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EFP 114: How to Buy a Website Without Any Cash

EFP 114: How to Buy a Website Without Any Cash

Justin Cooke October 30, 2014

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Most buyers don’t know that they’re able to buy websites without cash.

This week, Joe and I look at 6 creative ways buyers can purchase a website or online business even if they don’t have the immediate cash on hand.

Learn How to Acquire Profitable Websites Without Money

If you’ve been hesitant about buying a site because of cash concerns, check out this episode for some ideas on how to fund the purchase.

Check Out This Week’s Episode Here:

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Topics Discussed This Week Include:

Partnering with investors
Using credit cards and personal loans
Peer-to-peer lending platforms
Business credit lines
Home equity line of credit
SBA loan

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Do you have any questions about financing your next website purchase? Ask us in the comments and we’ll help you out.

Justin: Welcome to the Empire podcast, episode 114. Most buyers don’t know they’re able to buy websites or online businesses without having any cash. Today we’re going to look at six creative ways to make that happen. You can find the show notes for this episode and all links discussed at empireflippers.com/no cash. All right, let’s do this.

Speaker 2: Sick of listening to entrepreneurial advice from guys with day jobs? Want to hear about the real successes and failures that come with building an online empire? You are not alone. From San Diego to Tokyo, New York to Bangkok, join thousands of entrepreneurs and investors who are prioritizing wealth and personal freedom over the oppression of an office cubicle. Check out the empire podcast. And now your host, Justin and Joe.

Justin: What if you can make $5,000 per month with no money down? This reminds you of one of those infomercials, late night infomercials, talking about real estate back in the day.

Joe: Real estate. Yes, that’s exactly what everyone’s been up to.

Justin: So we were talking about different ways you can actually buy websites or online assets without cash. And we started thinking, some of the similarities between the online virtual real estate world and the offline physical real estate world, and they’re pretty close, but we want to cover some of those ways today in this episode. I think it’s really interesting because you can use some of these strategies to purchase the site straight up with no actual cash on your own, or you can use it to reach for a site that was a little bit outside of your range, right? It wasn’t a site that you would have been able to purchase, but with these strategies you can get the additional cash to reach further up the value chain.

Joe: Yeah, I mean I think there’s pluses and minuses to doing it this way, but definitely people should know that there are other options rather than putting all your money up front.

Justin: I also think it’s good to reach up the value chain. We’re talking about this a little bit at Rhodium weekend we were just at last week. It’s good to reach up the value chain because you’re getting better ROI on the hours that you’re spending on the site. So for example, buying an $80000 site at $4000 a month. If you make improvements, those improvements are going to give you a better return on your time than let’s say a $20000 a site making $1000 a month.

Joe: Absolutely. I think that if you can put that kind of thing together to make a deal happen for you, it’s a great idea.

Justin: All right, so these are basically deal-making strategies for buyers. Before we get into that, let’s take a quick break to pay the bills and look at hot money’s featured listing of the week. What you got buddy?

Joe: Okay. It’s listing number 40,089 it’s a beauty and cosmetic site built on around AdSense. It was made back in December of 2013. It’s making a little bit more than $4000 a month net. It has some content expenses in there. It’s almost purely passive except for adding content. Page views, more than 100000 page views a month. So it does get a large amount of traffic. And I think that it’s based on celebrities. So it’s definitely based on new kind of news and current topics from celebrities who have had plastic surgery. So I definitely think it’s someone who either finds the niche very appealing or someone who wants a rather passive AdSense income, or I guess the third person is someone who could change your monetization strategy because it does get a lot of traffic. And probably AdSense is not the best one.

Justin: I just saw this recommendation. So I recommend setting up Google alerts to getting notification on certain trends or spikes. It is a very trendy type of business or type of website. So if you can catch onto some of those trends, you can steal a bunch of that traffic and start to getting quite a bit of traffic on. And the work required is probably one, two hours per week. It’s really pretty minimal, but there are some costs associated by $100 a month in content. So [Selzen 00:03:40] two one hour long phone calls and 30 days of email support, so you’re going to be taken care of with the purchase, and this is a really good purchase for someone looking for $4000 a month in net profit and a minimal time required. I think it’s a good bye. All right, let’s dig into the heart of this week’s episode.

Speaker 2: Now, for the heart of this week’s episode.

Justin: Okay. This episode is all about how to buy a website without any cash. We actually have six strategies laid out here for you. We’re going to go into each one with a little bit more depth. First one we got is, you can partner with an investor. So we’ve been talking about this for a while, kind of our investor program, where basically we have investors who buy sites, and we manage the sites for them. We plan on rolling this out on a larger scale probably early next year, but this is something that would be done on an individual basis too. So for example, if you’re in a position where you don’t have that much cash, you can reach out to friends, families, coworkers, anyone else who’s looking to get into the investment game or online website, online business game, but doesn’t have the time to actually do it. So if you can actually provide the time, they provide the cash, and you could have a match there.

Joe: Yeah. In doing this investor program, I’m amazed at how many people are out there that are just looking for a basic return on their money with almost no investment of their time. It’s pretty amazing. There’s a lot of people out there, so yes, you’d have to win their trust, you’d have to make sure that it’s the right fit for you, but that’s probably a great way to go if you know how to manage websites.

Justin: The other thing too is you can structure the deal to match kind of the amount that’s being invested, and how much time you’re going to be putting in as opposed to them. And this can be anywhere from 80% to you, 20% to them to 20% to you, 80% to them, somewhere in that range where you’re splitting up the equity in the website or online business fairly based on investment and time that you’re going to be putting in. One of the great things here is that if they’re putting up all the cash you can put all the time, so it’s not going to be time free, but it’s definitely going to be cash free as well. Keep in mind that you’re going to need enough equity in this deal, you personally, to get an ROI on your time.

Joe: Yeah. Don’t start slicing up the revenue from the side of the profit from the site a million ways and then realize your percentage left at the end of the day is almost nothing.

Justin: Yeah. So you’re talking about like a $400 a month site, and you’re doing it 50-50, You’re only going to take $200 of it. If you improve it by 50% ,and you spent hours and hours, weeks and months doing that, you’re only getting an extra $100 a month out of the deal. That may not be a good ROI on your time invested, so keep that in mind. The investor on the other end is going to need to keep their investment in mind to what’s the upside, what’s the potential for this, and what are the risks as well.

The second way you can buy a website without any cash, you can look at credit cards and personal loans. This is something that we offer to some buyers as a case by case basis. We actually allow buyers to split up their purchases on multiple credit cards, so if they’ve got a balance of 10 or 15 thousand dollars, and they’re trying to buy a 30000 large site, they can split it up amongst multiple credit cards.

Joe: Yeah, I definitely think this is probably one of the more risky alternatives to financing a site. Obviously, the percentage interest that credit cards charge or personal loans charge is going to be fairly high, so you would have to maintain a very high return rate and get some good growth out of the site. But definitely you can turn a profit if you’re sure the numbers work out.

Justin: Yeah, they’re going to have to look carefully at their blended industry based on the different cards or personal lines that they’re using, and make sure they’re getting a good return on those dollars.

Joe: Yeah, put everything in a spreadsheet. Make sure that your monthly payments and your interest payments workout.

Justin: And that’s above and beyond the time that you’re actually putting into the site. So if you’re going to be putting in some time, effort, and energy into it, your returns have to be above and beyond what you’re paying back to your credit cards and to your personal loan. I’d also keep in mind that the second option will leave you on the hook and at risk personally. Whereas if you go with an investor, it’s their money that’s at risk. In this situation you’re going to be personally liable or personally on the hook based on your credit card payments and in your personal loan.

Joe: Yeah. I mean a lot of these options that we’re talking about make a personal guarantee for the loan. So I don’t think any of these kinds of things you’re going to be able to just walk away from.

Justin: A third option we want to talk about, and this is really interesting to me, is the peer to peer lending option. And this should be using something like Prosper or Lending Club to raise the money to purchase a website or online business.

Joe: Definitely the most interesting option that we’ve come up with. For those of you not familiar with peer to peer lending, it’s where the bank is not involved. It’s where borrowers and lenders are connected directly through a platform.

Justin: A lot of times it’s crowdfunded too. So you have multiple investors going on on this. Anything from $50 up to several thousand dollars per investor.

Joe: Yeah. And I think a great new entry into the peer to peer lending space is a bitcoin lending, peer to peer lending platform called BTCjam. I’ve been fooling around with it for a couple of months now. It’s awesome. It’s awesome as an investor. It’s awesome as a borrower. You’re able to make a pretty good return. So I really … if you have bitcoin you should check it out. It’s definitely an interesting way to get money.

Justin: This is something we haven’t talked about a lot, but we actually take bitcoin for our website purchases. So from our perspective we exchange them same day. So it’s same as cash for us. But I think it’s an interesting option for buyers, for investors to be able to use bitcoin, or to be able to spend their bitcoin and buy some online income earning assets.

Joe: Yeah. We already did one sale, a small sale in bitcoin, and the guy is actually based in India. The buyer is based in India, and he was a miner. So he was sitting on all this bitcoin that he had mined effectively, not for free, I mean, obviously he had to pay electricity, he had to pay the computer costs, but he had all this bitcoin, and he didn’t want to convert directly to cash, and now we got an income earning property.

Justin: Just a backup for a second. Anyone not familiar with bitcoin? If you’re listening to our podcasts, you probably are, but for anyone not familiar with bitcoin, it’s an online currency. It’s not tied to the US market. It’s not like the US dollar or a euro. It’s strictly online. And you’re able to actually mine these bitcoins online and then redeem them for cash. There’s been a market for this, been going up to I think $1000 per bitcoin. Now it’s done with 300 something. So it’s a fairly volatile currency, but it is a truly online currency people can use to buy and sell goods, pretty interesting. BTCjam is something that you kind of got connected with. How would you compare BTCjam to Prosper or Lending Club in terms of number of investors, ability to raise funds, how much information is required?

Joe: Yeah. The thing about Prosper or Lending Club, I think that the rates are going to be a little bit higher-

Justin: Than BTC jam.

Joe: Yes. But you’re going to be able to get larger loan amounts. As an investor on BTCjam, you’re going to be able to get more information individually on your borrowers and really pick and choose the ones you want. Whereas if you’re an investor on Prosper or Lending Club, you just kind of say, oh, I want A-level or B-level loans, and it automatically does it for you. You can choose as well, but it doesn’t make as much sense. And the nice thing about BTCjam too is they do pay hot bitcoin obviously, so you can use that pretty effectively.

Justin: So more money on Prosper and Lending Club if you’re a borrower, but easier to get money on BTCjam. Is it anonymous? No.

Joe: It is not anonymous.

Justin: On BTCjam you have to fill out all your information.

Joe: Yes, you have to submit a good deal of information to verify everything. And then based on the amount of information that you submit, you’re given a credit rating. Whereas with Prosper or Lending Club, you kind of just social security number, and if you’re not an American you can’t borrow through those platforms. So this is a great way for foreigners to get funding especially in smaller markets, third world countries, that kind of thing.

Justin: Oh that’s interesting. So if I’m in the Philippines, I get a loan via BTCjam. What’s interesting to me too with them is that, it takes kind of your credit, it takes your social media accounts into effect. So how popular you are on social media counts, how many real friends you are, that kind of thing. Similar thing to what we look out for sellers. We verify sellers identities via online. They have a, I think, slightly more complicated way of doing that for BTCjam, which was really good.

Joe: Yeah, they do. They look at the history of your accounts. I connected my PayPal account, my eBay account, and it looked at how old those were. I mean, I have a PayPal and eBay account since those services were created. So it’s nice to be able to say, on my profile, 15 years of account history.

Justin: I think there’s actually a market there. I think there’s a business there, Joe, where are you’re able to look at people’s online identities, and look at kind of their credit worthiness based on how out there they are with their Facebook, with their Twitter, with their PayPal accounts, with their eBay. There’s probably a business for that that’s outside of FICO scores in the US.

Joe: Yeah, I definitely think it should be turning that way because if other people that know and trust you are willing to vouch for you, then that’s more important to me than some sort of obscure credit rating.

Justin: I would like that. I think we’d be willing to pay for something like that if we are able to get some kind of like I guess “credit rating” based on their social media profiles, and then kind of judge our sellers based on some kind of a third party scores or something. That’d be something we’d be willing to pay for and checkouts. I was totally off topic, but yeah. There’s a business there buddy.

Joe: There is a business there, but peer to peer lending is number three and something you should definitely consider if you’re going to be borrowing or you need money to purchase a site. And please, if you do have bitcoin, if you’re a foreign investor or foreign borrower and you need a little bit more money, checkout BTCjam. It’s a very cool platform.

Justin: The last thing I’ll say about the peer to peer lending is that I think that’s a great option. If you’re going in, let’s say you’re going in on an 80,000 large site, but you’ve only got 50,000, right. So it’s a great way to reach that extra $30,000, and that’s something that you can describe in your writeup. Say, look, I’m putting in $50,000 on the site, so they know that you have equity invested … that you’ve got cash invested in this deal as well.

Joe: Absolutely. If you put that in your description of the loan, you’d be most likely to get funded.

Justin: Well, let’s talk about our fourth option, which is business credit lines. And in the last few years, some really interesting options have come out here. The first one we’re going to talk about is Kabbage.

Joe: Yeah. So I mean obviously you need to have a business to get business credit lines, but a lot of these do come with a personal guarantee as well. So you’re going to have to have not only business credit, but very good personal credit. Kabbage is great because they’re all online. They connect to your bank accounts. They connect to your quick books. They connect to your PayPal. They connect to your Amazon account, eBay account, anything. And they automatically analyze how much sales you’re doing. And then they give you a revolving line of credit based on that.

Justin: So kabbage is actually spelled with a K. We’re going to have a link on the show notes again, but it is business credit. We actually have six figures ourself in kabbage credit that we have available. They’ve done over $400 million in business apparently.

Joe: Yeah. They’re really killing it because a lot of other places have trouble approving online businesses. So it’s an interesting way to do business. It’s not cheap. It’s about 12% APR, but it can be pretty good return on investment if you can get good growth out of the site.

Justin: And with these websites were in such an early industry and the returns are so high that you’re probably … it’s still reasonable at 12% to buy online websites and online businesses. But again, that’s something you’re going to have to consider and making sure that you’re getting a return above and beyond that 12% you’re paying back. There’s some other option. You can take a look at, that you had mentioned Joe, OnDeck Capital. I know that PayPal Working Capital has an option as well.

Joe: Yeah. OnDeck Capital. The nice thing about them is this, when you loan from them, they do a daily recovery from your bank account. So if you loaned $30,000 and whatever term that would be over one year, they will actually take a very small amount of money from your bank account every day. So it’s an interesting way to work with OnDeck Capital. PayPal Working Capital works with your PayPal accounts. If you have a lot of business coming through PayPal, I definitely suggest reaching out to them for a business loan. It’s a pretty good way to do it. And then you started to get into the more hard money type of merchant cash advance options, which if you take credit cards directly on a terminal or something like that, or even a virtual terminal, there is a lot of companies out there that will give you a fairly expensive advance on your money.

Justin: It’s almost like a float on accounts receivables. Right. So there’s an industry term for that. I forget what it is, but basically, yeah, they’re going to fund you the money. They can look at your previous credit card charges and everything and say, okay, we’ve got this much money coming in, we’re willing to loan you this much. We know we’ll get paid back based on your business and where you’re at within the next month, two months, six months, whatever it is.

There’s another one I looked at when we’re looking at this jar that’s among the called out BoeFly, and they’re a lending platform for businesses, small to medium sized businesses, 25000, 80000, 100000 dollar loans to business startups. And so there are I think a number of options that are coming around for kind of the startup community, for entrepreneurs, for businesses that are just starting to get off the ground that are much more available than your traditional bank loan might’ve been for an online business. I’m trying to buy a website directly from the bank. It used to be extremely, virtually impossible. It’s getting a bit more open now, but yeah, much more difficult.

Joe: Yeah, I would love to see someone try to go down to the bank and use a website as collateral to get alone. That would be interesting.

Justin: So let’s look at our fifth option, which is actually like a home equity line of credit or second mortgage. And now that we are somewhat out of the financial crisis, it’s getting a bit more easy to pull money out via second or an equity line of credit, and there’s also more value in home. So it’s likely, especially in California, which we’re in right now, some home values have gone up so people are sitting on a bit of equity in their homes, especially if they bought pre 2005

Joe: Yeah. We just met with our friend Daniel yesterday for lunch and he was saying that rates are headed back down again.

Justin: Yeah. We’re actually talking about, this is like a second or equity line, but you might actually want to look at rolling this in your primary mortgage or loan as well. If you have not refinanced in the last, let’s say, five or six years or your credit significantly improved, you got more value in your home, you may want to see if you can get a really low fixed rate. And if you can drop a percentage or a percentage and a half on your primary mortgage, even with the fees and the cash out, that might be a good option for you right now.

Joe: God, I’m so glad we’re not in that business anymore.

Justin: Oh God. Did you hear the rates Daniel was saying, yeah, three and a half, three and a quarter, almost under 4% on a fixed loan. That’s insane.

Joe: Yeah. Pretty amazing to me because at that three percent, three and a half percent range, I mean you can be able to kill it by buying a site, and the ROI that they are going to be able to get will be amazing.

Justin: It’s phenomenal. Now, you’re rolling that into your mortgage, but you’re rolling into a fixed asset, and then you now have an online assets returning ridiculous returns as opposed to some of the traditional offline real estate.

Joe: So don’t take the money out and go to Hawaii. Take the money out and buy a site.

Justin: Yeah. Don’t go by your Ski-Doos. Don’t go to jet skiing it up and cruising out to Hawaiian, no. Buy something that actually returns to you some money every single month. So yeah, look at either an equity line of credit or if your rates are high enough and you can get a good enough deal. Now, look at actually rolling on into your primary mortgage. The sixth point, our last one that we talk about, and this is … we kind of waited for this one for the last point because it’s just starting to come around is the SBA loan, so the Small Business Administration basically guaranteeing your loan. So they’re just now starting to open up to online businesses. We talked to some other brokers about at Rhodium week, and I think only one of the guys we’ve spoken to had an SBA loan go through, so it’s still pretty rare.

Joe: Yeah. I mean I think that the biggest thing with SBA loans is that the application process is very cumbersome. They require a lot of information. They require that information to be filled out exactly correct. And if you’ve never done it before, it can be kind of a daunting process. Whereas you apply for those peer to peer lenders or business lines of credit and basically everything is done online. You submit the forms and stuff like that. SBA is not going to be that way.

Justin: So to be a little more clear about the SBAs and actually loaning the money, they’re just insuring the loans. Sometimes only partially ensuring the loan. It also is likely to require some kind of personal guarantee. The most common SBA loans are the 7(a), and for example with a Low-Doc loan, which they removed a lot of the paperwork and requirements to get it, you’re looking at a loan of less than 150,000. There’s another loan that’s called the SBA Express that goes up to 250,000, and there’s a micro loan program that actually comes directly from SBA. They are actually lending the money that’s up to 35,000 and is startup friendly. So if you don’t have an established business you are looking to get started, I think the average loan size is about 20,000, but they’ll go up to 35,000.

There are some requirements though that can be pretty strict. So you’re looking at two to three years of bank statements plus they want proof of owner equity. They want to know that you put cash in the business, that you have a retained interest in this business. We’re actually going to link to an article that explains the different options available to you as an entrepreneur. It’s actually over@entrepreneur.com. So I’m going to link to that article.

Joe: Yeah. I have to say that SBA is a distance sixth for me. I like the other options that we’ve talked about, even maybe credit cards, unless you’re getting it some outrageous rate.

Justin: 17% though?

Joe: Well, I mean if it’s outrageous rate, but I mean, today it’s not maybe as good as it was in the early two thousands when you could do those balance transfers and get 0% for 18 months or something like that. But you could still play some credit card games and get some good percentage rates on balance transfers and whatnot. So look into that kind of stuff first because the SBA loan is definitely going to be a daunting process to try and get approved for.

Justin: Oh for all you travel hackers, now you here the credit card spin and you’re like, whoa, that’s not so bad. So here’s a scenario for you, Joe. So let’s say I have $50,000, I want to buy an $80,000 site, that’s 4,000 a month in net profit. That’s enough to live on the beach in Bali, quit my cubicle job, but I don’t want to do that even though I’ve got the 50,000. So I mix it up on credit cards. So I do 9,000 this credit card, 12,000 on another and the rest on a third credit card. So I get the points for that on those rewards cards. I then transfer those balances to these 0% interest rate balances that allow for transfers. So I now chance for them all over to other cards, off away from the interest rates, and I’ll pay a slight fee there, but I might get points for my miles there as well. And now I’m not paying interest on this, and I can hang on to those for longer term. What do you think, man? You’re looking at me like, I don’t know.

Joe: Yeah, no I think it works, but I wouldn’t do it for the miles. I would just look at that as a bonus. But yeah, I mean the key thing is, I think, is that if the site doesn’t grow, basically the site is going to just keep up with the monthly payments. So before you quit your job and move to Bali, make sure you understand that the site you just put $80,000 on your credit card for basically is not earning you anything. So keep that in mind.

Justin: All right man. I really liked these options. If you are looking to buy a site with zero cash or you’re looking to reach up to that next kind of tier level, I think we gave you some great options to work with here.

Joe: And if you have any questions about the peer to peer lending, make sure to reach out to me. I can go ahead and help you along with some of that stuff.

Justin: All right man. Let’s get into the news and updates.

Speaker 2: You’ve been listening to the Empire Podcast, now some news and updates.

Justin: So we have had a crazy couple of weeks of travel and meeting up with people, man. It’s been pretty wild. First, I would like to mention the drop ship lifestyle retreat in Chiang Mai that we went to. That was fantastic dude. All these young entrepreneurs just looking to get started with our drop shipping side. So they’ve got a few sales under their belt. Most of the people were new to Thailand, so they flew out from the US and they were just really excited to be there. It was an electric kind of event.

Joe: Yeah. It’s going to be interesting to see where those guys go in the next five years. So I’d love to see about what percentage really succeed, get their online dreams going, and go back to Thailand full time.

Justin: I think it’s a small percentage. I don’t think, the chances that everyone knows we’re just crushing it, it’s pretty low. But there are going to be a few standouts of people that make some sites and make a living for themselves and are able to do the travel or live where they want. And we always say, Oh, you want me to just live in Chiang Mai or Bali or the Philippines or something. But some people are plenty happy living in the US and kind of living where they want in the US and that’s cool too. I don’t know why I’m defending these people, these US travelers, but yeah.

Joe: Yeah. I mean after spending some time here in the US this-

Justin: I’m ready to go back. We’re looking at each other. God, just go back to Asia. I mean, what are we doing here?

Joe: If I had Chipotle in Asia, I would never need to come here.

Justin: Right. It’s like we’re visitors to our own country or like tourists or. Next one was DC. Bangkok. So we got to meet up with, I’d say like kind of the next level of online entrepreneurs or expert entrepreneurs in Asia, and it was just fantastic. We got to connect. I just felt like this year it was just hanging out with friends. Probably half the people there I was cool with or connected with in some way and so it was awesome. I loved it.

Joe: Yeah. Dan and Ann really put on a great event. I mean, they have a great staff as well, so great job guys. Looking forward to next year already.

Justin: Yeah. I just had a blast. We actually did a talk on, to hell with diversification and cashflows. Double down on your one big thing, which seemed to be a hit and so it’s been kind of a recurring theme for us as we’ve sold off or given away many of our different cashflows or side businesses to really focus on the brokerage. So it was good and well received, which was great to hear. Next one was the Rhodium weekend in Las Vegas. So Chris and David put this event together in Vegas Baby. So that was kind of nice. We had to fly from Bangkok to Vegas, which was pretty wild, 26 hour journey. When got to Vegas and we got to hang out with some old friends. We got to meet some people we’ve talked to online for the longest time and never actually met in person. So we got to meet up with Spencer Haws. We got to meet up with Chris Guthrie.

Joe: I got to meet Ace for the first time.

Justin: Ace, so we got to hang out again. That was fun. Jordan Harbinger was there from The Art of Charm, and it was just a fantastic meetup. We had to meet up a bunch of buyers and sellers that we’d never actually met in person, so to be able to connect with them and kind of hear their stories.

Joe: We got to meet some solo brokers too. That was very interesting to hear that their side of the story from another broker. I really, I mean, besides Joc, I didn’t know any of those other guys, so it was nice to connect to them and kind of talk business and shop and see what other kinds of trials and tribulations they’re going through as well.

Justin: Yeah. It was fun. The Quiet Light was represented, The Tonus, Effie International. I actually saw one of our … I think, it was the last night was Sunday night, I ended up over probably more than a couple of beers with one of the Effie International guys, and we were swapping stories on deals we were able to squeeze through or deals that went south, that kind of thing. So it was fun to talk some shop and kind of talk about where the industry’s going. If you don’t do industry events like this with people in the industry, especially as an entrepreneur, I’d highly recommend it. I mean, there’s this real value in connecting with other people that are in the same space, and you can kind of connect with them and maybe even do business, maybe not, but just having other people out there that kind of know what you’re going through and having them to be able to talk to is fantastic.

Joe: Yeah, I mean most business is done on the phone, but the rest of the business is probably done in person, so just keep that in mind. I mean, even for people that sell consumer goods, I mean, I still think that there’s some value in connecting with other colleagues, other like-minded people through the conference network and meet ups.

Justin: All right. The other thing we want to mention is our valuation tool is now up and in beta. You can check it out at empireflippers.com/valuation-tool. Basically what this does is, it’ll take a bunch of information from you and then give you a valuation that’s different from just a straight up 20 acts. So it’ll take a bunch of different things into account. We’re still working on it, testing through it, and we’d love for you to take a look at it and tell us what you think. Give us some feedback and let us know how you think it’s working.

Joe: Yeah. I think this is going to be the future of multiples at Empire Flippers, but we do have to fine tune it a bit, and I think you’re going to release a blog post on exactly how the formula works on the backend, right?

Justin: Yeah. Part of our transparency I think we want to share exactly how it’s working, and we’ll continue to tweak the dials on the backend to make sure it works, but we’ll share all of that in exactly how it works for you as well. The idea is as we want … I mean, it’s just not fair to say all businesses always are 20x. I think that’s a good baseline, but some are definitely worth more than others. And we want a tool that rather than just subjectively picking like a broker might, oh it’s worth x amount of whatever. We want a tool that can objectively look at the numbers and give us a valuation. I think that’s helpful.

Joe: Yeah. I’m looking forward to any bug reports from our listeners, so if you do find a bug, please let us know ASAP.

Justin: All right man, time for some listener shouts who are also known as our indulgent ego boosting social proof segment. We’ve got a awesome five star review from pilot girl on iTunes who says, consistently my number one go to podcasts for all things Internet marketing, website buying and selling. These guys give great advice and don’t play the, I have a secret game. They’re good at what they do and have no problems sharing their knowledge. I had a chance to attend one of their workshops and Las Vegas and know they are good guys and legit. Keep up the good work, and I hope to buy from you soon. Thank you Pilot girl. We really appreciate it. Thanks for coming to our workshop as well. We had a great event there in Vegas, and I was glad you’re able to attend, and we were able to do some mind sharing, knowledge sharing with some of the other amazing attendees as well.

Joe: Yeah, I really appreciate it too. It was great meeting you finally, and I look forward to making you a customer.

Justin: Twitter, we’ve got, Michael who said, how long does it usually take to get domain info after paying a deposit? All right, Michael. Normally, it takes less than 24 hours, but there were a few instances over the last couple of weeks where it took up to 48. I think, in one instance even up to 72 hours. And that’s based on, after you pay the deposit you have to make sure that it sends you to an order form that you can fill out your information, and so they get back to you. There are instances where that order form doesn’t get filled out and takes a little longer to get back.

Joe: Make sure to hit the complete transaction button after you make a deposit, and that will send you over to the correct page where to fill out all your information, but if you are having any trouble, feel free to reach out to our support staff. They should be on there. Someone available almost 24/7 except middle of the night, Saturdays or Sundays. Those will be the only times that maybe you would be unable to find someone.

Justin: Yeah, if you want to let us know and alert us to it just shoot us a tweet. That’s a great way to get in contact, because I’m monitoring Twitter on a regular basis, so shoot me a tweet. I’ll make sure our team is on it. We got a couple of Zendesk updates, mentions, and requests. First one comes from Jack Rey, the ticket, good and he was satisfied, so I’m still exploring your services. So far the experience has been very good. I’m looking forward to doing business with you in the near future. This is from a depositor who did not pull the trigger. Someone pulled it faster than him ended up snatching the site. So I appreciate the fact that Jack was digging it and then he’ll be back to buy a site.

Joe: Yeah, thanks Jack.

Justin: We’ve got a not so positive view from Adam, rated us bad. I’m unsatisfied. His initial request had three questions. And what he received back looked like a standard template for how website’s presents to a buyer after deposit made. I asked all the questions again and received an answer or to only one of them. I think they were fairly basic questions. You see a lot in your business, but the questions were not acknowledged to even say that you couldn’t help me with them. Other than that everything seemed to go well, and I will still try again once another site comes up that I’m interested in.

I appreciate the feedback, Adam. I think in looking at some of our responses over the last couple of weeks, I do see that where some questions are asked and the answer is just to templated, right? So we’re replying with FAQ stuff and not really answering the specific questions. We can talk to our team and train them a bit on it. What we’ll try and do, sometimes we get paragraph with like three or four questions, and we have our team break out the questions, question one and then answer, question two and then answer. And that sometimes provides clarity where there’s not clarity in the questions. So hopefully we can make it easier to get back to your questions directly.

Joe: Yeah, great feedback. We’ll definitely bring that to the team and try to fine tune that, so that doesn’t happen again. Thank you very much, Adam.

Justin: Well, that’s it for episode 114 of the Empire Podcast. Thanks for sticking with us. We’ll be back next week with another show. You can find the show notes for this episode and more at empireflippers.com/no cash. Make sure it falls on Twitter @empireflippers and we’ll see you next week.

Joe: Bye, bye everybody.

Speaker 2: Hope you enjoyed this episode of the Empire Podcast with Justin and Joe. Hit Up empireflippers.com for more. That’s empireflippers.com. Thanks for listening.

EFP 114: How to Buy a Website Without Any Cash