Examine.com has grown up: $700,000 in the past year

http://www.solorwell.com/examine-com-is-grown-up-700000-in-the-past-year/

by ESBoston • 12 years ago

93 39 12 years ago

solorwell.com

SoloX516• 12 years ago

Hi, I'm Sol.

Any questions, just ask.

mikejarema• 12 years ago

Congrats Sol, it's been a pleasure watching Examine.com go from an idea to becoming the destination for supplement knowledge. Especially seeing your posts on schwarzenegger.com!

SoloX516• 12 years ago

Jarema you live!

Wow it's been like ... 4 years since we had lunch?

And speaking of The Oak ... http://www.schwarzenegger.com/fitness/advisory-board scroll down :)

albemuth• 12 years ago

Did /r/Fitness have any influence on the site's success? What are your major traffic sources?

SoloX516• 12 years ago

It definitely helped. But, I've been a redditor for 8 years now anyway - http://www.reddit.com/user/AhmedF/ - so it was just a natural fit.

In terms of generating revenue or people who spread the word ... reddit was honestly not a big deal.

Major traffic sources? We have about 25+ sites that send us 100+ visitors/day. For example, "garcinia cambogia" is one of Dr. Oz's favorite (bs) fat burners. Quite a few sites that rank high in the Googles for that phrase link to us as an unbiased source.

Lastly, every time there is a study getting a lot of buzz, people ask us to look into it. And once we do, it gets shared a ton. Our latest one - http://examine.com/blog/high-protein-diets-linked-to-cancer-... - got us roughly 100,000 visitors over the course of 3-4 days.

Lastly, our brand is pretty strong. Our top two referral keywords are "Examine.com" and "Examine"

It all adds up.

Kiro• 12 years ago

How do you make money?

SoloX516• 12 years ago

We sell a Reference (oriented towards professionals) and Stack Guides (oriented towards the layperson).

mkal_tsr• 12 years ago

No questions, just a congrats :-)

0xeeeeeeee• 12 years ago

Hi Sol,

Where's my t-shirt you promised me 5+ months ago? =]

-Tk2oG

SoloX516• 12 years ago

Shiiiiiiit busted. I swear I asked about hylete pricing today!

terrellm• 12 years ago

Congrats Sol. I know you've been working hard on putting together a great source.

nazgulnarsil2• 12 years ago

Hey Sol. I was getting into nutrition just slightly before Examine launched, and was completely incredulous that something like Examine.com didn't already exist. As you mention in the post, the incentives in this industry are totally perverse. We're taking an anti-supplement stance with MealSquares partially due to some of the research you've helped collate and rate (we've done a lot of our own too of course :). I've happily watched Examine.com grow and I wanted to say thanks for trying to improve the epistemic standards we have for nutrition. Keep fighting the good fight. P.S. would you venture an opinion on Soylent?

MDS100• 12 years ago

http://examine.com/blog/soylent-is-made-from-hype/

SoloX516• 12 years ago

Thanks for the kind words, and good luck. We're thankfully at a stage now where we're well cashflow positive so we can just focus on what we do best.

Soylent

Beyond the link that MDS100 posted, I personally think it's a bit shortsighted. Paring food down into some kind of overly simplistic "consume this" ignores all the social and psychological aspects of eating (not to mention the satiety considerations of chewing something versus drinking it).

As a replacement for food, I think it's foolish. As something to help you get to X macros in a pinch ... well, I'd rather take a protein shake and then mix whatever I was missing into it (need fats? Nuts. Need carbs? Tons of additions)

trevmckendrick• 12 years ago

Great post and congrats. 2 questions:

1. You're background is in SEO, how much do you attribute SEO to Examine's success thus far?

2. Why do you think it took 2 years to make decent revenue?

SoloX516• 12 years ago

1. Well, I'd say my background is more in developing tools for myself and then making them usable by end-users.

With that said, SEO has not done much for us. On top of that, I've had enough experience with Google that relying on it is my last priority. At this time, Google generates < 50% of our traffic, which is uncommon for major sites.

2. It took time to build up the trust and reputation needed, AND for US to build up the knowledge base required to be able to monetize it.

We could have tried to sell guides right off the bat, but a lot less people would have used it, and its quality would have been a lot less.

Plus, supplements have been historically quite the shitshow (you should see all the gossip and innuendo that flies around on my facebook when it comes to health and fitness and supplementation). That meant it took longer for us to convince people we were legitimate.

I'm a big believer in career capital, and it takes time to build that up.

AlexC04• 12 years ago

Hey Sol. Now that you're moving into the range of revenue that you might be able to invest, do you or Kurtis have any designs around conducting your own research?

Maybe there's a supplement or interaction that you think might be interesting but can't find any solid research on?

Maybe there's something that has weak evidence / poor experimental design that you'd just like to get to the bottom of?

Not sure how you'd turn that into real money, but maybe there's stuff that just "gives you an itch"?

SoloX516• 12 years ago

We _may_ eventually start looking into doing our own original research, but at this time, zero plans.

We do have plans to start publishing some of our research as meta-reviews, but give us a bit of time on that.

into real money

Honestly, not concerned about that. That's the benefits of a lifestyle business - we're (quite) cashflow positive, so we don't obsess over a thousand here or there. It's just to get really solid research (especially in nutrition) is quite cost prohibitive. Maybe in the future we can be involved in some grants and study design, but nothing concrete.

nell• 12 years ago

Your website is blocked by websense as "Compromised Websites".. any idea?

SoloX516• 12 years ago

Hadn't updated WP a while ago, got a few stupid links injected (for SEO, not for phishing). Your company is likely just a bit slow in updating its filter list.

MicroBerto• 12 years ago

Hey Sol, Mike from PricePlow here!

Always a pleasure watching your success - congratulations for taking the long, hard road and grinding away.

I know we can't work together much due to your wise philosophy of non-affiliation, but I'll always look forward to working with you in any venture, whether it's this one or the next!

Congrats once again!

SoloX516• 12 years ago

:-)

noneo• 12 years ago

Hey Sol! Fellow entrepreneur here :)

You should start accepting Bitcoin on your site! It would let you increase profits ~3%. My company Moolah.io lets you do it for free, hit me up at jonathon@moolah.io

Thanks!

SoloX516• 12 years ago

Have considered it. Problem is our audience trends older, and they may be confused by what bitcoin is (and checkouts are all about ease of use).

jug5• 12 years ago

Congrats Sol & team.

One thing that really stood out for me was the endorsements. Having perhaps the most prolific researcher of recent history Adel Moussa (Prof Dr Andro) vouch for you guys, and on the other hand one of the best prep coaches Matt Porter on the same page... That's big.

halcyondaze2• 12 years ago

What prompted dropping all links to supplements purchasable online? Because you guys are an unbiased source, did you still feel it was wrong to offer an affiliate link to the product?

I absolutely love Examine.com and have shared it with many friends, but I seriously questioned that move from both a business and helpfulness perspective.

1. From the user's perspective, it's helpful to click right out and get the product if you want it.

2. From the business perspective, that's a shit load of Amazon cookies to be dropping, and you're not compromising your message since you treat all supplements equally and back it with research.

Thanks for creating an amazing resource!

SoloX516• 12 years ago

It's easier and simpler.

While we linked to only the generic search from Amazon.com, it's easier to doubt the research when we still profit from the sales.

Examine.com is run as a lifestyle business. If we wanted to maximize revenue, we could easily 2-3x our revenue in the span of 6 months. Just not our approach.

halcyondaze2• 12 years ago

Gotcha. Makes sense. Time for money tradeoff. Thanks for the answer!

monksy• 12 years ago

I appreciate the work you do!

extremelyn• 12 years ago

I'm curious about how the Examine team came to the price point for the Stack Guides.

Simply put, $50 is incredibly high for an eBook — particularly when the site itself hosts a large quantity of that information for free.

applecore• 12 years ago

Actually, $50 is nothing for a quality info-product, and the best people in the business always "give away" a lot of free, valuable information.

SoloX516• 12 years ago

$50 is high if you just think of it as an eBook.

We think more along the lines of the Picasso Principle: http://www.psychotactics.com/blog/the-picasso-principle/

The Stack Guides greatly simplify the process. They are NOT for everyone. But for the layperson who doesn't have the time and/or energy to figure it out themselves, it's well worth the investment.

jemacniddle• 12 years ago

Hey man no question in mind, just wanted to let you know that examine is a lifesaver. I recommend it to all of my clients, friends and family. Some are ignorant to the truth but many listen, thankyou.

SoloX516• 12 years ago

Thanks!

We've tried to be as non-condescending as possible. It's not hard being right, it's hard to teach/show someone the truth.

sandGorgon• 12 years ago

@SoloX5 - big fan here (from /r/fitness)!

I'm wondering why you didnt setup examine.com as a wiki (I read somewhere that it is a Wordpress site right now).

Each of your landing pages are heavy and (I assume) are constantly being edited. How do you manage that process ?

It'll be nice to know the plugins,etc. you use for the site - its brilliant for a quick encyclopedia-ish wordpress setup !

Quick comment - it might be a good idea to go SSL by default on the site. Your register/login pages are also non-ssl.

SoloX516• 12 years ago

Hihi.

We have a wiki-backend, but the reality is that our subject matter is far too specialized.

The edits are not as frequent as you'd imagine - one of our guys does the lead research on our page, emails the editors, and then they all hash it over, partly via email/asana, and partly with online editing. Then when they are all happy with it, it goes to the copyeditor to clean up (another fittitor!)

You can also click on the "History" link to see how a page has evolved.

RE: SSL - yes. We are working on rewriting the entire code base from scratch, so that is one of the things on our massive todo list!

And thanks for the kind words.

sireat• 12 years ago

Also curious how the domain examine.com was acquired, was it something dormant that you or one of your team already own, or did you actually shell out 4,5 or 6 figures for the said domain?

One example of a successful generic domain is bodybuilding.com which I believe was bought for $30k a long time ago and then developed instead of sat on.

SoloX516• 12 years ago

We did purchase it.

Examine.com has grown up: $700,000 in the past year

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