Summary

In this conversation, Mohit Tater shares his journey from a college student with an entrepreneurial spirit to a successful investor in online businesses. He discusses his early experiences with website acquisitions, the lessons learned from both successes and failures, and the evolution of his investment strategy leading to the establishment of Black Book Investments. Mohit emphasizes the importance of due diligence, the shift towards group investments, and the strategies he employs to find and manage digital assets effectively. In this conversation, Mohit discusses his journey in the online business investment space, focusing on investor readiness, the cultivation of relationships with high net worth individuals, and the strategies for group buying and investment. He elaborates on the types of investors he works with, the importance of compliance, and the structure of his investment funds. Mohit also shares insights on scaling his business, diversifying into different business models, and the vetting processes he employs to manage risks effectively. The conversation highlights the challenges and opportunities in the online business market, as well as Mohit's future plans for growth and expansion.

Takeaways

Started with a desire to avoid traditional jobs.
First acquisition was a website for $2,500.
Learned valuable lessons from early scams.
Emphasizes the importance of due diligence.
Now has a dedicated team for due diligence.
Prefers a buy-and-hold strategy for investments.
Focuses on finding good deals and negotiations.
Builds rapport with sellers over time.
Transitioned to group investments for risk management.
Deals are primarily in content and affiliate sites. Investor readiness is crucial for attracting the right investors.
Building a list of interested investors takes time and effort.
High net worth individuals are often looking to diversify their income streams.
Group buying allows for shared investment in larger assets.
Understanding compliance is essential when dealing with investors.
Diversifying into service-based businesses can mitigate risks.
Vetting processes are vital to ensure sound investments.
Partnerships can enhance visibility and operational efficiency.
Maintaining a conservative approach to revenue projections is important.
Future growth may involve larger acquisitions and entering the M&A space.

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Transcript:

Jon Stoddard (00:01.261)
Welcome to the top M&A entrepreneurs. Today my guest is Mohit Tater from Black Book Investments. He's out of India. Welcome to the show, Mohit.

Mohit (00:11.638)
Thanks, Sean. Thanks for having me. Great to be here.

Jon Stoddard (00:13.417)
Yeah, well, I'm glad to have you here because we're doing a long distance and then we've got some good headphones here. So Moheat, I want to talk to you about the hundred acquisitions you've made and you sell them to FE International and you started like a 10 years ago. You bought, uh, you know, from $10,000 in size to a million bucks. So how did this all start?

Mohit (00:20.514)
Yeah.

Mohit (00:26.837)
Uh-huh.

Mohit (00:41.602)
So yeah, I mean, it started like back in when I was in college, actually, I had this urge to, you know, do something of my own. And I always knew that I'm not going to work a day job. I still took up one nonetheless after graduating and saw how it felt. I did it for about a year and I learned how to make websites, you know, on the side. So I was working the evenings and learning how to make websites and all that stuff, learning how to blog so that I can make money online.

I'm sure all of us have Googled how to make money online. So I was doing that and I learned blogging, I learned to make websites, but then I could not make any money blogging to be honest. I was reviewing movies and whatnot on my blog, but no money. So that went on for about a year and a half, two years. I then left my job after one year. I thought maybe if I go full time into it, then I'll be more successful. That didn't work too. Then...

I came across a marketplace called Flippa, Australian company, that was a marketplace for buying and selling websites, profitable websites. And I was like, okay, why not give it a shot because I'm not good at running, starting something from scratch and growing it. Maybe something that's already making money, I might be able to grow that. So I bought my first website for, actually it was, yeah, $2,500. The first one, very first one. And that was basically a social media service.

That was, you know, you can use that to increase your followers, your likes and all that stuff. So we were providing a service for social media, likes and followers, all of that 10 years ago, 11 years ago, rather. And that worked out well for me. It kind of, you know, I was able to make much more. I was able to grow the site, grow the business and sell it for about $12,000 in six months. $12,000. Yeah.

Jon Stoddard (02:31.173)
So you took it from $2,500 and you sold to 12,000. So what did you do to fix it, to grow it?

Mohit (02:40.214)
Yeah, basically the current owner was not responding to too much to inbound inquiries and he was just servicing the existing clients. He was not focusing on getting new clients first of all. He wasn't doing any marketing, which I started doing because this was basically people on social media who are wanting more followers or more likes for their social media profile. So what better place to find new clients than social media itself. So I started doing outreach, started doing outbound marketing.

And of course, entertaining inbound leads also and converting more of those basically. And cross selling also. So basically the earlier owner was just lazy and I just came in and optimized the revenue and grew revenue almost three to four fold and was able to exit for five facts almost in six months. Not that the amount was too big, but it was big for me back then. Yeah.

Jon Stoddard (03:27.151)
Yeah.

Jon Stoddard (03:31.041)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But was that the time where you could actually add followers, you know, that you can't really do that today, right? And did you, who priced that for you? Did you price that? Did you say, Hey, I'm going to sell it for 12,000 or did you have somebody say, flip us, say it's worth X amount.

Mohit (03:35.902)
Yes. No, you're gonna... Yeah, it doesn't exist anymore.

Mohit (03:52.226)
So what I do is I actually auction, do auctions for all my sites that I sell on Flipa at least. And I start and I do a reserve of $1, $1 starting bid and $1 reserve. So no matter what it has to sell, it will sell. When people see that it has already crossed the reserve, they're more inclined to bid on that. As opposed to let's say if I put the reserve at 10,000 and people would have seen that, you know, it's not even close to the reserve. Like it's not met reserve yet.

Jon Stoddard (03:58.628)
Yeah.

Mohit (04:20.374)
So maybe there's no point bidding on it. Whereas if they see that, okay, it's sitting at 500 bucks right now, but it's crossed the reserve, so maybe I have a shot at winning this auction. So they bid $600 and then they keep, keeps going on. So it was market, uh, you know, that dictated the price basically. It was a gamble that I took. I would have had to sell if the whatever price that, you know, was the last bid, but, uh, that gamble worked for me.

Jon Stoddard (04:37.21)
Yeah.

Jon Stoddard (04:44.901)
Do you still, how often do you use Flippin' Now? You still use it?

Mohit (04:49.654)
much less, like once in a blue moon maybe when there's a small asset I have to just get rid of and you know otherwise I mostly sell within my network or with a broker basically yeah.

Jon Stoddard (04:56.047)
Yeah.

Jon Stoddard (05:01.561)
Right. And what about your second deal? What did that look like? You got a little, you got success under your belt and you're going, okay, what am I gonna do now? Do you wanna buy bigger or did you buy same size? What?

Mohit (05:07.373)
Yeah.

Mohit (05:12.446)
Yeah, the second one was I think $5,000 and pretty similar service as the first site. And I was like, maybe I can double. Yeah, cash, all cash, all cash, all cash. And I got scammed the second time basically. So, so, totally. So the revenue that was represented for the business was not coming from that business. It was coming from some other business that was in the background and wasn't shown. And it was claimed to be the revenue for the business that was being sold. So...

Jon Stoddard (05:18.817)
And you pay cash with this, right? It's cash, right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Jon Stoddard (05:26.41)
Oh, she, what happened? Yeah.

Mohit (05:42.075)
It was not a profitable business basically it was just a scam. I got scammed. Yeah.

Jon Stoddard (05:46.913)
Yeah. And what did you do? Was there any recourse with Flippa and say, Hey, you guys didn't check this out or you just got, you just lost 5,000 bucks.

Mohit (05:53.802)
No, I did. I just lost it because Flipa is just a marketplace. Um, just like eBay is, I mean, I don't know, eBay, you might have recourse, but on Flipa there was no recourse back then. So it was just a dud and I had to live with it. I still had some money from the sale. So at least I had the, I was not totally dejected or totally out of money. So I still could manage to continue buying more sites and had this one been the first deal, then I might've probably not done it exactly.

Jon Stoddard (06:19.749)
I've never done, you would have never done it again, right? Yeah. So the second one, what did you take away and learn from that and say, hey, we won't do this again or we'll do better due diligence this time?

Mohit (06:23.313)
Exactly.

Mohit (06:32.586)
Yeah, better due diligence. You need to know where the revenue is coming from. You need to tie the revenue to each order. I mean, it's easy to show revenue coming in to a PayPal account, it's not that tough. So that doesn't mean that the revenue falls from that business. So I need proof that the revenue that you're showing in claiming is coming from that business. So whether that's an order on email or that's an order on your Stripe or your PayPal, that needs to be, it needs to be clear that the revenue is for the service

product that you're selling on the site that you're selling basically.

Jon Stoddard (07:06.605)
Yeah. How do you do that though? I mean, if you, do you guys have them on the phone and talk or zoom or, you know, they could do screenshots and go again, it's not really connected. It's just a screenshot of another business. Right.

Mohit (07:19.562)
Yeah, so we've come a long way since then, to be honest. So mostly we buy, you know, either off market or from brokerages now, and they've done their wedding to quite an extent. So that's one thing, but we have a full team, like in-house team that focuses solely on due diligence and they're experts in what they do. So from technical points to, you know, financial points, everything is covered and...

So we either look at, we get access to their affiliate accounts as a guest user, or we get access to their reports directly from an ad network, let's say AdSense or Mediavine or something like that. So we know from the source where the money is coming, we need to get to that source and verify that income from the source, not from what they're saying. Only if it is very, yeah.

Jon Stoddard (08:10.405)
Yeah, so you get the login credentials, and then they allow you to log in. Is that like a 30-day pass or something, or they just change it if you decide to pass on it? Yeah.

Mohit (08:15.135)
Yes.

Mohit (08:21.93)
Yeah, so they just add us as a user on their account so we can go and check the revenue. We can't do any changes, we can just go see the revenue. And that happens during the inspection period, which is typically 14 days, 14 calendar days. So we do that during the inspection period. If it passes well and good, if it doesn't, then we might reverse the deal, basically.

Jon Stoddard (08:25.232)
Right.

Jon Stoddard (08:41.121)
Yeah. So how long did you keep buying from Flippa? Or did you start, when did you start looking for other deals other than Flippa? Which is a nice, I guess a starter site. Yeah.

Mohit (08:50.77)
Yeah, I'd say two, three years, at least two, three years, three years maybe.

Jon Stoddard (08:56.033)
Yeah. And what did you like doing best? What kind of content sites or affiliate sites or e-commerce sites or SAS or what?

Mohit (09:01.035)
Yeah.

Mohit (09:04.482)
So we only do content sites monetized via affiliate income and or display ads. We don't do e-commerce or SaaS yet. So yeah, mostly content websites.

Jon Stoddard (09:17.921)
Yeah, and when did you start moving bigger? You know, you find yourself doing all the work and you're going, okay, you know, same amount of work goes into this as the other one. What do I, yeah, when do I start moving up?

Mohit (09:21.547)
Hmm.

Mohit (09:27.002)
Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, so about in 2014, you know, I was, I'd sold another of my website and I was wanting to visit the US. I was always fascinated and I had friends there. So I was visiting there. I stayed at my friend's place in Midtown Manhattan. He was an investment banker. He saw what I was doing and you know, I was working out of home or cafes every day and then making and doing all right. So he was like, what do you do? And I told him what I did. And he said, you know, I have

some money lying around, so why don't I put money with you and you can buy something for me and manage it. So that's when the idea for Blackbook came about, that there was a demand for alternative assets that can give a higher ROI. And that's when Blackbook was born in 2014. And then we bought a site for my friend. And then it gave good returns to him. So he got his friends involved, he got his family involved, and then slowly we started moving into the bigger leagues.

Jon Stoddard (10:22.641)
So it was some accredited investor that you happen to know put in money. What kind of money are we talking about? 25, 50K, 100K? Yeah. And what percentage or equity did this give him of the business? Or percentage of cashflow? Yeah.

Mohit (10:30.942)
Yeah, 50k, something like that.

Mohit (10:42.261)
So cash flow 50%, I had 50% cash flow, but his ownership was 100%. And if we made any capital gains on the sale, that would also be split 50-50.

Jon Stoddard (10:53.637)
Oh, OK. So there was no target in mind. He just offered the $50,000 to put up. So how long between you taking the money or getting a commitment from the money? Did he give you the money or did he make a commitment? Yeah, OK. How long did it take you to find something good?

Mohit (11:03.263)
Yeah.

Mohit (11:09.63)
Yeah, no, I committed. I got a commitment. Yeah. It's like you find something good for me and we can buy it.

Mohit (11:18.67)
About a month, I think, yeah.

Jon Stoddard (11:20.097)
Yeah. And then you buy it. So you come back to him and say, Hey, it's doing, what did you give him as, as far as a presentation? Was it official pitch deck or just the numbers?

Mohit (11:31.786)
Oh no, he was like a good friend of mine. So I just gave him the numbers. He was a finance whiz. He was a mathematic, mathematics genius. So he just needed the numbers to make sense of it. And then he was like, you know, I trust you. So go do your thing and, you know, let me know if I can help you.

Jon Stoddard (11:46.989)
Yeah. And you go buy it, you go do your thing. And do you have a time period where you do your thing or do you say, hey, we're gonna fix this, this and this, and then we're selling it, regardless of the time?

Mohit (12:00.942)
Yeah, I buy to hold forever. That's what my strategy is. I like cash. That's what my strategy is. I would like to do that. And I try and doing that with all my assets under, you know, my ownership. But yeah, we didn't have a timeline in mind, to be honest. We just went in and started, you know, getting cash flow from that. And who doesn't like cash flow? So at least I do. So there was no initial intention to flip it. So we did keep it for three years or more, I think.

Jon Stoddard (12:05.321)
Oh, you buy and hold forever?

Jon Stoddard (12:31.038)
Yeah. And he owned how much of the cashflow? 50%? Yeah, 50%. And how much did he make on his original 50,000?

Mohit (12:34.658)
50% yeah.

Mohit (12:41.434)
Oh yeah, I think he made it.

Mohit (12:46.166)
one and a half times over in the period that he held it. Held it, sorry. Yeah, yeah. And maybe 1.75 times. And also he made a decent chunk of change when we exited the investment. So I would say annualized, he would have probably netted 70%, maybe 60%. But yeah, 50% on a safer side. Yeah, no, annualized. 50% annualized. Back.

Jon Stoddard (12:49.325)
In a three year period? Yeah.

Jon Stoddard (13:06.829)
Yeah, over a three year period.

Jon Stoddard (13:12.513)
Oh, 50% annualized?

Mohit (13:13.91)
Back then, the assets were really cheap because we could buy for multiples, 12X multiple or 20X multiples of monthly profit, 18X multiple. Now you cannot buy something half decent for less than 40X. So the ROI has halved, less than halved actually. Yeah. Exactly, so much money chasing the deals. Yeah, so much money chasing the deals. Private equity, yeah.

Jon Stoddard (13:28.046)
Yeah.

Jon Stoddard (13:31.877)
so many people coming into the business. Yeah.

Jon Stoddard (13:37.825)
Yeah, where did you find that deal?

Mohit (13:41.314)
That was I think on Flippa only I think. Yeah. That was on Flippa. Yeah, yeah.

Jon Stoddard (13:45.061)
Flip out again, yeah. And what kind of revenue was it doing then?

Mohit (13:50.418)
I think it was doing about $2,500 or something.

Jon Stoddard (13:54.925)
Yeah, that's not a lot. And you took it to what in a three year period?

Mohit (13:55.714)
Yeah.

Mohit (13:59.598)
We took it to, I think, more than 6,000, I think. Yeah, yeah.

Jon Stoddard (14:04.709)
6,000 and he had sold that in three years. And he said, when you, how was this conversation with him? How much time did you spend with him? He's your friend, you say, hey, we're doing this. And he said, you should sell or we should sell or we've tapped out. What was that conversation like?

Mohit (14:09.088)
Yeah.

Mohit (14:24.046)
He... Yeah, I mean, it was like, he said, okay, we've made good money on this, we've made our returns, let's see if we can sell this thing. Because he had made the money already on it. And then we, I think, sold it for one... Yeah, and then we... Yeah, and we sold it for 140k, I think.

Jon Stoddard (14:37.421)
Yeah, 50, yeah, 50 X per year.

Jon Stoddard (14:45.401)
Wow, that's good. And then what happened next after that? You go, hey, we got something here. I'm trying to find out when the point was like, you should start at an investment fund or.

Mohit (14:54.958)
Mm-hmm.

Mohit (14:58.338)
Hmm. No, that was not until later because until, you know, 2018, I think 2019, I was just catering to one-on-one investors. And you could come to me and I can help you buy a website and then I can manage it for you. Then when the risks started increasing and the prices started going up, I thought maybe it's not worth it doing it for individual investor anymore because even for $100,000, I cannot get something decent enough.

Jon Stoddard (15:07.493)
Yeah.

Mohit (15:26.43)
So might as well reduce the ticket size to maybe $25,000 and pool money from multiple people to buy multiple assets so that the risk is spread across multiple people and multiple sites. So yeah, reducing your overall risk basically. Yeah, so.

Jon Stoddard (15:42.081)
Yeah. Let me go back a little rewind a little bit and ask, was there any deals that didn't work out?

Mohit (15:51.05)
There was a business I think that we bought in 2017. It was a service-based business actually which was I don't even remember what it was basically a UK based business and there's a document in the UK called DeedPoll. It does something basically you need that document to do something I don't even remember now so 20-30 bucks we were selling it for 20-30 quid and you just entered your name and all the details that we needed.

make that form for you and then we would you know email you the form a postal form actually like mail you physically that form we had a VA in the UK who was doing all the mailing that was that worked fine for a bit but then kind of started declining for no good reason apparently soon after we bought it so we took a loss on that one basically I think we bought it for about 150k

Jon Stoddard (16:45.741)
Yeah. Was that outside your specialty expertise? Did you feel? Yeah.

Mohit (16:52.424)
I think so and that could have been the reason of its decline. I think that didn't work out.

Jon Stoddard (16:55.737)
You didn't have any control over flow of customers. Yeah. What, why did you structure your deals where they would own a hundred percent of the business? I mean, I guess with your friend, that's easy to do, but when now you, if you step outside people you don't know and try to explain that to them.

Mohit (16:59.434)
Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Mohit (17:19.019)
mess.

Jon Stoddard (17:20.649)
And then go, hey, well, what happens if the deal goes bad? I own a website or a business not doing anything. All right.

Mohit (17:28.114)
Yeah. So why they own 100% of it is because they put up all the money.

Jon Stoddard (17:32.437)
Yeah. Why was it the a hundred percent versus, you know, Hey, I own 50% of, you know, when we sell, when we capitalize.

Mohit (17:41.038)
So I own the cash flow because I didn't put up any money to buy it. So 100% of the money was, I don't put up, I just take the 50% of the cash flow and 50% of the upside, the capital gain for doing the services that I do to grow the business or run and manage the business basically. I don't put up any money upfront.

Jon Stoddard (17:44.302)
Oh, I see. Right.

Jon Stoddard (17:56.206)
Yeah.

Jon Stoddard (17:59.633)
And then when did you switch over to Black Book Investments?

Mohit (18:07.394)
So yeah, we started in 2014 officially, and then slowly started gathering clients, friends and family, extended friends and family, all through references. I was not doing any kind of marketing. It was just word of mouth basically. And I was growing like slow and steady. Yeah.

Jon Stoddard (18:10.018)
Yeah.

Jon Stoddard (18:24.057)
Was this a traditional fund where there's capital to deploy or was this a syndicate deal by deal?

Mohit (18:33.467)
So initially, like I said, we would work with investors one on one, and then we would get a commitment from them, and then we'll start looking for that. Let's say you were an investor who wanted to invest 100,000 with me, and I would start looking for a deal for you for that amount of money. And then if I found something good, I would present it to you, and you would look at it and tell me your thoughts on it, and then we can go from there. But now it's totally at our discretion. We have our own group buy.

Jon Stoddard (18:37.521)
101, yeah.

Mohit (19:00.19)
It's not a fund, it's more like a group buy. It's a multi-member LLC. All the investors are members in that LLC and we raise money once every year, but now we're changing that to once every, twice every year actually, or maybe on a deal basis. So right now, so far we have raised money and then started acquiring assets. And it's at our discretion completely because there's so many investors in the group buy, we cannot ask everyone what we're buying.

So we have more freedom. And now we're thinking of switching to deal basis, acquisition basis. We identify the deal first and then raise the money for that, as opposed to raising money first and then finding the deal. Because sometimes even 90 days are not enough to find a good deal to deploy all the capital. Yeah.

Jon Stoddard (19:47.509)
Yeah, that's right. Yeah, was that a US legal fund structure, like a 506C or something? Or D?

Mohit (19:57.406)
Yeah, it's a yeah, I think we have a CFO who has better details on that one, but it's a multi-member Wyoming LLC.

Jon Stoddard (20:07.217)
Oh, okay. So you decided, how much did you kind of run or what was the minimum commitment from people that you asked for on this fund, like 25, 50K? And look, I'm like, same thing. If you're trying to buy a business and then you go, gosh, I just want to raise a fund to have investors help me go find business. I go, well, you got to run those parallel because you're going to be spending a lot of time raising capital, talking to investors, asking for money, getting commitments, getting.

Mohit (20:15.198)
Yeah. 25k, 25k. Yeah.

Mohit (20:23.118)
Peace.

Mohit (20:33.709)
Yeah.

Jon Stoddard (20:36.985)
you know, people depositing the money. That takes a lot of time while you're trying to look for a business same time. That's a lot of energy.

Mohit (20:46.418)
It is, it is. So that's the reason, you know, I have to do everything in parallel, raise money in parallel, look for deals in parallel, you know, I cannot do it one after the other because once the money is in the clock starts ticking, because for the investor, they have already given you the money. Yeah. So for them, the date of deployment is one the day when they give you the money, not the day when I go buy a site for that money. So yeah.

Jon Stoddard (20:57.594)
Right.

Jon Stoddard (21:08.799)
Is there a date of I need it back if you didn't find anything?

Mohit (21:14.138)
90 days is what we asked for, to look for deals and deploy the capital. And fortunately, until now, we have been able to do that, but it got really tough last time around. So what we're doing is we're switching to identifying assets first and then raising money for that. Because now we have goodwill and trust in the market. So when we go to investors with the deal, even the existing investors are interested in putting more money. So it should not be that big a deal.

Jon Stoddard (21:39.717)
How many investors do you have in your kind of family that you can go to?

Mohit (21:46.552)
In our current group, we have about...

Jon Stoddard (21:47.745)
Yeah, that you can send an email to and say, hey, we got a great deal, we got an LOI on it. What's that email list look like?

Mohit (21:55.655)
Yeah. About 50, I would say. 40 to 50, yeah, 40 to 50, yeah.

Jon Stoddard (21:57.637)
50, yeah. And the minimum commitment is what, for?

Mohit (22:03.022)
So for subsequent rounds, it's $10,000. If you've invested 25K before, you can do so in multiples of 10,000 from there on.

Jon Stoddard (22:10.689)
Yeah. And let's talk about these deals now. Are they still affiliate deals that you look for? And how big?

Mohit (22:18.562)
So we're doing deals like $100,000 to half a million dollars mostly. But yeah, around $250,000 is the median I would say. And these are content sites, affiliate sites, display ad sites. So yeah, majorly content still.

Jon Stoddard (22:35.993)
Yeah, and where do you find those? Those are off-market or on-market deals?

Mohit (22:40.178)
Now we're finding more and more off market and more and more people are coming to us to sell their sites because they know we buy and we do a quick close, all cash. So we get the deals before even the brokerages get them. In more than one instance, people have come to us and then maybe we didn't buy it or we passed it over and then they went ahead and listed with brokerage basically.

Jon Stoddard (23:02.053)
Interesting. And where do you sell these sites that once you've, uh, you know, rehabbed them or grown them?

Mohit (23:08.888)
Either again in the network or on a brokerage. If it's a small one, maybe flip up.

Jon Stoddard (23:14.477)
Yeah.

Yeah. Do you any other sites like FE International or any of those other sites like that?

Mohit (23:24.31)
Yeah, we mostly buy from these big brokers. Quite light, FE, Empire Flippers. Sometimes we'll sell on based on the size. I mean, like FE deals with bigger size of businesses. And they're more specialized in software businesses, I'd say. So it's different.

Jon Stoddard (23:40.249)
Yeah. They're definitely, uh, Thomas, uh, Smale is definitely going larger now. Yeah. And what do you like about what you're doing here? The whole process? Um, do you like finding the deals? You like raising capital? Do you like fixing the deals or you just like working above it and assigning people to it?

Mohit (23:46.131)
Oh yeah, oh yeah.

Mohit (24:03.57)
Yeah, so mostly I'm working above it and assigning people to it. But yeah, what I like doing is finding the deals and then doing negotiations. Basically, I think I'm fairly good at doing that and I'm able to, you know, buy at the right price because I think the money is made in the buy and not the sell. So if you buy it for the right price, I think you're sorted at least to some extent.

and then your team can go in, then my team comes in and then they do their thing to grow the site. Of course, I'm technical too, I know SEO, but I've hired much smarter people, then much smarter SEOs than I am to grow these sites.

Jon Stoddard (24:42.413)
Yeah. When you say you make the money when you buy, I understand that. When you see a good deal and it's overpriced, do you make an offer on it or do you just say, hey, this guy's not going to budge, he's overpriced?

Mohit (24:58.45)
I wait them out. It's just a waiting game. I know how long it has been listed for on the market. And more often than not, I am able to wait them out to the point where they're like, okay, no one's buying this at this price that I've listed at. Let's see. And I'm constantly in touch with them. For one deal that was listed in 2021, January or February, we were talking to them, you know, they were price high.

But I was in touch with them all these months, and we ended up buying it 12 months later because I was taking updates from the seller every other month. How was the business doing? What's the new P&L? Can you share the numbers? And slowly I saw the multiple and the price reducing. The multiple reducing actually, the business was growing, but the multiple was reducing. So after even 12 months, they could not sell. I came in with an offer that I thought they would, you know, it would be hard for them to refuse it, and they accepted the offer.

even though at the same time they had two more offers, but then they ended up taking my offer, which was probably a little less than the other offers. But then because I had built a repo with the seller over the last 12 months, they felt more comfortable selling to me.

Jon Stoddard (26:10.497)
Yeah. Did you buy a hundred percent of it? Always? Yeah.

Mohit (26:15.523)
For that one, we bought about 85%. Now more and more deals, we're doing bigger deals like half million dollar deals and million dollar deals. So we are trying to have a roller equity. So 20, 25%, we buy about 70, 75%, 80%. So yeah, it gives us some cushion and some security basically.

Jon Stoddard (26:33.153)
Yeah, when you say you were in contact with them, do you reach, you see a good deal on Flip or some other site, do you reach out to them early on or do you kind of hold off and go, hey, the price is too high, I'm gonna wait till he's met reality?

Mohit (26:49.978)
No, so I schedule a call with them. I get on a call with them. I understand the business. I understand the numbers. I get to understand the seller, what their intention is, what their motivation is to sell, what their plans are, why do they need the money, all of that. Once that is done, some sort of rapport is built between me and the seller. And they start knowing me. And since they can Google me and search me and my company and find that I do this for a living and we're...

you know, one of the non players in the market. So, you know, they start having an inclination towards telling to me if they were ever to sell at whatever price.

Jon Stoddard (27:28.557)
Right. Do they ask for your personal financial statement or your net worth, your ability to purchase, or are you, they just, you just ask them to go to look at your website in your background and so many stuff. Okay. Yeah.

Mohit (27:35.058)
Bye.

Mohit (27:40.714)
Yes, yes. They just need to Google my name and more often than not they're just satisfied with that.

Jon Stoddard (27:45.685)
Yeah. Do you have any partners in this aside from the investors? Do you have any equity partners or just... No. Yeah. Is this your buddy that worked with you early on? Is he still an investor and partner in this?

Mohit (27:53.547)
Nope.

Mohit (28:02.466)
He's out of the game. He's done his own startup and he's done really well. So, yeah, this would be a huge change for him now.

Jon Stoddard (28:12.613)
Yeah. Yeah, tell me about this process back to this list of 50 investors. How long did that take you to cultivate and present to them? I mean, this is, I mean, if anybody knows the story of Angel List, it kind of started the same way 15 years ago, just an email list. Hey, you wanna invest in this? Yes or no, right? Oh, what is it? And then you'd send the pitch deck.

Mohit (28:31.807)
Exactly.

Jon Stoddard (28:37.473)
And they get back to you goes, I do this. It's much more formalized legally now, but, and that the big, it's bigger, like, I don't know, a hundred thousand people on the email list. Yeah.

Mohit (28:42.016)
Yeah.

Oh yeah, totally. So yeah, we have a investor readiness test, investor readiness questionnaire on our site, which prospective investors can fill out and then we can schedule a call with them. So we have a list of about 300, 400 investors who have shown interest in investing in online businesses and websites. And out of those, more than 50 have actually invested. So if you talk about that 50, those people have actually put money where their mouth is.

and we can easily go to them and raise more money from them. And then at a broader level, those people who have not invested but have shown interest in doing it, it's about 300 to 400 people. And it's taken over, I think, seven, 80 years to cultivate that list.

Jon Stoddard (29:28.113)
Oh yeah, absolutely. What kind of investors are those? What are these high net worth individuals look like? And are they accredited investors, non-accredited or do you have to comply with that asking for money? You're in India versus United States. Now, if I was asked for that kind of money in the United States with another US citizen, they'd have to be accredited investors, verified. Yeah.

Mohit (29:48.862)
Yes. So the beauty is that I'm just a facilitator. I don't take money from anyone. I'm nowhere involved in the deal. I facilitate the deal and the money goes from the buyer directly to escrow. From there, it goes to the seller. I just facilitate the whole thing. So to buy an asset, to buy a website, you don't need to be a credit investor. You need to be a credit if you're investing in a fund of sorts, but for this purpose, you don't need to be.

But most of our investors are H&Is, high net with individuals, UHNIs. And there are professionals like doctors, lawyers, entrepreneurs, startup founders, and just the e-commerce owners. Like entrepreneurs like myself, similar, who want to diversify their income streams, basically.

Jon Stoddard (30:35.789)
Yeah, yeah.

So how do you set that up with these individuals on a deal? So let's say I find a $500,000 website. Do you put up any money yourself? Or, yeah.

Mohit (30:49.034)
Yeah, so for the group buy, for the group buy, we do put up money. RCFO has put money. I have put money into the group buy and.

Jon Stoddard (30:55.789)
Yeah. And what's your minimum amount that you put in for a 25% or 25K? Yeah. And do you go, what do you say to these investors? OK, if you want in the deal, you need to send 25K to escrow.com or what?

Mohit (31:00.698)
25, same for me, same for me, 25,000. Yeah. 25, yeah. 10%, you can say 10%. Whatever or whatever is higher.

Mohit (31:20.106)
No, for the group buy, we have to get the money into the multi-member LLC. So it would be infused as capital basically from the members.

Jon Stoddard (31:25.561)
Multi-member LLC, yeah.

Jon Stoddard (31:32.406)
Okay, and

Mohit (31:33.73)
So it's not an investment, it's capital to start your business.

Jon Stoddard (31:37.989)
Gotcha. And that's usually for what? 85, 80% of the business now, 75% of the business that you purchase from the seller.

Mohit (31:47.842)
So now with the Group Buy, we purchase 100% now. With one-on-one, it used to be, roll over equity in some cases. With this one, we buy, because already there are so many investors involved in the Group Buy, it just makes things complicated to have the seller ensemble. So we buy 100% of it into the Group Buy and you own that, the whole, you own the whole, a certain percentage of the whole portfolio basically.

Jon Stoddard (31:51.209)
Oh, it's back to, yeah, it's 100%, right.

Mohit (32:17.302)
and we keep adding to the portfolio. So your percentage, yeah.

Jon Stoddard (32:20.221)
So it's not an, is it an individual specific deal or it's a portfolio of businesses?

Mohit (32:26.934)
So far, it's a portfolio business. But even now, when we buy any new deals, either we are going to do separate LLCs for those ones, and that would be individual deals, and whoever invests in those will get percentages of that business in the ratio of their investment.

Jon Stoddard (32:42.82)
Yeah.

So when you do sell a percentage of the portfolio or percentage equity in the portfolio, what do they own? Do they get a dividend or is the dividend suspended until for six, 12 months or what does that look like?

Mohit (33:02.454)
No, so first of all, they own equity in the LLC, in the company, in the ratio of their investment. Secondly, they get rights to dividend, which are paid out from the first quarter itself because these businesses are cash flowing. There's no reason for us to hold back on any income coming in. So we start giving dividends from day one. How we structure it is out of the 100% revenue coming in, we distribute 40% as dividends, which are paid out quarterly. And we...

Jon Stoddard (33:18.009)
Right.

Mohit (33:31.99)
reinvest 30% of the revenue back into the growth of the websites and the remaining 30% is Blackbooks fee basically to manage and grow these sites

Jon Stoddard (33:43.697)
Gotcha. And what is that? And how many websites are you doing concurrently? Purchasing and growing and seeking investment for? Yeah.

Mohit (33:51.629)
I just...

Mohit (33:56.543)
Yeah, seeking investment for maybe one to two. We're buying actively, but we're not buying all at once. But yeah, at any point of time, we have about, let's say, 20, 25 sites in our portfolio. And those are in different stages of growth. Some are in maintenance mode, some are in growth mode, some are in the exit phase. And yeah, so about 20, 25, out of which 10 would be like we're working on actively.

Jon Stoddard (34:02.575)
Right.

Mohit (34:23.754)
and rest would be like, you know, a little bit passive.

Jon Stoddard (34:25.901)
Yeah. How many people do you have working for you? 30. And are these people, uh, interfacing with investors or is just that that's just you.

Mohit (34:29.698)
About 30 full-time people.

Mohit (34:38.886)
me and my executive assistant and the CFO and the CFO yeah because I cannot because the investors have queries from time to time so the CFO takes care of those.

Jon Stoddard (34:42.357)
Okay. And the CFO.

Jon Stoddard (34:49.645)
Yeah. Where did you find that CFO to work with?

Mohit (34:53.046)
He was again, he was a good friend of mine from my hometown. He's a CPA, yeah. Yeah.

Jon Stoddard (34:58.457)
Oh, cool. Yeah.

Jon Stoddard (35:02.573)
It seems like you definitely evolve, you know, you do these small deals by yourself, then you brought investors on, and then you try to fund, and now you're doing a kind of more of a syndicate. Now, where's this going to go? Where do you think it's eventually going to go where somebody's already doing exactly what you want? You know, where do you think you're going to end up?

Mohit (35:09.314)
Yeah.

Mohit (35:15.19)
Yes.

Mohit (35:28.886)
Yeah, good question. So it's labor intensive business to, you know, to manage these active businesses. It's not like a passive investment where I can just buy some stocks and forget about it. So, and finding talent, good talent to run these businesses is again the challenge. So I can only scale it so much. So what I'm going to be doing is I'm going to be diversifying into other types of businesses.

Jon Stoddard (35:38.158)
Right.

Mohit (35:51.806)
So like agencies, marketing agencies, SEO agencies, I'm going to be looking at buying those agencies now and not just content sites, which would, these companies, these would be companies and not just websites, and they would come with their own teams and I can install a CEO in place to grow that business further. So that would save me the hassle of finding a whole new team to run that business basically.

So I'm gonna go bigger, buy bigger, because if you're buying for $200,000, there's no team. It's only run by the owner himself or herself, because you can't afford a team at such a lower level. So I'm looking to buy bigger businesses, raise more money, buy bigger businesses, and big businesses that come with the team already in place. So then I own multiple companies through the portfolio, basically.

Jon Stoddard (36:30.917)
Right.

Mohit (36:46.782)
and those can have synergies.

Jon Stoddard (36:46.849)
and the agency and somebody in that role is actually growing the business and you're just getting the roll up of the numbers, right? Yeah.

Mohit (36:51.49)
Exactly. That is correct. That's the next step from here. I don't have like the super end goal in mind yet, but I know the next few steps.

Jon Stoddard (37:00.085)
It's kind of formulated and crystallized and in your head somehow. Yeah, yeah.

Mohit (37:04.363)
Dude, exactly.

Jon Stoddard (37:06.573)
Yeah. And who do you get advice from or counsel or mentorship from to kind of move in this direction, to help you avoid big landmines?

Mohit (37:17.694)
Yeah, true. So what we're doing right now is very handful of people that are doing what we're doing right now. So and lucky for me, most of those people are known to me and you know, I'm on good terms with them and friends with them. So we do like, you know, quarterly calls and just see what's the lay of the land and how is the market evolving? What are they doing? Oh, you know, I tell them what I'm trying to do and then we brainstorm basically. And I'm also part of a couple of

other masterminds where there are people from different industries also but online businesses so I get to know other forms of other businesses in the online space and what's happening with them. So yeah, you've got to be updated.

Jon Stoddard (37:54.298)
Yeah.

So who is this mastermind that you kind of have that's doing what you're doing? Is it, if I said Michael Barislawski, he's doing, yeah, he's doing some amazing things. Right, right.

Mohit (38:06.118)
You named him. Yeah. There you go. The main magnet. Yeah. Yes, we have a we have a call scheduled every eight weeks, like he automated every eight weeks, we have a call schedule. So we're like, you know, just catching up. Right now. He's in Chiang Mai, you know, and yeah, he's been the game longer than I so he's been there for much longer. But yeah, we be

Jon Stoddard (38:27.641)
Yeah, he's got three funds. I mean, the last time I talked to him is he's working on his last $10 million fund, committed fund to acquire businesses. Um, it w why, yeah, he's great guy. Why not go that direction? I know you're going away from the fun stuff, which he's doing, but he's doing, you know, his, uh, return on investment to his investors, like 170% per fund, which is amazing.

Mohit (38:35.243)
Yes, yes, yes. Great guy.

Jon Stoddard (38:56.431)
Is it, why are you making this personal decision not to go that direction?

Mohit (39:02.178)
No, so I'm just not calling it a fund. It is a fund, but it's a group. It's structured in a way where I don't have to comply with any regulations like SEC and all, because there's a lot of costs involved there. But here it's a, it's more like a team of people coming together to start a business where everyone is a part of the LLC and they are a member of that in the proportion to their investment. So it's not like I'm not doing it. I'm doing it pretty much the same way. It's like.

Jon Stoddard (39:06.133)
It is a fun, okay.

Jon Stoddard (39:16.074)
Oh, lots.

Jon Stoddard (39:23.854)
Yeah.

Mohit (39:30.23)
But it says that I'm doing it in a rolling way. It's like a rolling one and not like a one-time raise and then. Uh, but contrary to that, I'm doing the other one too, uh, with one of the biggest marketplaces, in fact, the biggest one, Empire Flippers, uh, Justin and Joe, they're good friends of mine. Empire Flippers is the biggest marketplace for buying and selling online businesses. And three years ago, they spun off a sister company, which was called Empire Flippers Capital, which is now rebranded to Web Street, uh, which is run by Mike Rankovich now.

And that company basically pairs investors to portfolio operators like me. And then they raise money and we deploy that money and grow that. So I've done three rounds with them and raised over four million dollars with them. And we've bought four million dollars worth of websites and businesses using that money that they raised and deployed that capital. And for our fund, too, which we did in 2022, we were able to last quarter returns

were 10% for the quarter that we were able to give for that second round of investment that we raised with Webstreet. So just that last quarter was 10% ROI.

Jon Stoddard (40:35.685)
Yeah.

Jon Stoddard (40:40.493)
Yeah, so yeah, yeah. I mean, Joe Bignotti, I sold my site through him, you know, for, I don't know, probably six years ago now. Yeah. He's got a pretty big list of investors that don't want to manage sites anymore, but wanna put their money to work.

Mohit (40:49.09)
Yeah.

Mohit (40:55.586)
Exactly. Or they don't know how to. Or they don't know how to. They have the money. They just don't know. So that's where people... Yeah.

Jon Stoddard (41:00.941)
Right. Yeah. And what are the fees for that? What does that look like? I mean, they're, they're actually presenting investors to you. So they got to be charging something, right?

Mohit (41:12.674)
So yeah, there are always, I don't interfere with, interface with the investors. It's them, it's their face, it's their name on the line. It's not me. My name is also there because it's shown, but I don't interface with the investors. So, you know, they don't split the revenue, they split the profits. So let's say, you know, 100% of the profits that we get, they're split into different parts. 66.67% goes to investors as dividends, two thirds of the profits.

20% goes to me as the operator, as the portfolio manager, as the carry, yeah, 20%. 3.33% goes to advisors of WebScreen that help out with the 3.33, yeah. So that's 66.66 plus 3.33 plus 20, that's 90.

Jon Stoddard (41:47.277)
Operator, right spot. Yeah.

Jon Stoddard (41:58.253)
Is that 3.3 did you say or 33? 3.3, okay.

Mohit (42:09.73)
70 plus 20, 90. 3.33 is for the advisors that help out with the acquisitions, with the sale, with the due diligence, all of that. And 10% goes to empire flippers of the profit basically. And that is the same for the capital gains and the revenue. No, it goes both ways. Goes for the recurring income every month, which is paid out quarterly and also goes for the any profit made, any capital gains made when we sell. So it's...

Jon Stoddard (42:22.862)
at time of recapitalizing or selling the business, yeah.

Mohit (42:39.287)
Yeah, it's both.

Jon Stoddard (42:41.697)
Yeah. Do you like that? I mean, are you happy with that? Or do you think it's a faster way to money? You know, because look, there's not a lot of Angel List type opportunities out there. And I think, you know, these guys are in front of that, which is great. I know that Flippa is doing something similar to that. Yeah.

Mohit (42:49.95)
Yes. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Mohit (42:59.686)
Yeah, that's true. Yeah, but these guys are ahead, I think. And they have, you know, they are the forerunners in the market. And I think it gives me more visibility, my company more visibility. I don't have to worry about the raising investment part now. So I can focus on the acquisitions. I can do bigger acquisitions. I don't have to manage the investors. So there's a lot of things that are good that come along with it. So

Jon Stoddard (43:19.791)
Yeah.

Jon Stoddard (43:28.993)
and it's worth the 10%.

Mohit (43:29.47)
Yeah, yeah, for me 20% actually, yeah, 10% for the Empire Flippers, for Empire. It is worth the 20. Yeah, I thought it might be less, but if you do enough of these funds, it adds up. It might not have worked had it been just one or two funds, but since I'm doing it, you know, repetitively, every, let's say every year I'm doing a fund with them, I might be doing two with them now going forward every year. So cumulatively, these 20% add.

This 20% adds up basically.

Jon Stoddard (43:59.885)
Yeah. So this $4 million rolling fund, I mean, was it a specific deal that you put up there, or you just put up your idea for a portfolio up there?

Mohit (44:10.85)
So yeah, so the rolling fund is Black Book's own fund, which is the multi-member LT. Here, it is not, yeah, it's separate. Yeah, here, it is not a rolling fund. It is a one-time fund. We raised the money beforehand. We get commitments based on my thesis that, okay, Mohit Thader is the operator, Black Book Investments. This is what he's going to do. This is what he's going to buy. These are the numbers that he's looking at, looking at these kind of deals. We define that, pre-define that.

Jon Stoddard (44:16.065)
Yeah, that's separate from the Empire flippers.

Mohit (44:39.746)
So people know that, okay, what they're putting money in. They don't know the targets, but they know the broader picture that, okay, Moid is going to invest in content websites ranging from $100,000 to $1 million. So you raise the money first in a 60 day period, let's say, and then we go and buy assets and websites using that money. And that's a 90 day period basically. And it's a closed fund. Yeah.

Jon Stoddard (45:02.541)
Yeah, four million, that sounds like it. There's a lot of money ready to put to work. Was that an oversubscribe or way too much excitement? Saying, whoa, whoa. Yeah, I mean, we can't spend four million bucks. That's a lot of websites.

Mohit (45:08.97)
Yeah, there is, there is.

Mohit (45:15.218)
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So that was across three funds, 1 million, 1.5 million and 1.6 million across three funds. And all of them were oversubscribed. And all of them were luckily for me, the hour there were other operators like me too, some are doing content sites, some are doing FBA, some are doing e commerce. So lucky for us, ours was whichever fund round we did ours was the first one to get

you know, get over subscribe and then we could start. Yeah.

Jon Stoddard (45:45.537)
Yeah. And what are they? So these are people on Empire Flippers list. They're investors, high net worth individuals, or people that just don't want to operate anymore, maybe second time serial operators, uh, what

Mohit (45:52.088)
Yes.

Mohit (45:58.829)
Yes.

Jon Stoddard (46:03.909)
What do you have to deliver to them? Is it a formalized pitch deck or a private placement memorandum or what? What are they doing? Nothing.

Mohit (46:11.23)
Nothing. I am I have full discretion on what I'm buying and whatnot. I have to present A presentation to the vet street guys the emperor flippers guys That why i'm looking at a certain asset and why I want to buy and why I think that's a good asset to buy Good acquisition which I do over a loom video and I run I They have a sheet where they've done the modeling so I plug in the numbers based on what my projections are And based on certain numbers and the forward projections

which I explained why I put those numbers in. We calculate the ROI. And then we also analyze the risks associated with the business and weigh the pros and cons. And then if it's all good, I tell them, okay, I'm looking to bid or offer, make an offer on this site for this much money. And then they approve it and then we do it.

Jon Stoddard (46:59.185)
And they don't care what side it is, where you buy it from, where the funds come from.

Mohit (47:03.998)
For the first two funds, it was solely, it solely had to be bought from Empire Flippers. But now since it's spun off into its own entity, Web Street, we have, you know, we can buy from anywhere, even off market. Ours was the first fund to do an off market deal on Web Street.

Jon Stoddard (47:09.466)
Yeah.

Jon Stoddard (47:21.189)
So when you enter these projections that you think it can do based upon your expertise, do they have any interaction with you about saying, no, we think those are too high, too exaggerated? Do they veto it?

Mohit (47:29.9)
Yeah.

Mohit (47:40.97)
Yeah, so I am anyways conservative when it comes to revenue, so it hasn't come to it. But yeah, if it's too optimistic, they do ask, you know, that these look too optimistic, maybe we can dial them down. So yes, that's their job. That's the advisor's job too, right? That's what they're getting paid for.

Jon Stoddard (47:56.301)
Yeah. And what is this qualification process you have to go through to be on Web Street? To say, I'm going to

Mohit (48:03.138)
So I think, yeah, I think they have a formal process in place to vet operators and portfolio operators like myself. They have, I think, vetted over 300 or 400 operators and selected about maybe 15 or something, 12 to 15. And so they're a very small group and strict, they're very strict because they're entrusting you with so much money. And their investors are entrusting them with so much money, which they're then entrusting you with.

Jon Stoddard (48:19.849)
Oh, so it's a very small group. Yeah.

Mohit (48:33.01)
So they need to know that you're a solid guy or a girl and that you can deliver and that you've done it before. It's not your first rodeo, right? So, and they know pretty much everyone in the industry. So they can do reference checks. They can do your background checks. They can do your previous performance checks. All of that, they ask for proofs, your history, things you've done in the past. So all of that. It's a long process.

Jon Stoddard (48:57.721)
Yeah. And so you find a site for an example, $500,000. You need to raise funds. Sounds like it oversubscribes to that. What, what you raise the funds first, but how do they disperse that to go purchase the acquisition? But if you need capital ongoing, do they support that also?

Mohit (49:09.834)
No, we raise the funds first and then we find the site. Then we find the site.

Mohit (49:24.994)
So let's say we raised about a million bucks. So what we do is we keep 10% aside for growth capital and operations for the first year or so. So we only deploy $900,000. That's my strategy basically, it doesn't have to be for everyone. So we keep some capital aside for the growth part basically. And also I forgot to mention that we as portfolio operators have to put in our own money also into the fund, a 5% to 6%.

Jon Stoddard (49:51.077)
Okay, gotcha. You got your skin in the game.

Mohit (49:54.75)
Gotta have skin in the game, yeah.

Jon Stoddard (49:57.173)
Interesting. Yeah. And where are you at with that process? How many have you purchased from the Empire Web Street Fund?

Mohit (50:07.454)
Yeah, first round we did, we bought two websites from Empire Flippers. Second round, we bought five sites from Empire Flippers. Third round, we have bought one from Empire Flippers and two from, one from another broker and one off market basically.

Jon Stoddard (50:24.005)
Yeah. When you say bought five sites, did you, now you're buying like, you know, like you're going grocery shopping. Is it increases the risk a little bit that you're going to get over, overconfident?

Mohit (50:41.706)
No, actually I'm again very conservative. We have multiple vetting processes for the site before it passes and we have multiple people doing it because one person can have an oversight, two people can have it, but three people cannot have the same oversight. So we look at it from multiple angles and we do a very thorough vetting of these businesses, these sites, and only if we like it, then we present it to the WebStreet team.

Jon Stoddard (50:50.082)
Yeah.

Mohit (51:11.678)
and then they do their wedding. So it's multiple layers of wedding.

Jon Stoddard (51:16.197)
Gotcha. Yeah. And this is a Web streets. I got to check into this because I wasn't familiar with it, but is it a run out of New York or run out of wherever. Where's Joe at? He's in Thailand too. Isn't he somewhere? In Vietnam? Oh, Philippines. Yeah.

Mohit (51:28.706)
Joe is in Manila, Philippines. Joe is in Philippines, Manila. Yeah, I spoke to him a few days ago. Justin is traveling in Switzerland right now, but he's mostly in Thailand. And, but he's spending more time in the States. But yeah, Web Street is US based, Delaware, I think.

Jon Stoddard (51:45.057)
Interesting. Yeah. And are you going to keep doing that or you have some other bigger plans, you know, buy a $20 million site and see what you can do it.

Mohit (51:57.174)
So slowly we have increased the amount of money we're raising with Web Street. I'm hoping to do bigger rounds with them, like four or five million, maybe even bigger than those, and then buy real companies, like get into the M&A space, like at the private equity level. Right now we're micro private equity, but I want to get to that point where we can...

Jon Stoddard (52:01.058)
Yeah.

Jon Stoddard (52:15.609)
Yeah, because you're reselling back. I mean, you're building these businesses, you're selling back to empire flippers, people, which is a different multiple than if you go a little more lower middle market or middle market to private equity groups, then you're gonna start getting 10 Xs, 20 Xs.

Mohit (52:24.926)
Yes. Higher up.

Mohit (52:33.208)
That's where we want to be in the next two, three years. And we need more money to get there, to raise. So it's relatively easier to take a three, four million dollar business and sell it for $10 million, as opposed to taking a $300,000 business and taking it to $3 million. So that's where we are at.

Jon Stoddard (52:51.193)
Yeah.

Jon Stoddard (52:54.605)
Yeah, that's interesting. So you've got a couple needs. You're looking for agencies to help you manage these growth. And what else do you need?

Mohit (53:06.826)
No, so we have our in-house team who is basically managing, running, growing all of these businesses. What we're doing is we're trying to pivot, not pivot, but yeah, we're trying to diversify into other business models, not just content, because content is volatile. And especially with AI coming in, it's going to be more volatile from here on. So we are wanting to get into the services industry where we can buy service-based companies like marketing agencies, PR agencies, SEO agencies, and then run them with their teams and then have synergies across.

Jon Stoddard (53:09.284)
Yeah.

Mohit (53:36.07)
the portfolio. So those would be still valuable. Content types can be more vulnerable to Google updates and more volatile SEO agencies and other agencies.

Jon Stoddard (53:45.133)
Yeah, and Google just dropping everything they're doing and putting it into AI right now. So.

Mohit (53:51.39)
Yep. So we've got to diversify the business models, the types of businesses that we're buying basically.

Jon Stoddard (53:57.717)
Yeah. And do you think, what about, are you going to stay with affiliate sites to go after? Or do you think there's a cap on that, and you may have to go to SAS or something else?

Mohit (54:10.326)
So we're going to keep with them. It's just that we're not going to be 100% into affiliate size. We'll reduce the percentage slowly and try diversifying into other forms of monetizations, like you said, SaaS and agencies. Maybe e-commerce online, no plans as of yet.

Jon Stoddard (54:28.653)
Yeah, yeah. Well, Mohit, this is great conversation. I really appreciate the time you spent with me, man. Yeah.

Mohit (54:35.19)
No problem, John, it was lovely speaking. I mean, it's been a long while where, you know, I've been asked such insightful questions, to be honest, and I had to think, you know, to answer this. So really, yeah, my mind is racing now. It's 10 30, 10 30 in the night here. Yeah.

Jon Stoddard (54:48.537)
Yeah. Well, it's like we're because everybody listens to this. They go, oh, yeah, great. I made my first million. It's like, you know, I'm worth 30 million. Yeah. But how did you get there? Like, what was the first steps you take? What were the failures along the way and who's your mentors that help you get there?

Mohit (54:59.287)
altogether.

Mohit (55:05.138)
Exactly. And I must compliment you on the questions because most of the podcasts I do, 80% of the questions are the same. But with you, 80% of them were different than all others. Only 20% were overlapping. So I must, that made me actually think because I've done it so many times that I just, you know, it's like, I know it in the back of like the back of my hand, what I have to say. But every question of yours was like, you know, making me think and then I'll, okay, I need to think and answer.

Jon Stoddard (55:17.109)
Oh, thank you so much.

Jon Stoddard (55:33.281)
Yeah, well, good, man. Thank you. I appreciate that. Yeah. So thanks for being on the top M&A entrepreneurs podcast.

Mohit (55:36.268)
No rust.

Thank you, John. Thank you.