E168: PE Firm Blackbook Investments: Acquiring and Growing Profitable Websites with Mohit Tater

[00:00:00] Ronald Skelton: And welcome to the How2Exit podcast. Today I'm here with Mohit Tater, and he is the founder of black book investments. Which is a micro, uh, investment fund. We'll have him explain to us what for a second here, but thank you for being on the show today, guy. 

[00:00:13] Mohit Tater: Happy to be here at Ronald. Thanks for having me.

[00:00:16] Ronald Skelton: I always do the origin story. The running joke is, and I, and everybody's probably sick of hearing it. It's like, Hey, you were born. Now you ended up on a show about mergers and acquisitions. Could you fill out that small gap in between? Tell us who you are, where you're from, and kind of how did you get into this space? What made you do this? 

[00:00:32] Mohit Tater: Yeah. So yeah. Hi, hi everyone. I'm Mohit Tater. I'm from a city called Jodhpur in India. It's also called the sun city or the blue city because all the houses are painted blue here. And Nick Jonas got married here. So yeah, that's where I'm from. And, um, I have been, yeah, I've been born and brought up here, grown up here and then left for college, which is not too far from where my city is. And, um, did my engineering, you know, studied for four years, but while during college I always had this bug in me to do something of my own.

And even before that, actually during school, during high school, I had read a book called Rich Dad, Poor Dad. Which kind of planted the seed of doing my own thing, doing my own business, owning an asset, owning a business. Which then was further strengthened by, Tim Ferriss book, uh, For Our Work Week, which I read in college.

And right after college, I, I took up a job with a startup, uh, called Zomato. I took it up just because I wanted to see how it's to work a job before I could take a call on, you know, going my own way. And I decided I'll do it for about a year and then. Probably, quit and then go do my own thing, which is what exactly I did.

But during this, uh, one year I kind of, learn how to build websites, learn how to code just in the evenings and on the weekends. And why I chose to do that was because I was trying to, because of the two books that I'd read. I was trying to make a source of income from being location independent or time independent.

And as most of us would do, we would type in how to make money online in Google and try to come up with ways in which we can make money online. So I read blogging was pretty hot, so I thought maybe I should blog. So I started building websites, blogging. Uh, and seeing if that works for me. That unfortunately didn't work for me.

Um, and even after I quit my job, I was trying to, make a go at it, but it didn't work for me. So I was at, at it about, uh, for about a year, but no luck. I didn't make a penny. Then I was like, okay. There must be some other way. Someone introduced me to a marketplace called Flippa, flippa. com, which is a marketplace for buying and selling online businesses and websites.

And, uh, I browsed it for a few weeks before liking something. It was a small $2500 business. I had some money saved up. I bought some from my parents and I kind of took the plunge. I, you know, sent 2500 to a guy I didn't, I didn't know and I was like, you know, what's going to happen? I'm shooting in the dark here.

It was a business basically that was providing social media marketing services, like increasing followers and likes and all that stuff. It was very popular back then, 10 years ago. And this is all 2012, 2013. So that luckily for me, that worked out well. It was a legit thing that he was doing and nothing was misrepresented.

So I took on the business. I grew it further, like almost fivefold. You know, increased income by, reaching out to more clients or converting cold leads into warm ones. And the warm leads to customers. And probably six, seven months down the line, I ended up selling it for five X, what I bought it for 12, 500. And also made some money during, uh, it was in my, you know, ownership.

So that was a nice chunk of change for me because my salary when I was working was about probably 500 bucks a month. So, yeah, getting all this money in a two years worth of income in one go, what was, yeah, a huge sum for me. So I was like, okay, I had always wanted to travel to the States, so I, I packed my bags, and, visited the States.

I went to New York, uh, visited my friend. Was there for almost like two, three months in the U. S. and was with my friend for about, a month or so. And all this while, like while this was going on, I did buy another one that I got scammed on that was for $300 and the income on that was misrepresented. 

It was an income from some other source or some other business, which was being portrayed as income from this business. And I got scammed out of my money, but luckily I had some money. Like I said, from the exit. So I didn't lose hope. I went at it and the third one worked well. It was also something similar.

And the fourth one, that's how BlackBook came about. I was visiting my friend. He saw me every day, like working outta my laptop or from cafes, and he was like, what do you do? I wanna know. He was, uh, in a hedge fund. He was working in a hedge fund, and he had some cash lying around some money. He said, let's do this.

You know, why not? I invest in something, you know, in a website and you can manage it for me. So that's how the idea for BlackBook was born. We looked for a website for him to buy. We found one, we, we bought it, and then I started managing it for him. He got a good ROI. So after about a few months, he got his friends and family also involved.

So we bought more sites for them. And then that's how in 2014, Blackbook Investments came about due to a need in the market. So that's the origin story of Blackbook Investments.

[00:05:37] Ronald Skelton: Interesting. We, we share a little bit of a similar path. Probably a few years older than you. Back before Flippa was around and before pretty much any of those sites were around, um, you could buy and sell websites on a, on a thing called the warrior forum.

And it was, uh, it was just a news group. So I was doing the same thing with your, you started off. I bought, buy small revenue generating most of the time websites that they didn't know how to do web development. They had an idea, they put it together, they got customers coming in, they were making some money.

Uh, maybe it was AdSense or maybe it was, you know, affiliate or whatever, but they were making some money. But they, they didn't know graphic design, they didn't know anything. And I've always been kind of good at all of it. So I would come in, and uh, grab it. And I had a couple programmers that worked for me and in India. But um, I had a couple guys, but even way back then, uh, I would find them on Skype. And then what happened to me is the same thing that happened to you.

I kept buying bigger ones and bigger ones. And, you know, I bought one, luckily I stepped down. I was buying some pretty good size sites, six figure sites that by the time I was, getting there. I was like, Hey, this is something I'm going to do. And I bought. I bought a smaller one that was doing about $36, 000. I paid $36, 000 for it. 

I bought it because it had great traffic. They were doing, uh, basically paid two X, two years worth of revenue. They were doing okay. I thought I bought it right in, in, in these days in terms that's still a great price.

Unfortunately, they had a thing going on that I didn't even know existed back then. I thought about it before because I owned a bunch of domains. Back then I owned over 3 000 domain names.I would I would buy and sell and trade domain names. I still have about 100 maybe down to 80 now. But um I would buy and sell and trade domain names.

I'm in the same space you are. I'm looking for acquisitions. I'm buying stuff, but it's a lot easier these days. Cause you have third party vetting tools, the analytics are in the cloud. It's common these days to write a little bit of the, uh, purchase price in performance over time. Right. So you give them some money up front. Yeah, exactly.I date myself back then I got out of it for a long time. I've done everything since then. Uh, yeah, I worked with some of the biggest websites on the planet back in the day when .Com were the thing. 

Let's go back to, what were some of the first acquis, you know, you, you did some acquisitions for friend investors. What worked really well with them? What did you, you did the social media company and sold it. 

I see on your website, you called it a micro PE or on your, on your profile. So if you say it's micro PE, I get it now. You started where I started, like you started, you know, college kids. I was still in college back then. Um, I was in college probably longer than I should be. I have a bunch of degrees. 

You started really small there in, in, in the terms of not, you know, not in your world and not in my world back then, but in the terms of the PE world, you know, your first acquisitions were very small.

What did it look like to, you know, buy the bigger, you know, what was the, what was the next biggest thing you bought? I mean, did you buy anything so far that like really like, well, that was a lot? You know, it's a big difference now. 

[00:08:47] Mohit Tater: Yeah. I mean, for the, for the most part, for the first few years, we were staying under six figures.

So low mid high five figures and friends and family, because I was still kind of learning, you know. As you went and I, I did with other people's money. And it's very expensive, so I didn't want to lose any money. Uh, that was the thing. So I was playing, yeah, I was playing it safe. And probably for four or five years, we were just, you know, going nice and easy, slow, steady, uh, not ramping up.

And we started, and we had, like, moved to content sites then, after the first two years, like, one and a half, two years, so. We're only doing content websites, display ads, mostly some affiliate mixed in, um, and, uh, in around 2019, I'd say 2019, 2020 is when we, you know, started, leveling up if I may.

And, uh, we launched our group buy, which is, it's like a fund, but it's like a group buy when we pull money from multiple investors into a, multi member LLC. Wyoming LLC. And then we buy multiple businesses and websites using those funds. Why we did that was because the one on one investment that we were serving our clients with, the minimum for that, uh, was about a hundred thousand dollars because anything lower, it would not even cover our fee.

So there won't be much left for the investors to pocket. We said, you know, a lot of people out there who don't have a hundred thousand lying around and they still want a piece of this action. So we offered a group buy to them for which the minimum was $25, 000 and that kind of went off well. So we started in 2020 and in the last three years we did about 1. 04 million across three rounds.

But we did one each year. It's like a rolling thing. We keep adding to it. Now we're going to be doing it more frequently. And hope to be at like around two two and a half million by the next year end. And also in 2020, we, we partner up with the Empire Flippers Capital. They had a new program, Empire Flippers Capital wherein they were pairing up, uh portfolio operators like me to investors that wanted to invest in websites because they have a list of investors, uh, who, who did not buy only because they could not run the business.

So it kind of paired us up and, uh, we raised about 4, 4. 1 million across three rounds in 2021, 2022, 2023. And we deployed all of that money to buy content sites. The last one we bought was, about a million dollars. Uh, and bought for about 38, 40x. And, uh, we are looking to exit from the round, from the first and the second round now.

Uh, so that, because the life cycle is almost coming to an end. So, yeah, so we raised about 5 to 6 million just from these two, uh, ventures. And that's apart from the, one on one investors we work with. So, yeah, that's where we are right now. I think we do mostly mid six figures and above, uh, now. So the limit for individual investors also has increased to $250, 000 now to work with us, instead of 100k.

[00:11:56] Ronald Skelton: Yeah. So, uh, let's cover a couple of things real quick. When you said it's 30 to 40 X, for those of you guys listening and who buy brick and mortar companies and they buy them at three X, the difference between what he just said, and what you, what you're thinking of is, in the brick and mortar businesses, you're buying off a three X of profit.

Or SDE, EBITDA, those type of things. And what we do on these, most of these websites are extremely profitable. Meaning that they're, if they're running at 75 percent profit margin or below, they're not running it correctly. Uh, there's something wrong. So usually they're at 80, 85, 90 percent profit margin. It's one or two guys, a writer, an SEO guy, and, and the website.

So in this world, we trade at multiples of revenue. So the yearly revenue. So when he, or monthly revenue, and it's based off the, trailing 12 months. So when he said 30 x or 40 x, he's taking the last 12 months. Correct me if I'm wrong, what you're doing is taking the last 12 months of revenue, averaging it across the last 12 months average.

It's the average of the last 12, trailing 12, which was the, right now would be, at the end of September, it would be September back, right? Or at the end of, you know, August back, if you, depending on how you did it and you just look at all the, the last 12 months and you do 30, the going rate right now is between 30 and 42, is what I'm seeing about right, about right?

Yeah. Yeah. If it's running really sweet, it's really good. They've got a great thing. And you might get, I think the best I've seen around there is 40, 42. So a lot of people hear that and go, you're paying what I'm gonna, I'm gonna create a business and I'm gonna do, I'm gonna sell you a website, you know, 40 x.

And I'm like, you know, it's 40. It's 40 times your monthly. So it's still three x If you look at it.

[00:13:41] Mohit Tater: It's still three x still. That's what, three x about that. 

[00:13:44] Ronald Skelton: But it's three x your revenue. So if you, if you can go out there and create a six figure website that actually generates six figures, uh, call Mohit and me and,we're interested.

I'm only in the b& b world. Uh b2b is my kind of thing. So marketing topics, uh software review sites that type of stuff. What you guys delve into all kinds of stuff, you don't really care as long as they're profitable or you have certain industries your content types you look for? 

[00:14:10] Mohit Tater: Yeah, we don't do adult, betting or casino, all that stuff. But other than that, we try to go for evergreen niches. Like, you know, we'll do lifestyle or hobby or tech. We have a couple of sites on the Mac book niche, Mac niche, basically, you know, Apple ecosystem. One on the PC niche. Tech iS big. Um, then we have in the hobby niche, hobbies are like, you know, people like to spend money on their hobbies.

So that's interesting. That's ever long lasting. When we try to go for things that are not too dynamic, like that changing every day, because then our content gets outdated every day.

[00:14:45] Ronald Skelton: When I get, one, once I get the kind of portfolio built out a little bit with some good software review sites, constant sites in the B2B, if I decide to expand my market, I'll do what I call passion niches.

Passion, in my world, a passion niche or niche is a, um, is anything where people will spend money. Whether the economy is good or bad, you know, or recession or not, they're gonna, they love their, their sports. They spend money, yeah. Their passion. Right. And they're gonna spend money on it. Yeah.

Golfing that would be one like we had, 

[00:15:15] Mohit Tater: you know, we had a couple on that. 

[00:15:17] Ronald Skelton: Yeah. People are insane about golfing. You know, and where I'm from and you know in the midwest or the United States here, bass fishing or fishing in general. People are going to spend money. They're going to go fishing whether the economy is good or bad. If they're going to figure out a way. I don't think that, you know, the economy is going to hit them very hard for long as you're talking about the average Joe and not some sport fishing book or something. $200, 000, uh, boats or anything weird.

That said, um, you know, passionate niches, I might go into that realm at some point. The only thing I do, I think different than you is, uh, I'm actually looking at things that service those industries. So if, um, like if I found a really good copywriting and content writing service, I'd be interested. Social media management or something that really takes, uh, like you did before, once before, they have great clientele and stuff and they grow, grow content, you know, I'd be interested in that. And that's a service industry business, but, uh, I can run those from anywhere, especially if they're already remote. 

So those type of things I'd be interested in, but do you guys go outside of the software or outside of the, uh, do you do any apps or anything other than the website? 

[00:16:25] Mohit Tater: No, mostly content websites, mostly. 

[00:16:26] Ronald Skelton: Yeah. You know what you're running, you know, you know, you know your, uh, that's good. That's actually a really good thing to like be in your lane.

Yeah. Um, my, my criteria is I can run it from anywhere in the world because, I haven't lived in the same, 

[00:16:38] Mohit Tater: But now we, yeah, we are pivoting now because content has gotten riskier. The content space overall in general. So we're moving into buying service based businesses like agencies, SEO agencies, marketing agencies.

That be, even, even, even a podcast booking would be a nice acquisition actually, to be honest. Uh, yeah. Um, so those and software, we don't have the expertise, but we are building a few software in house to get the chops ready. And then we can, you know, because we don't want to buy something for you, make you invest in something that we don't know how to manage or run or grow.

We got to do it with our own money first. And then we, you know, we can confidently say that, okay, we can do it for you. 

[00:17:16] Ronald Skelton: Yeah. I, I think that that's a good move there. The reason I'm looking at the service industry is as I use them, right? I look to buy things that I understand and or that I either like, that are cost centers now. Like you said, podcast booking service. 

I pay my, I pay a team of people to book people for me. Um, you know, I have a team of people who, they vet the people who want to be on the show and reach out to people and ask them to be on the show and all that. And, uh, so that's a cost center at this point. So why not turn it into a profit center?

We've done it a few times. I've had people, I've had guests come on and say, Hey, I really like being on your show. We'd like to be on other shows and like, you know, we can do that for you. And, we just do a little, you know, one off package for them. So I know we can do it well, right.

[00:18:01] Mohit Tater: Interestingly, yeah. I'm going to chime in here. So we did the same. So we were, we were managing and growing all these content sites. We had a huge team. We have 25 full time people with us and then a lot of contractors, freelance writers, experts, niche experts. So we were like, okay, why limit, you know, this management service to just the people who have invested through us?

Why not offer to everyone? So we, we just launched BlackBook digital a few months ago and now we cater to everyone. Even if you haven't bought a website through us or invested with us, that's fine. If you have a website, if you want to need full service website management, or even, a la carte services like content or, or backlinks or WordPress management, just simple.

We can, we can cater to you now because we have the bandwidth, we're doing the same thing anyways. So, might as well offer to more people. So yeah.

[00:18:45] Ronald Skelton: One of the things you said there because you raise funds and there's a reason why I'm resisting this. Um, I have, I do have private investors that I work with, but I don't raise funds in the traditional set sense because I don't want to be forced to sell.

So what I do is, uh, I give my private investors ability to call back the the uh, investment meaning that after a certain period of time, I usually do it as a debt plus equity, so I pay them off. So somebody comes in and they want like if I buy something I want to hold long term when I raise the money for it I'd like okay put in a hundred thousand Uh, we'll pay you back over the first three years at a hundred thousand you have your money plus a certain percentage of income and you still make you still are a You know five or ten percent minor owner.

Yeah. Yeah, so you're part of an owner, but you can't make me sell it You know from when it's profitable and running in there and doing its thing. What is the life cycle you talked to, you talk about having some that are at that time? That's one of the things about raising funds where you're just strictly raising capital and people are investing in sites.

They need liquidity. They need to be able to put their you need you know, there's a thing called velocity of money is how, how many times the money turns over. So, does that make you sell things you're not quite ready to sell sometimes? 

[00:20:00] Mohit Tater: Oh, mostly no. Uh, so I, yeah, I, I sell, then I think it's the right time to sell.

It could be earlier than we are expecting to sell or later than that, but the ideal life cycle would be anywhere from two to three years.

[00:20:13] Ronald Skelton: Two to three years. So, uh, that's, that's what I was curious. Cause I heard you, you mentioned that in our previous a little chat there. You were saying that you had a couple of sites or something or at that point where it's time to start considering selling them.

And, uh, I also interviewed, uh, treasure hunters, the guy, the guys that run that. And they had a website right after we had the interview, they sent one over and I'm like, why would you sell this? It's extremely profitable. And then I realized they raised a public fund, right? They did a private placement memorandum, reached out to accredited investors, and they promised a timeline.

And now they're getting, you know, that fund, bought X number of sites. This is one of those. And it's a couple million dollar site. Unfortunately, it's like I said, I'm buying stuff, but I'm buying things I can improve. And he had the same playbook. I I'm trying to build. That's one of the reasons I interviewed him is like, what do you do to these?

It was probably at its max profit potential. It's making as much money as it's going to make every month. It's, it might grow because of getting more followers, but there were no, Hey, swap this ad service out with this one and get an improvement. Yeah. Although hanging fruit, he'd already, he'd already fine tuned this thing.

I'm looking for things that have not been fine tuned yet, that they, they're using AdSense instead of some of the more profitable, you know, services that are out there. They're using, you know, Amazon, you know, for the affiliate products when they're probably the lowest paying around, right?

So what does it look like on what does the search look like for you guys? Uh, you still you farm Empire Flippers? You farm Flippa on all those on a regular basis? Or you guys do cold outreach like I do? I mostly cold outreach. Um, So I don't like the option 

[00:21:51] Mohit Tater: Yeah, it's a multi fold strategy to be honest. We made a name for ourselves in the market space. And uh people know that we buy sites all the time. So we of course look at the marketplaces like Flippa. Uh, you know, we look at brokers, International Empire Flippers, white light, they know us. We have a relationship with them. So they keep sending us deals.

We also, uh, have our own outreach approach. If you're looking for something specific, we do the outreach for that. Then we also have an inbound approach where in people who know that we already, we buy sites often or who have already sold sites to us. They come to us oftentimes, if they have something else to sell.

So we have a good inbound pipeline also. So it's a multi fold strategy. Uh, that we, you know, utilize. 

[00:22:34] Ronald Skelton: I love that. That um, If they've already sold sites to you, what people don't realize is some people out there are just really great creators. And they know how to create a good site, they know how to build something, they know how to get revenue to it. And then a year into it, 18 months into it, they either get burned out or bored, and they want to, like, get the next biggest idea, and, they could be making six figures on these sites and they got the next biggest idea.

And they'll, they're going to call you back over and over again. Hey, I've got that. Or, you know, or they try multiple things at once. Well, this one's making six figures, but this one's really taken off. And now it's just a distraction, right? It's no longer an asset to them. It's a distraction from what they really should be focused on.

So it's, you got to build a rapport with these sellers, even if you don't buy their current website, cause you don't know what they're going to create for you in the next six months or year. 

[00:23:22] Mohit Tater: Exactly. You never know. Yeah. And some people just want, you know, to take chips off the table. And some people are not comfortable running a site that might be worth a hundred thousand dollars if they sell today, but it might be zero tomorrow.

So, so they want to take the chips off the table, you know?

[00:23:36] Ronald Skelton: Yeah. So one of the spaces, and I want your opinion on this, uh, honestly, cause, uh, I'm concerned about it. Where do you see, and how do you see AI affecting these content websites? I'm, I'm concerned with, and I'll explain my, I want to hear your response first, but what do you see that as a.

[00:23:53] Mohit Tater: I don't see it as a threat, to be honest. Uh, there's a lot of panic in the market due to which multiples have fallen down. but I think it's temporary because AI is only weeding out low content, low quality content sites, I think. It is not going to replace a human who has actually tested a product that, you know, they have laid their hands on, shot pictures off, at least not in the near future.

So, that kind of content comes from experience and doing something yourself. You know, if, if let's say I'm, I'm testing a scope, so I have three really big sites in the scope and the, hunting niche, uh, you might be interested in them. I can share, share them with you later on because we're looking to sell those.

So this girl who writes for this website, she works with us. She does videos with us. She actually goes to the range and tests out the scopes and red dots and all that stuff and takes pictures and everything. So it is legit original content with her own views because she has so much experience doing it.

AI cannot do that. AI needs this content to be able to train. If there wasn't this content in the first place, AI would not have any content to write. So I think it's going to actually weed out the generic, uh, content sites. And kind of push the, the ones with the really good content up. And anyways, we only hire expert writers.

We pay good money for expert writers and, uh, we, we don't maybe, we don't publish like in bulk, but we publish really high quality content with original images. So I think it's going to give us a boost. So that's, that's one thing. And the other thing is, it's actually going to improve our workflow in other ways too, which is the whole content planning process, you know. Now I can just tell AI to create a content brief for me if I know what to tell the AI, it can create a really solid, tight content brief for me with all the whole structure of the article laid out. Which I can just give to the writer.

And have them, you know, go at it. So, and right now it's being done by manually by our content managers who go and check out all the other competing pages, competing articles, then they see what's best from each, and then they make the content outline, which alone takes a lot of time. Like maybe an hour also or two hours to get a solid content outline done, which can be done quickly with AI. So I think it's going to help us in the long run. For sure.

[00:26:12] Ronald Skelton: It's interesting is I do some of my own writing just because we, uh, I don't have the writer that write at the level I want you for some of this space, especially things I've studied and stuff like that. So if you see articles on like the psychological impact and stuff, I'm fascinated by the human brain.

I like to study that. So a lot of times what I actually, I use AI. I actually tell it what I want to write on, what the topic is, ask it to create what it thinks an outline would be. And then I read that outline and think, what questions do I still have of this? Like, what is it missing? All right. And then I add those to it and then.

I even have it, you know, you'll start with the like, even writes part of the article, but what I do is I just, every time I, as I'm reading through what it's creating, I just go back and ask him more questions. Like, Hey, what about this? So if I, if I was a reader reading what I have and it creates a fairly thorough article, if you could treat it that way. It's like, uh, it still takes an hour or two to get a good article out of it.

I think anyway, but that, that, that same process to write that same article, it used to take me half a day. Right. 

[00:27:14] Mohit Tater: Yes. It's good for prepping. Yeah. Yeah. Sharpening the axe, you know, sharpening the axe. Yeah. It reduces the time the writer has to work on the actual content. It also, you know, apart from briefs, you can also use it to compare your article to the top ranking article for that keyword.

You can put in the, you know, URL and say, what can I do to improve my article. This is a reference article. So, a lot of ways you can use it smartly. 

[00:27:39] Ronald Skelton: Yeah, I like that. The concern I have with AI, and I'll circle back around to this, is I think it's going to cut our traffic down quite, quite a bit.

And the reason is, is as Bing's already doing this, uh, Google's talking about doing it, and they're doing it on some of their beta stuff. Is if you ask a question in Search Side Search Engine, a lot of times the AI is just going to flat answer it without ever like, especially how do I do this or how to that. A lot of those, how to sites, which I'm a fan of, I actually, you know, this show is called how to exit.

I have one that's called how, I own the domain, how to blog, and some other stuff. And the how to blog was just going to be an art, a bunch of articles on how tos and, uh, starting to line that up. I own that domain for a long time. And then AI came around and like, this might go away. Right.

Somebody said, you know, how to tie a knot or, you know, how to tie a so and so. Yeah. That article is very simplistic. Anything can write it. The AI does a great job at it. Cause you're wanting a simple answer and being showing it in the search results. Like the actual response to it is you do X, Y, Z. And I don't, that traffic that a lot of that, how to traffic, I don't think it's ever going to make it to a site like yours or mine. It's going to stay right on the search engine.

So in that realm, we've got to look at like, you know, how do we switch things? How do we do things that are unique? Um, I like your idea, like, you know, unique content. I wouldn't mind own a hunting website and testing out gear all the time. Except for I moved to California and most of the , most of the stuff I would mount that scope on for would probably not be allowed here.

[00:29:09] Mohit Tater: But I have a logic to, I have the logic to your, your, uh, apprehension also. Which might hold true or not, but I have logic to that because all these search engines need to make money and they do so by showing ads.

If they don't send any visitors to your site, they don't have any ads to show to anyone. So it's kind of, you know, hitting themselves. Kicking yourself in the foot. So I don't think it's, it's going to be like they'll take away all the traffic and only show answers on the search page. Maybe for some topics, maybe for some niches, but mostly they want to, they want people to go to the site so that they can show their ads.

[00:29:48] Ronald Skelton: I think they're playing with it right now because it's a cool new toy. Yeah, I think once they start really, if they start seeing it really digging into their revenue because people aren't clicking on ads or basically they're, you know page view time starts shooting up because people are getting on their answers on on the actual Bing or Google search or whatever. Then, logically, there should be an impact on their revenue. I can see that. That's a, that's a good reason. 

[00:30:13] Mohit Tater: We'll see how that plays out. Yeah. Yeah. We'll see how that plays out. Yeah. 

[00:30:16] Ronald Skelton: But, uh, I think it's become a better and better writer. So and I pay, I pay for the paid version of that. Um, in the last six months to a year either I've become a much better person, like prompter, like asking questions, asking deeper questions and asking deeper questions to get good articles out of it. Right. It's just become a better writer. Some of both probably. Like used to, and I trained it differently probably too, just because when it used to everything was like in conclusion and conclusion in this and that, you know, every paragraph was like a, a freshman college kid writing. And now it's, you know, much more fluid than it used to be. And I think it'll only get better. 

[00:31:00] Mohit Tater: It's a tool. Yeah. Yeah. How you use it is up to you. It's a tool, you know? 

[00:31:03] Ronald Skelton: Yeah. So on the software side, you guys are doing that in house first before you guys build out apps and stuff. My concern with, with apps is, um, they tend to come and go. So there's some tried and true, like there's like, if I think about my phone, I probably, I don't play, I have, I have two games I play on my phone, but I don't play games anywhere else.

Like, I don't have, I don't have, my son has an Xbox, but I, I think they're a waste of time and I'm very competitive. So if I, if I sit on his Xbox, I would play that damn thing until I beat everybody at that level. Right? 

So for the purpose of saving time, I don't play those, but, um, I think about all the apps I try on the phone, you know, everything from meditation apps and stuff like that, I burned through them so fast because I just, the next best thing comes out. That would be my concern is like, does how I would have to, before I bought an app or even developed one, how, how do apps become sticky and hang around? You know, I'd have to understand that.

[00:32:04] Mohit Tater: Yeah, that's true. That's true. And that's the reason we are not linked to apps anyways, because they're not sticky. And you know, you run through them like faster than, you know, you run out of eggs maybe. So the thing is what we're trying to do would be b2B SaaS. 

[00:32:19] Ronald Skelton: B2B SaaS, yeah. I talked to a guy, I interviewed one the other day.

He bought a small B2B SaaS in the HR management realm and now he's looking to grow it a little bit. Um. But, you know, I didn't even know, like he was, I'm been a tech nerd for years, but I'm on the Unix, Linux and Apple side. He's on the PC side, but he's got this visual, you bought this thing. It was built in like visual basic something. VB net or something like that.

Yeah. Yeah. VB. net. And now he's trying to move it to the latest and greatest not net architecture, whatever there are on Microsoft side. And I don't know anything about that world. But, um, I, there are so many systems inside of big businesses. Everything from CRMs, which are simple to ERP, ERPs or whatever, like enterprise management, you know, enterprise management type of tools where it manages everything. Inventory, uh, logistics tools, you know, you name it.

A lot of people don't realize how many tools can be out there and you can build and people, businesses need. Right. Um, I never, until I ran this show and started interviewing people, I just didn't realize how much of that really truly existed in the space.

So I, at some point like you, you know, you're probably a year or two ahead of me on that one. I might be interested in going down that path cause I'm a nerd by previous trade. But, I would have to do what you're doing right now. Build something in-house, understand it, make sure I have a dev team that understands the current, the current tech stats that are out there.

What, what, what we would be buying and potentially the migration process. A lot of times you would be buying something that's on an old tech stack and how do you, yeah, you want your tech. Yeah. How do. Like this guy, he's having to rewrite all his software because like nobody, nobody's using the old tech, you know, the technology you bought, right.

He's having to port that over to new, newer languages and stuff. Which I told him, it's like, Hey, I probably helps with that now too. Right. It's like, uh, yeah. But, uh, and I come from that world. I mean, from a test engineer and engineering review, I worked for Lockheed Martin for years, we would take old government, you know, military intelligence systems. 

One of the service companies I might be interested in is not a Lockheed Martin, of course that's huge, but uh, a company that's real good at like, they can take caught technology from, from, they can take something from assembly and move it to the current site.

You know, they come and they can do that for you and then help you. That'd be kind of a cool agency to own. Because it's just kind of, that's something that would be competitive, you know, it's just going to happen all the time. 

[00:34:54] Mohit Tater: Yeah. All the time. Yeah. Ages, you know, and new tech comes in, so it's going to keep.

[00:35:00] Ronald Skelton: If you had some expert programmers on staff that could look at something and go, yeah, that was written in this and we can get it to that, you know, and, augment it with the AI and you get real proficient at doing it, I think that'd be a heck of a profitable consulting agency to own. Anyway, so, um, what's your current, uh, what's your current plans?

You have a couple of sites you're thinking about selling? When you guys sell them, do you go back to where you bought them from? You put them on Flippa, you put them on Empire Builders or, you know? 

[00:35:25] Mohit Tater: We try to sell them ourselves first within our network, because we have built up a potential network. If that doesn't work, then, then we go to one of the brokers and try to enlist and get sold there, basically.

Like, I'm a long term hold guy. Ideally, I like to hold things, uh, for a cash point. So, yeah, we don't sell that often. but for this fund, we had a timeline, so we are going to, you know, respect that and sell them off the sites. 

[00:35:51] Ronald Skelton: That's interesting. I often consider doing a private placement memorandum and raising a fund. But, uh, that's my biggest concern is like, well, I have to sell something. I guess you could always buy it, you know, get, get a product or a market valuation of it and then buy the investors out at a, at that valuation.

Right. But will they feel, if you don't sell it to somebody outside of your own, will they feel that you did them right? That's my only concern is, right? If I do a third party valid, you know, evaluation and get a value for it and then I say, you know, my investors own 30 percent of it or 50 percent of it, I just buy them out.

Will they feel that it's fair because we didn't get into a competitive bid market type of space? Yeah. Right. That's what I'm, and you want them to come back. You want them to, you want to hand them, you want to hand that check to them and they go, great. Now here, here, take it back and you want them to, you want them to come back.

You know, that happened to me all the time in the, uh, in the real estate space. My, my investors, I got down to where I was only needing about three or four private lenders because they, they just fulfilled all my needs. And, uh, I had a few, I never went back to. 

Anyway, let's circle back to, what's your current investment criteria?

What are you looking for? So if somebody's out there and they've got a website, um, give them kind of a high level, hey, here's what we're looking for. If you got something, uh, we would buy it. So, tell the listeners what you would buy if you found it. 

[00:37:12] Mohit Tater: Yeah. So we're looking for like content websites monetized by display ads or affiliate income. Ideally an evergreen space, evergreen niche, uh, for which the content is like not too complex to write on.

And, uh, making, I'd say at least, uh, five grand a month, if not more. Like ideally it'd be ten grand a month. Uh, but yeah, I mean, we can, we can look at it and it should have been around for like three, four years, if not more. Should have a stable history of earnings, traffic, and ideally. If it's going upwards, that's even a plus point.

We ideally don't look to buy sites that have been negatively impacted by a Google update. We try to avoid those. I'm not the turnaround guy. I don't do turnarounds. I like to buy things that are going up and, you know, make them go further. So yeah, if it's, if it's on a growing project, even better. So yeah, in short, and also now you started looking to, buying agencies also.

So we're looking to buy agencies in the, they're doing at least, let's say 20, 25 K in SDE monthly. So like 200, 300k at least annualized SDE. And these agencies could be your marketing agencies, PR agencies, SEO agencies, link building agencies. Any kind of agency mostly that does not require too much technical expertise.

So we're looking to buy those as well and should not be reliant heavily on, on the founder. They should have systems and processes and people in place. 

[00:38:39] Ronald Skelton: Yeah. So, uh, I'm working on one we talked about. I talked to tell you about a little before the end. Um, we'll see where it goes. I, I meet with the owners of via zoom this week. But, um, a lot of these, even their, their site, I can't say who they are or anything because of NDA, but even their site is really heavily on them.

Right. Um, they're all over their website. They're all are all over the, uh, like their personal names are all over everything. And, there's going to be a, a shift that's going to have to happen. And I'm trying to figure out how to do that without losing clients and customers because it's been on, it's been on everything ever since the start.

Let's talk about, how do people reach out to you? What's the, uh, what's the way that you want them to find you? You have a unique domain name, so make sure people know what that is. And, uh, yeah. 

[00:39:26] Mohit Tater: Yeah, you can write to me at Mohit, M O H I T at B B I dot X Y Z. You can just Google my name, write to me on LinkedIn or Twitter or X rather.

So Mohit Tater, M O H I T T A T E R, uh, yeah, it should be easy to find me. 

[00:39:43] Ronald Skelton: Okay. You said, um during your thing, you're talking about nothing too technical or nothing too, uh, thing. Somebody brought me one like, Hey, I see, I heard you buy, buy, buy B2B stuff. Like, yeah, they do in the, and it was in the mergers and acquisition space, but they, uh, did financial, deep dive financial analysis on the industry and stuff.

And, uh, I was like, I don't have anybody to go right on that. And it bores us not out of, I don't want to ride on it, but it was like economic reports. It was, it made good money. Don't get me wrong. But like, I would have to be like cutting the college scene down and trying to find the people who were very deep financial technical analysts to write these articles that they were doing.

It's a friend of the family. They just, he just sold his business and they were doing, you know, they've been around for years. They had a quarterly, I think it was quarterly, thing in the chip industry, and they wrote the chip, uh, they basically analyzed the, uh, microchip industry. They were doing, to be a, to be subscribed to their, what do you want to call it, newsletter or reports or whatever they did quarterly, where it's six figures, a quarter.

So, and companies were paying this. Like, uh, they had, his dad, second generation, his dad and him, he's older than me by a few years. So he's probably 55 or so. And his dad created him and his dad created it together. Travels the world, analyzes the space. When they sell that they had to sell it to somebody that had that technical expertise that knows this version of silicone versus that version of silicone.

Where this stuff being mined, is there any shortages? All the economical impact. Right. You know, butterfly flaps, its wings, in some places that impact,or they see a, a storm or something somewhere and that's gonna impact the mining industry in that area. I don't want to own anything like that.

So I can see that you don't need, you don't need to own anything that's so complex that finding writers for it is, you know, number one, number one, there's six figure writers because they're, they have to be. You got a PhD. 

[00:41:43] Mohit Tater: There are only so many. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And only they can write. Good stuff about this exactly. So I've faced that. 

[00:41:49] Ronald Skelton: I'm not interested in that either. Like if you have to have a PhD or a, even an engineering degree to write the article, probably not the right B2B site for me. I get that. Well, I appreciate your time here. Is there a, anything you want to leave? Like, is there any big takeaways? Like a, if you're out there looking, if you want to get started, what would be a good lesson learned that you could give people if they want to do what you're doing, what they want to do, where I'm starting off? What would you tell them, uh, like as far as, uh, a quick uh, soundbite of where to get started. 

[00:42:18] Mohit Tater: If you have more time than money, go build a site or buy it yourself and grow it. But if you have more money than time, you know, you can come to companies like us and help us get you that high ROI that you can, you know, probably not get in a lot of places, uh, other than this.

So, but yeah, if you have the time, you should definitely see how the thing works, how the online business space works, how these websites work. Because then you'd at least know, even if you're giving your money to someone else, you'd know what they're doing and if they're doing the right thing or not. It's good to go through it yourself. 

[00:42:50] Ronald Skelton: And when he says that, she means BlackRock Investments. Unless I know you we've been doing business for a while. I probably probably won't won't help you place your money anywhere.

That said, uh, I appreciate you having you here today. If you ever need anything from me, let me know and we'll call that a show. 

[00:43:03] Mohit Tater: Thank you Ronald. Yeah, well, thank you so much and great, great being here.