Episode 564 | Running a Business with 10,000 Paid Subscribers

Startups For the Rest of Us

Rob Walling

Entrepreneurship, Management, Business, Marketing

4.9 • 819 Ratings

🗓️ 24 August 2021

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In Episode 564, Rob Walling chats with Sol Orwell about growing his website, examine.com to millions of views per month, changing revenue models, and the importance of doing customer interviews. The topics we cover [2:14] Intro [3:06] How Examine started [7:21] Examine's differentiated approach based on scientific research [9:33] 10,000 paying subscribers [10:59] Building trust through transparency [15:26] Interviewing customers [21:14] Getting hit by Google [26:52] Sol's stunt marketing pages Links from the show Our Mistakes | GiveWell Examine SJO.com Sol Orwell (@sol_orwell) | Twitter If you have questions about starting or scaling a software business that you’d like for us to cover, please submit your question for an upcoming episode. We’d love to hear from you! Subscribe & Review: iTunes | Spotify | Stitcher

Transcript

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0:00.0	You guessed it. It's another episode of startups for the rest of us.
0:03.2	I'm Rob Walling, and this week I'm talking with Saul Orwell about growing his website,
0:08.3	Examine.com, to millions of views per month. He's 10 years into it. We talk about why he built it,
0:16.3	talk about changing revenue models and how today it's a subscription business. So while it's not software
0:22.3	as a service per se, it is information as a service. And he's built up one of the most reputable
0:28.6	nutrition information websites on the web. That's examine.com. I also ask him why when you
0:35.4	Google who is the most attractive man in Toronto, his
0:38.9	webpage ranks first for that.
0:41.1	He does some fun SEO stunts like that.
0:43.7	And so I just find Saul super interesting.
0:45.9	I came across him because Sherry and he met at an event.
0:50.7	And then since then, you know, obviously me being in the B2B SaaS world and Saul being in the online marketing slash nutrition information world, he and I would not normally, let's say, cross paths, but it does come down to digital entrepreneurship, right?
1:03.9	It's about being an online entrepreneur. And when I look at his path, working with domains and becoming essentially a digital nomad and then a self-made digital
1:14.2	entrepreneur there are more commonalities between what he and I do than than not so obviously this
1:21.3	episode is a little different and that it's not straight SaaS but we also touch on you know his
1:25.5	subscription numbers how he reduced churn and some other
1:28.7	things like that that I actually find pretty fascinating. Before we dive into our conversation,
1:33.8	there are just a couple more weeks left to get microconf local and microconf Europe growth
1:39.5	tickets. We're hosting our locals in Portland, Oregon, Boston, Massachusetts, and Austin,
1:43.7	Texas here in September, just a few weeks out.
1:47.1	And then obviously in Croatia for MicroConf Growth Europe.
1:50.4	Tickets are going quickly, and I believe we're going to sell out at least a couple of those events here in the next week or two.
	...

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