justincooke

Justin w/ Empire Flippers year. Yeah, typically an affiliate site making $10K/month in profit will sell for around $280K - $320K.

I understand why some others have said those returns sound unbelievable. It's because they aren't completely passive. It requires absolutely zero skill/effort to put money in the stock market, mutual funds, etc. It requires skill and effort to put it into an online business and maintain or grow that business. Most people can't (or won't) do it.

I just currently locked down a 12 month lease in Saigon, Vietnam. I've been visiting here often the last couple of years and keep feeling pulled back to the city, so decided to commit to being here for most of the time the next 12 months.

It's a "big" city in Asia without being massive. (Bangkok, Tokyo, Manila, etc.) Great coffee shop scene, rooftop bars, restaurants, and friendly expat entrepreneurial community/vibe. In fact, Obama came through a few months ago and gave a talk at one of the co-working spots to some of the local entrepreneurs!

Here are some good write-ups on entrepreneurship in Saigon:

https://www.virgin.com/entrepreneur/the-worlds-best-start-up...

https://www.coworker.com/lab/14-reasons-why-saigon-is-the-ul...

How so, Brian?

Thanks, Joel, that's a good point.

It felt a little awkward/forced running through the details on the different scenarios. I think that would have been much more legible in a blog post or written form. :-(

Thanks, Patrick - that's a pretty fair overview of what we do.

We noticed that the buyer avatars we used in a podcast (Newbie Norms, Portfolio Paul, Lifestyle Larry, Strategic, Sally, etc.) really resonated with our audience. We've since expanded on those a bit in posts, later podcast episodes, etc.

That's interesting feedback, Ian. Funny, though - some say we charge WAY too much while others say we don't charge enough. Why do you think we're on the high end of the scale. (And, if that's the case, you'd definitely consider SELLING your sites with us, right?)

Pricing is always relative. (and pretty personal) My guess is the place you can get in Austin for $900/month isn't a fair comparison to the place you'd get in Saigon for the same.

Saigon place: - Furnished - In central district (D1) - Short-term lease - Maid included? (possibly) - Might include cable, internet, phone, electric, etc.

When you're dealing with such small companies, they're usually pretty early in their market and might not have built up enough defensibility to share all of their information publicly. They'd rather limit disclosures to those who have taken some action to express interest.

Public listings increase the number of copycats the end buyer will have to deal with. This isn't much of an issue for a well-established company with significant market share, but it is for a young software company fighting it out with their other (early) competitors.

Here's a company that focuses on buying/selling apps specifically: http://www.appbusinessbrokers.com/

I'm not sure - I hope not.

Shit - time to throw the laptop in the oven. :-(

I understand where you're coming from, but I really think we'll have plenty of support.

Keep in mind he didn't vet the ACTUAL post before I pushed it live.

In reading it back, I wouldn't say he was enthusiastically pushing it or anything:

"I think you guys have your minds made up. The reality is the risk is probably low. Truth is an absolute defense to defamation. It's unlikely a couple Russians would try to sue you, but you never know. My boring attorney answer is try not to go too far to minimize any risk. Stick to the verifiable facts."

Not really. We definitely discussed with our attorney but, due to the small amount of money in the fraud ($25K) it wasn't worth the hassle of litigation.

Someone else mentioned we should go after them in Russia but, even if we won, I doubt it would be worth the hassle or distraction.

I seriously doubt you're right, but I guess we'll see. Those that do appreciate it will be our customers and that might be a bigger pool than you'd think. Appreciate the comment, though.

It's not on the site yet, but we're adding it so that it's public/clear.

You bring up some interesting points regarding chargebacks but, in this instance, chargeback protection actually saved the credit card holders from becoming victims as well, no?

I'm pretty sure these were stolen credit cards and that the credit card owners had the cards used without their permission. That's why, after the first chargeback, we didn't fight it - we didn't want the credit card owners to get screwed if we WERE to win.

I can appreciate where you're coming from here, I really can.

I will say that we did consult our lawyer before writing this post, actually.

Additionally - business is done on trust. Some will read this and (like you) not trust us and won't do business with us. Others will appreciate it and do business with us. No worries either way.

No. Amazing value because those sites combined were earning close to $1,200 per month in profit. $5K for that is an absolute steal, so Nate was just happy he got an amazing deal. (And didn't know the sites were stolen)

We are, actually. We currently accept bitcoin for both deposits and full-on purchases. We prefer it, actually.

Narcissistic guy and his brother, I guess.

Yeah, it's a pretty horrible feeling. We were angry with the scammers and somewhat embarrassed that it happened at all.

All of those passwords are changed after migration. In this instance they weren't, as we had an active/open ticket with him.

I don't really know anything about when he's heading over. Plus, not sure it would work out that cleanly.

I wasn't sure about publishing, but now that I did I'm glad it's out there.

I wasn't sure about the model, but some other entrepreneurs we know have done something similar with dozens of hires. A great way to get talent on the cheap and give them a stepping stone to building their own company.

Thanks for the Empire Flippers shout, Brian. Glad to hear you dig the show.

You've turned some assumptions you have about my knowledge/understanding of Filipino culture into questions here. While there are some cultural similarities (deceivingly similar, I'd add), I was under no illusions they were the same.

I'd say my understanding was better than most Americans in my position coming out here, but it's grown significantly in the last 4+ years, for sure. I do think this played a role, but I don't think it was a primary issue.

As best as I tried to explain what happened factually in the 3K+ word article, I definitely wasn't able to include everything.

As an expat entrepreneur, holding back on getting your business rolling while you take time to learn more about the culture sounds nice, but isn't realistic. How many months (years?) would you have spent learning the culture before starting your business here?

You're right in that it was painful and frustrating and I'd be lying if I said there wasn't any emotion involved during the process. I think some of your criticisms are fair and provide an interesting counter-argument. (Likely closer to her perspective)

One clarification though - we weren't looking to push her out. She informed us (me, actually) that she was looking to quit and wanted to walk away. I'd asked her to stay on for a while and she did. In the end, she was planning again to quit and, instead, I offered the paid leave of absence.

We definitely could (should?) have taken steps to avoid the lawsuit early on and we probably didn't treat the case as seriously as it ended up being, but that's much easier seen in hindsight, I think.

I wonder if a clean break (with severance) would have avoided this issue altogether - I'm not exactly sure that would have worked either.

Joe knows a bit more about the details here than I do, but I can say that we've qualified for the tax exemption status.

Additionally, our corporate structure in the Philippines is like this:

- 95% owned by a US Corporation - 1% owned by each of us (2% total) - 1% owned by 3 individual Filipinos (3% total)

This approach is less common for companies as small as us, apparently, but we're pretty happy with how it worked out. I think we lucked out working with a law office that was aware of and familiar with this setup.

I DON'T think we could have necessarily avoided the lawsuit by just setting up another corporation here in the Philippines. We COULD have set it up, of course, but our attorney said it was likely to catch up with us. Something about the new business being a mirror/shell of the old one. The worry being that, at some point in the future, they'd latch on to our new corporation's bank account again.

I know what you're thinking - sounds pretty stupid, right?

But...in the heat of things and being right in the middle of it, we thought it was likely or probable that our attorney was in on something with her attorney.

The fact that he was asking for all that money to be place din escrow had us thinking we'd NEVER see that money again if we handed it over. Who knows where it would really go - so we stopped contact.

Over time our phone numbers had changed (common in the Philippines) but the address remained the same. We figured if it was a major issue, he could still get in contact.