I decided to sell my business

hey guys it's nathan been a long time since i i made a video and the reason for that is i've been busy um so this is like just an update video i guess on like what i've been up to the things i've been working on some of like the projects that i'll be launching uh launching going forward um so the first big announcement i have is i sold my shares of um the largest company that i had the one that i was talking about previously it was a social media marketing agency with 140 employees and i sold my half of the business um

to my co-founder um and i i'm really happy with the deal actually um really happy uh i've managed to sort of get my freedom back and leave a business that wasn't um i it just wasn't satisfying in any way to me like it was just no sort of like personal growth or development or like working on anything interesting um and if like for me anyway um so i was like quite happy to sort of step back from that like i much prefer like the sort of birth the conception like the um

watching like a startup sort of having an idea and executing on that and watching it sort of flourish in front of you so this sort of early stages of watching your idea come into fruition let's say and then i love growing the business um to like up to a certain point but after that it tends to sort of like flatline um and it turns into much more of like a less like a commercial environment right let's call it like larger teams management meetings not sort of start-up be fun digital and yeah and i don't know and it becomes like much harder to to like maintain that as like a team gets bigger just because you're purely by building out the team you're the sort of views of people and

unless you're in like a startup area like i don't know san francisco or l.a or even even like london in fact you could definitely do it um you won't find enough people like where i am in eastern europe who are sort of understand building like mvps and just have i don't know like a startup mentality so it just naturally turned into a um a much more like corporate business and also like the disagreement that i had with my co-founder was i believe that we should be focusing on revenue and profit um

like immediately that should be like the priority and he he was thinking much more like long term i don't know two three maybe even more like years down the line and like for me i just i don't know it's like social media it's like high-risk business bearing in mind the situation we've been in for the past two years right i think it's quite hard to um to have any idea what's um going to be happening in like two years time so i rather than rather than like not making any money for a year but working full-time on this business with the potential of it having like doing very well for us in future it made much more sense to me to to like to pull out my my money basically um

which i was like and the time that i'd invested so that that's why i sold back to him um it's the first ever time i've actually sold a business as well and i'm i've been really quite happy with the outcome um not even just from like a financial perspective but from a like weight off your shoulders um it's quite interesting that the thing that was causing me the most stress and problems in my life is something that someone's willing to buy off me so it's quite interesting that actually most of the satisfaction doesn't come from being able to like sell and receive a bunch of money it was actually from like the uh i didn't just have the feeling of having like my freedom back and

not having to worry about like these little issues and things like that and like i said like that the job just wasn't that interesting to me anymore like it was all just stuff that i'd done before there was nothing sort of new and innovative bearing in mind and like like bearing in mind at the same time i think there's loads of really interesting um spaces that are like opening opening up particularly in like the crypto space obviously nfts are going on right now um and i actually just bought a nft which i'm going to have physically printed and it's going to be put up here and

this is my apartment by the way i don't think i've ever actually shown shown this it's still still being renovated it's been a very long process but i'll be very happy when this is done kitchen living area uh lovely view uh library section chess area that i'm working on and this is like the iPhone 13 camera by the iPhone 13 Pro and the camera is unbelievable i was i was just back in london for two weeks and i was going to pick up a um like Sony A7S III if people know it's like a professional video camera but then i just by coincidence bought like an iPhone 13 Pro and

after seeing like the quality on the camera okay it doesn't quite compare directly to like a Sony A7S III which is like a professional level camera but just the convenience of having this in like your pocket is so so much easier and being able to go and like literally post this straight away without needing to do any like um editing in post like of course i can if i want to but just the convenience of this being like in your pocket the whole time and you don't need to carry around a dslr with like a lens if not multiple lenses like a microphone as well because the audio quality on there isn't isn't that great um

i really think this is is so convenient and like the quality on on this camera i i was honestly pretty shocked um anyway back to back to the update so as i said i've like sold the company and i've sort of listed out my reasons there so which also was like a learning process for me and i've also i've got no regrets about um about setting up and working on that business either uh at the start it was like very interesting and um not very interesting but it was like there were a lot of like new things and a lot of like process automation that i i got to work on um

but as i said i feel like realized that i really like the sort of early stages of a startup um of like a business so my main focus which is also what i said last time is building out these like passive income products sorry the other thing to mention as well just before i go on to that is what i i like i still knew i didn't know this already but um was a big reason for me like wanting to move on to something else as well is there's like a sweet spot for acquiring customers with every like particular channel obviously right because we have grown that social media agency to be so

large there was such pressure on marketing to acquire these customers at such a fast rate because our churn rate was was high it was about 20 percent if in fact more than 20 percent um there was such pressure on marketing to keep bringing these customers in uh or else people would would lose their jobs and what this meant was we had like i basically had to pay a much higher like cpa just to be so aggressive on the campaign but it's not an efficient way of of acquiring the customers at all because we could acquire i don't know sort of how many uh you could like we were paying about 150 cpa to acquire like 20 like 30 customers per day let's say on average maybe 25 whereas you could acquire like six to ten customers per day and

you could pay like a 25 or 30 cost per acquisition which is like is much more interesting for me like the business would be so much more profitable and it would also be like much easier to manage so that is one lesson that i definitely learnt just from trying to like from keeping working on keeping people in their jobs and making sure that no one had to be fired it cost the profitability of the business um so i definitely wouldn't do anything like that again like what i would do is it is the only benefit of having like a big team is it sounds good if you say that you've got like 140 employees or whatever but

also it sounds much better than it is in my opinion it is a bit of a anti-climax and i know that some people from the company actually will watch this video so i i don't mean to make anyone feel bad but it's my um my opinion is that it's it's much more it's much better to have like a smaller team with everyone where you can have a much closer really focus on like profitability so not just trying to like grow for the sake of it you acquire as many customers as you can for as cheap as as you can so if i was to set up this business again i could actually make the business more profitable following this method than the previous business in well in like a couple of months and

have a team of for example like five people in fact i could probably do it in the first month because yeah anyway um and have like a much smaller team of like three or four people or and this just it's i like it's what i'm really interested in doing and so setting up like these sort of smaller startups where you're not in working like full time on it you set up these acquisition channels to acquire customers at a cheap but and slightly slower rate and you're doing this on purpose um

and but then you also have like a few other businesses simultaneously for example you could run like 10 startups like this um a mixture of them being like completely passive income and a few of them that maybe need some staff you have like a few employees you could get a larger office and share share the office um to like minimize the expenses um you could also hire for example depending on the size of the business and the number of customer support requests you could hire one customer support agent or have like one 24 7 team that cover all of your startups um

so this is something that i was sort of thinking of playing around with um like to be honest i'm not taking a little break but i'm not ready to launch any people based startup is startups now like anything that needs employees um i'm just like i'm taking a little bit of a break after like because i now feel i've got my freedom back so i just i just spent like two weeks in london with my family it was the first time i'd seen them in in two years um

so that was that was really nice and like i think i'm going to go off to cuba in in like a month or so um but i'm just like yeah playing around with some little projects i think i mentioned before like setting up these like passive income websites and i will i will actually make a video on on how you do it i don't i will share some of the ones that i'm building but i don't want to share like too much of the specifics because by i like i just said i'm trying to make like passive income streams that don't need any like stress don't need like much input from me and

by me sharing exactly what they are the next thing that will happen is someone's going to go and set them up themselves right and it just means i'm just causing competition for myself which just i don't know it's just shooting myself in the foot a little bit so i will share one or two of them and maybe give give some examples of other ways that you could apply this and how you can set up these these websites because they have been performing really really well i spent about two days um

building them like building one of them and once i'd done that i have like the template and the code base so then it's only the only thing that's changing is the information that is displayed on on the website and like one of them that i launched i is getting about 200 visitors per day and it's got about 15 000 active pages but i've got about 30 000 more that i'm ready to deploy and again it's all automated which is really interesting and it's actually being the data is being hosted from Airtable there's going to be a limit of 50,000 pages and once i reach that point i'll move over to MongoDB or something and

the other one was getting about 30 or 40 clicks per day which is really quite good considering i've not invested any time into into um seo and i will like monetize these in in different ways um which like i i'm happy to talk about that as well um so i've been working on some things like that some other interesting projects like um automatic like YouTube channel like automated YouTube channels um where for example you can take like a TikTok influencer scrape all of their videos download all of their videos merge them together say like this is whoever Kylie Jenner's TikTok dance compilation and these things they get hundreds and

thousands of views and so i've just been playing around with things like that so automatically scraping through these profiles merging it together and then um pushing on YouTube and the same on um Instagram it works as well for example you can do like Instagram story scraping download as an mp4 merge the files together merge all the videos together and you can put like whoever Kanye West um Instagram stories compilation for november 2021 um and this is all automated so the only thing you need is like a database in the first place of um

influencers to keep scraping and so there's like a few little examples but on the websites i'll actually do a little more like technical video of um of how to like build uh build it out and set it up and then there's there's just a few other ideas for little like startups um that i've had like website plugins that i would like to build like a Shopify plug-in for example yeah so i think like i'll document that process as well so that's again so by selling my shares and like freeing up my time it just allows me again to work on like the things that i personally find interesting and

like whatever i feel like doing and bearing in mind my interests do change so yeah it just gives me that freedom to sort of build these projects and i'm not putting any like real commitment into them i these are just things that i think are interesting cool projects i'll learn something on them i want to build them and release them they'll be like functional businesses they'll have income and revenue like the website plugins for example um and perhaps i need to hire like one customer support agent and so on and i would just set up completely automated marketing so there can be like a small Google Ads campaign i'm not interested in being like super almost like as we would say like i'm happy picking up like the low hanging fruit like the easy to get customers it's not a business i'm working on full-time so

i'm not worried about like dominating the market i'm happy to get like the easy and cheap customers and i'll let everyone else fight over paying like the highest amount to make sure that they're always in like position number one on on Google Ads for example and i actually think that you can end up making like more money as i said there's like a sweet spot and when when you're fully invested in one business it can be almost like hard to see where that sweet spot is because you just have have a dem requirement you want as much income as possible from that business whereas if you switch like change the dynamics slightly instead work on having like multiple or like you know i reckon you can easily get away with like 10 of these businesses that are just super optimized to pick up like low numbers of customers per day uh even if like on average they get like two or three customers per day each you can you can still easily make like a thousand dollars per day but

they will also be like super profitable and more than a thousand dollars per day even um so yeah that was something that i will i think i'll like start documenting a lot more and the other that which leads on to my next point the other problem that i always had with this last business is because it was a social media business like there was and i don't know some past indiscretions that say i couldn't document a lot of and also for like competitors and so on i couldn't document a lot of like the things that i was building particularly at the start in terms of like process automation and

management and like also like google and management there was quite an interesting like campaign there with it was spending about 200k a month at one point um i i couldn't really document it which meant which is why like this YouTube channel has suffered over the past past two years even um so now that it's all like about to change and as i said before like i was going to push this video more into the i don't really want to call it personal developments i don't really like like the phrase um

but there's something along those lines sort of like documenting hacks and experiments that i am sort of doing in my life and it can be it can be on anything for example i like everyone talks so much about like a ketogenic diet or a carnivore diet or like a vegan diet and i was just thinking why like to just document myself trying all of these diets for maybe like 30 days each um and just logging the results and like seeing how i feel um and just sort of sharing the the experiences or even it can be and it doesn't have to be health it could be taking specific supplements or videos on like making money like for example i was putting out those um

the apy schemes on like um Olympus DAO where you can get like 7 000 interest on your on your money per year um and that is like still stable by the way it's still at 7 000 since i made that video i've more than doubled the that money and like i probably almost tripled it even though the coin has actually come down and um because coincidentally Bitcoin crashed today but of course it will come back up and so i can like document some investments as well like i was looking at getting into um

some property investments there's some interesting opportunities around here i got a very interesting offer from the bank actually for loaning money um for example i also bought a healthy food delivery company not but like invested sorry so i bought half of the company um like one of the food preparation companies if you know what i mean so i can document some stuff working there and just like in general like making money uh another challenge that i thought of doing is going from like zero dollars to building up like a million dollars um

and just see like how long it takes i know there was a guy who actually did this before and he started off being like completely homeless so i wouldn't go quite that far i would sort of treat it as in like i have a laptop um and i have maybe i don't know 50 starting money like most people i know not everyone does but most people would have access to like 50 to start a business and then just sort of seeing how quickly um how long does it take me to turn it into a million uh i thought that could be like quite an interesting series and

so anyway it's just basically to say that i've um now that i've sold it up i could like freed up my time to be able to make much more um content on like the various different things that i i work on in life um yeah other than that uh what else is new um this is like the office set up by the way the desk set up it's a little bit messy at the moment um this is Herman Miller Aeron chair it's very good ultra wide screen that's a dell i'm mostly used for programming and and um

Notion this is really good actually i'll make another video on it it's the new um MacBook Pro M1 Max and it's it's like 32 gig of ram like the processor is really like unbelievable actually um like i was like scraping i was just testing it out and i was scraping things with like Puppeteer with like 75 simultaneous um tabs open it was scraping 75 pages at a time whilst i also had i don't know like maybe 10 or 12 of my own tabs open i was watching YouTube i had Notion open and i was working on Airtable without without any like interruption like uh the cpu actually went up to like but

it like didn't even freeze at all it's just really interesting so that was like a really good investment and i strongly recommend anyone who who spends a lot of time sitting in front of a computer if they experience like any like type of slowness on their laptop just invest in a in a new laptop it all adds up um like little like micro seconds and like interruptions that you have in your day over the course of like a year it will if you value your time at any decent amount like anything over i don't know five or eight dollars per hour the laptop will literally pay for itself just in in the amount of time that that you save in fact i'll make another video as well i made like a time management calculator justifying to myself why I need a maid um

rather than bearing in mind a maid is very cheap in georgia they'll be about 300 per month so justifying why I need a maid rather than spending even like two minutes per day on these on these little and like i don't know making tea making coffee cleaning up and things like this i made like a calculator where over the course of it works out the total time wasted over the course of a week a month um six months a year five years 25 years and it goes up to 50 years and i worked out that i would spend 427 days making tea in my in my lifetime which just doesn't and

bearing in mind that's uh that's not including waking hours right so it's more like two years of my life would be spent um spent making tea so i think when you look at things like that in fact i will make a video on that calculation i'll share it with anyone who's interested but yeah when when you put it like that it just completely justified the need for me to outsource these like repetitive tasks that you sort of have to do every day but um you know it's like it's not an efficient use of your time anyway it's very good to be back that is like the main um

update for me like i think i'll i'll make start making some videos but then i'll go off to cuba for a month and i guess i could make some videos there as well we'll see um and yeah if anyone has any video ideas as well that they would like released feel free to leave them in the comments and i'll definitely review them