How Human Proof Designs CEO Bryon Brewer grew to $2M revenue and 500 customers in 2020.

hello everyone my guest today is brian brewer he started in the it consulting industry almost 20 years ago working for some of the us largest consulting firms including accenture and microsoft 12 years ago he launched his own consulting firm and has since started grown and sold numerous online businesses he currently owns and runs human proof designs based out of dallas texas the company specializes in helping entrepreneurs start and grow online companies started in 2013 they've built over a thousand online businesses and helped hundreds of entrepreneurs grow and flip their sites his company has now grown to 16 full-time employees and over 300 contractors he also owns and manages several affiliate marketing and e-commerce sites brian you ready to take us to the top absolutely we'll get there so so at its core how are you making money is it a retainer to founders that want to work with you or are you actually owning and operating your own properties and then selling them well we have two parts we do what's kind of a ready-made service so we find and research niches and topics that are low competition and we actually build um affiliate and e-commerce sites that have no traffic they're brand new and then we sell those we have our customers purchase those and then we help them grow those into revenue producing sites so brand new completely new businesses uh and then we also buy and sell sites usually that are making between zero to a thousand dollars a month uh kind of starter sites and we help companies our individuals entrepreneurs purchase those sites and then grow them tell us maybe the story of one of those so we can dive deeper what maybe maybe the one that you you know sold for the most over the past 10 years yeah so you know we have such a variety because we work in just about every single niche and we also do custom niche sites so folks who come to us and are looking for a specific niche but for example if you look right now we have a niche site in the organic foods market which is really popular nowadays with healthy eating that site is uh selling for uh ten thousand it's a revenue producing site that has made earned about four thousand dollars in revenue so far this year using affiliate marketing model mostly from amazon affiliate links uh so that site right there is really ripe for for growth we've spent a little bit of work in building it getting that site to where it is currently a new owner is going to pick it up earning you know a few hundred bucks a month and then with our help and their knowledge they'll be able to grow that um you know much bigger than what it is today so then that investment is you know we we've got that site listed for around 10 000 right now so it's a great way for people who want to get started in online businesses and need help uh that's really what we cater to brian it seems like a lot of work though i mean you buy this site for four grand you put a bunch of work into it now you're gonna sell it for 10 grand you're getting you're gonna make a six grand profit if you sell it at that price that feels like a ton of work to make six thousand dollars um well it it is a lot of work i mean obviously we what we do is we have a staff of writers you know affiliate marketing is really based around content so you want to build really high quality especially with google today there are logarithms there's not really another way around it but to just build really high quality content and and do good keyword research target the right niches and that's something that we've been doing since 2013 so we've gotten really good at it so we can you know build these uh get these generating some revenue and and then pass it on to a new owner who then can focus on it and grow it much bigger than we can because we are you know we're not focused on just one business we've got you know at any time we may have 50 or 60 of these sites that are in our inventory that we're building and working and trying to sell so brian in 20 in 2019 how many total sites did you did you sell to somebody else um we sell probably about 50 sites a month so so how many did you sell into all of 2019 when you add them all together um it'd be somewhere in the 500 to 600 range okay 500 to 600 and how many of those did you buy yourself and then do work and then resell them versus you built from scratch so probably about 70 of those we built from scratch and about 30 of those we will purchase we do have a success guarantee so if someone purchases site from us and they go through our training program if in one year they aren't making the income they want to make on that site or they're just got bored with it or it wasn't for them then we buy the site back from them so it does reduce the risk for a customer so we do get some sites back as well that we um you know purchase back from customers after one year if they're not interested in anymore so in 2019 on 500 or 600 sites sold total how much revenue do that mean for human proof um sorry what was that last part how much total revenue did you do in 2019 oh in 2019 we were at revenue standpoints without some of our bigger sites kind of adjust that is about 1.5 million and this year will be somewhere around 2 million okay and again the majority of that revenue is coming in 2019 the 1.5 million came from you selling those 600 sites correct yeah we well and you know part of that revenue is also we provide uh seo and growth services to our customers how much of the revenue came from that um it's it's growing um you know i think over the years as we've gotten a larger customer base we've started to serve more of our customers from a growth standpoint instead of selling sites so um it's probably about forty percent of our revenue now this year so call like six hundred seven hundred thousand dollars is what you'll do on your seo growth services correct yeah and is that product ties are they buying software or is that you getting on a coaching call once a once a month with a group of people uh it's somewhat productized i mean we do things like uh video production so um we kind of have a format a system in place where we take existing content turn it into video that they can share on youtube social media other ways to grow their sites we do content writing um we do backlink services guest posts um all these types of outreach efforts to help grow their site on page and off-page seo services so it's it's more of a service and less of a productized type of offering because it is custom to each site so how many here in 2020 you think you'll do about 2 million revenue 40 will be those seo services how many unique customers we work with in 2020 uh gosh it'll be it'll be in the hundreds um you know we probably in in in a year's time we'll have 500 500 customers we work with okay and so in 2020 again there's four or five months left in this year you think you'll work with about 500 customers how many total sites will you sell this year do you think um it's it's probably going to be similar um you know back in uh so 500 when you say similar sorry 500 to 600 sites this year yeah 500 to 600 i mean you know back in the day when we started back in 2013 all the way up until just about two years ago we were only selling ready-made sites and we started almost two years ago selling revenue generating sites so these are smaller sites that have revenue coming in already so they really get a fresh start i mean the problem with ready-made sites is google has kind of a six-month sandbox so a site isn't going to rank and isn't going to grow and develop your revenue uh likely for the first six months so you got to have a little patience if you're buying a ready-made site of course it's a good time to start growing and adding content getting your site ready but it you know you're really looking at six months before you're going to start any revenues on the site because if you buy one of our revenue generating our age sites then you you've got revenue potentially coming in right away of the 500 600 sites you'll sell this year how many are aged versus brand new yeah so most of them are going to be brand new um we sell you know maybe 20 to 30 of those are going to be revenue generating sites got it are older revenue generating okay interesting and how many i mean do you make money if you do two million this year will you make money oh yeah yeah we're profitable okay and can you break me down like obviously you have people expenses you had 16 people on the team it sounds like yeah that's right and and what how many are engineers um so we have a techno technology team that is four uh engineers and then um we have a content team account manages our um you know our writing production video production keyword research all those activities um we have an investment how many people are on the content team so the content team um it varies you know we have about 300 contractors and most of them are on that team uh doing writing services um video services all sorts of creative services um and but we do have a full-time staff as well that kind of manages that contract team is uh and then we also have an investment services team which they uh they kind of manage the overall due diligence on sites that come into us that we look at purchasing and then growing and selling so they handle kind of all those aspects as well as customers who come to us and say you don't have a site inventory that i want but can you help me find where can we view your inventory sorry what where can we view your inventory uh humanproofdesigns.com i'm there right now where do we go okay so click on services yep and then you'll see when you scroll down there's readymades there are aged there's revenue sites and so you can click on like say the revenue page there and you'll see what we currently have available and it is broken up we do have a few sections there's because we do affiliate marketing and we also do drop ship eco ecommerce sites and then local lead generation sites as well so you'll find three different ways to monetize your site uh within human brick designs got it so i scroll down i see one that is acne skin care approximate word count 80 000 highest keyword 11 number of keywords in ahrefs 389 estimated traffic 20 domain created in 2017 and then you can click and actually view the earnings you're listing this for two thousand seven hundred ninety seven dollars correct yep um the site gets twenty twenty hits per when you say ahrefs traffic is twenty what's that mean uh let's look at that one that's the acnecare one yep um so that yeah so that one is kind of a new site um it's got some revenues but you'll see a link there for revenues yep so you can kind of pull up and we let you know pretty full disclosure on kind of all the traffic the numbers what the revenues are uh kind of a low entry point around two thousand dollars for someone to get started with that um and so let's see it's got um five hundred three dollar five hundred eleven dollars in sales yeah um so yeah it's it's um uh traffic would be 20 visitors a month currently so that's what i thought i mean that that seems i mean that's that's a nothing burger that's a big zero i mean you might as well put zero yeah it's not much traffic um you're getting some traffic to it um you know the key with this site here and what a lot of people are looking for when they buy a site is um if i want to start an online business how long is it going to take me to write 80 000 words of content that's a lot of work right um and and i've already got with this site here we've already got 389 keywords that are ranking in google so you're basically taking a shortcut instead of starting from scratch and creating some wordpress site and then starting you know and writing 50 articles or in this case about 80 articles to try to get it to start to rank for certain keywords that you're targeting this site is ready to go you've already got the content yeah i understand is that the main thing driving the price is that not the the how old it is and how many words have been written on it yeah there's two ways to value a site we can value it on the content which this site has very little revenue so we have to base it off the content like how much would it cost to build this site today if you were to start from scratch so you know we look at that and then for those sites that are earning at least a hundred dollars a month then we do we switch over to a valuation model and look at what is the earnings which most of these sites are going to sell between 30 and 40 times the monthly revenues or or two to three x annual revenues correct two to three x annual are you using empire flippers i see a a a quote on your on your page from those guys are you using them to sell the sites justin and cook yeah so yeah justin and and we we work with empire flippers a lot um we because we have an investment services team that helps people find sites so we partner with empire flippers to match people to sites um but other than that we you know we're we're kind of separate um do you like a broadcaster is that part of your business uh well we we do have a relationship with them so we do get a commission for deals that we bring them yeah um but that's kind of a small part of our business because most of our clients are not looking for a site that's selling for a half a million dollars you know which is if you're going to go to empire flippers you're looking at deals that are 100 000 and up mostly that's right we we really target those are starting with their online business how how many people give on your list that have expressed interest in buying a site like this under 10 000 well we have a total of about 31 000 people on our email list that are active and we also have a facebook group with about 11 000 people in our in our private facebook group um and we have an early bird list i think we have about 6 000 people on our early bird list which they're the first to know whenever we get a new site or we launch and build a new site uh so about 6 000 people on that list for our early bird notices you have all like the early pieces of like building your own marketplace i mean there are companies you mentioned you have 300 contractors writers and creatives i mean there are companies like scripted like content fly like like that sort of play in this space and they're large i mean they're doing eight nine ten million dollars a year in business why haven't you gone that route well you know we've we've really focused more on building sites and selling ready-made sites kind of that done for you service um and our service is kind of our services side our growth side like content writing video production keyword research backlinks you know there's lots of companies offering guest posts and backlinks that is a service we really just started focusing on in the last year and a half uh and mostly just to our customers that are buying sites from us because they want to grow them and so we just naturally started offering those services so we haven't really branched or marketed outside of the people that are buying these sites which was something we were kind of set up to do and is another area that we're looking at doing uh over the next year or two so i think there's lots of growth opportunities on our on our kind of growth side of the business and brian have you bootstrapped the company or you raised no this has all been uh bootstrapped um now domwell's a colleague of mine started the company in 2013 and then i acquired it from him um and it he started out with what's that you bought in what year i bought it into that into 2018. okay got it why'd you do that i mean i i assumed obviously that wasn't cheap why'd you decide to buy it yeah so you know i was doing consulting work for many years and traveling all over the country um i have four kids and that's really hard when you're traveling monday through friday and so i was looking for an opportunity where i could stay and work from home yeah and also you know so this is a perfect opportunity and you know being in technology this was right at my wheelhouse ryan let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book um probably bill gates all of bill gates books really are inspiring um how he got started um you know what his thought patterns are behind building businesses number two is there a ceo besides bill gates that you're following or studying um probably um probably not um i mean i you know one of my favorite shows is uh the shark tank so i watch all the sharks and what they do and kind of how they look at businesses and how they value them number three what's your favorite online tool for building a company online tool yep well the two that i used every day would be ahrefs and simresh um you know analyzing sites it's interesting to say both of them you usually pick people have a a clear favorite it's either ahrefs or semrush not both well you know both of those tools are just estimates and one can be way off from the other it's interesting how different they can be on some sites so we really have to use both of them mm-hmm interesting okay number four how many hours of sleep to get every night um six to seven okay what's your situation that sounds like you're married with four kiddos right yeah uh and how are you i'm 43 43 last question what do you wish you knew when you were 20 what do i wish i would have done was something you wish you knew when you were 20. oh well you know i didn't realize that the way to really make money and be successful is to go out on your own because i worked for a consulting company for many years and they were billing customers 250 an hour for work i was doing and i was making you know a third of that maybe and so once i started out on my own and realized that if you're out there and you you let people know what you do what services you offer uh customers will come if you do a great job so um so i wish i would have started a little bit earlier human proof designs they did 1.5 million dollars in revenue in 2019 they'll break 2 million this year completely bootstrapped they have over 500 customers those customers buy early stage ready-made sites from the company so these could be sites with revenue or with traffic or they're just they're ready to get going and get started then after they buy brian's upsells them backlink tools content tools things like that and that's how they'll drive two million bucks in revenue this year they got a great community 31 000 on their list 11 000 their facebook group 6k on their early bird list to buy these websites and they got 16 people on their team brian thank you for taking us to the top yeah thank you nathan one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm central it's called shark tank for sas we call it deal or bust one founder comes on three hungry buyers they try and do a deal 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