revenue come in.
I wouldn’t call it passive, but it was very hands-off because I had a manager in place. So that’s when I called it a side hustle. It really was. I wasn’t trying to do a deal a month or anything like that. I had done a couple of good deals. They were working really well. I improved the revenue. I put a team in to automate it, but my mind was all in I’m a blogger. I’m creating content. Like you said, what I do today and what I’ve been doing for many years, I have courses on how to essentially sell using blogs and email lists. That’s my kind of bread and butter. It’s what I’ve got a skill set in now for over a decade. So I was there doing that as my day-to-day business, writing articles, delivering the course, teaching on webinars. Meanwhile, there’s these little assets to the side, which I would just check in with the manager and, “Hey, how are things going? Are you implementing the ideas we have in our last call?” Some worked some didn’t. I shared some income with him because he obviously needed to get paid for managing them.
But it made it such a side gig for me. And I loved it because it felt a little bit like a mogul. You’re a little tiny bit of Warren Buffett where you’re buying your own assets like that. And I was doing what I loved every day, which was teaching and coaching and writing about how to make an information publishing business and then funneling money into those when I could.
Eventually, the reason why I sold everything was I actually just wanted to get the capital out of those businesses. And I bought a house, I bought a car. So I went on a bit of a selling spree and after doing a buying spree, it’s like, “Okay, let’s sell the essay editing company,” which went for over $100,000. I sold the community of forums for double what I paid for. I think was actually $30,000 when I sold those. And same, I sold the second blog as well. So everything was gone within about four years after acquiring them. But it was amazing.
And honestly, if I wasn’t so passionate about blogging and teaching and coaching on the topics that I have for the last 10 years, I would have still been buying and selling I’m sure. Or buying and just holding probably because I think it was such a great strategy that you can still do today. If it’s your main thing, great. If the side hustle is possible as well, you don’t have to hold 10 websites. You can hold one and just have that as an income stream, but great strategy. I still love it. Especially for people new, if you just don’t know what topic you want to get into or what product you want to sell, just head on over to Flippa and you got just examples in front of you. And you go, okay, would I like to sell this set of knives on this e-commerce site? Or would I like to write about how to do home decor on this blog and sell affiliate products? What would be the role that I would enjoy? I think that’s a great thing to do.
Steve McGarry:
Yeah, yeah. It just really stimulates the creativity around just business in general or online business. And what you mentioned earlier, I really liked about the aha moment when you acquire something that’s, let’s say, getting a 100,000 views a month, to someone who’s never had an active audience before, it really starts the creative wheels turning where you’re like, “Whoa, all these people all of a sudden care what I have to say, and I now own this asset.” So just the revenue streams in your mind just start churning and it really, really can generate a lot of great additional streams of income because you have these active and kind of vibrant communities that you’re acquiring.
Yaro Starak:
You’re forced to learn. That’s huge. That’s when the rubber hits the road, as they say.
Steve McGarry:
Yeah, for sure. Well, thanks for tying the bow on the entire four year journey. That’s fantastic that you exited all of those. And then now you’re focused on the teaching people how to generate email lists through blogs and sell courses and things like that. So that’s the primary business that you’re focused on now. Where can people go and learn more about it?
Yaro Starak:
To be honest, after 20 years it’s more than one business and the actual business I’m well and truly focused on right now is I won’t talk too much about it. It’s called InboxDone. We do email management for people. So that’s inboxdone.com. But I’m still very much writing my blog and that’s kind of my face online at Yaro.blog. Y-A-R-O, you can just Google that. You’ll find it that way as well. And all my content on buying and selling websites and businesses is there. So if you just look for that category, you can just go through the history on that blog. And of course you can check out everything else I do there as well, Yaro.blog.
Steve McGarry:
Awesome. Well, thanks so much for coming on, Yaro. Really inspirational story. Love the idea of starting in something like Magic: The Gathering and working your way all the way up to six figure exits. I think that’s fantastic, but thanks so much for coming on and sharing your story.
Yaro Starak:
Thanks for having me. I love talking about this topic. So good luck everyone.
Steve McGarry:
Thank you so much for listening through to the end here of this episode of The Exit podcast. Yaro is an incredible entrepreneur who has done many, many great things for helping others when it comes to taking their online training to the next level. So if you have not yet, definitely check out the links in the show notes on the Flippa blog, as well as wherever you’re listening to this. There will be some links so that you can go check out his blog, InboxDone, and some of the projects that he’s been working on so you can get to know a little bit more of what he was talking about in the episode.
If you guys are brand new here, definitely hit that subscribe button, leave us a comment on future guests that you’d like to see on the show. And we have some amazing interviews coming in the next couple of days here. So definitely stick around, hit the subscribe button and I will see you guys on the next episode of The Exit.
