Full Exposure:

Sold (in Summer 2016) for $2000 + profit of around $400 ≈ $2400 made in total. This is not a how-to guide. I’ve learned some things and am writing this primarily as a way to reflect for myself and to share my experiences.

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About a year ago, one of my best friends and I were bored. We had just finished the International Baccalaureate (high school) and wanted to be at least mildly productive for our last summer before college.

Bored teenagers = a wide array of terrible choices coupled with lots that can go spectacularly wrong.

However, Arthur and I happen to be responsible, baby faced, young men…

and so we decided to start IB Survivors. 

How exciting! We were going to be millionaires!

What the hell was IB Survivors?

We were going to help current IB Students by posting high quality articles, uploading our notes, and offering a ton of advice. Our primary product was going to be an eBook that we were going to write – titled ‘A Guide to Surviving the IB’ – that was going to be priced at around $30.

The reason we wanted to start something in this niche is because we had a true comparative advantage – we were surrounded by smart peers who also had free time, we had tons of high quality notes, and most importantly, we had just gone through this journey ourselves.

Arthur was going to handle the technical and design side of things – I was going to do the marketing and sales.

The First 1.5 Months

We wanted to launch around September, when all students would be starting school again. To make things more interesting, Arthur and I were also communicating from across the world; he had just begun university in London and I had just started in Berkeley. But in all honesty, this turned out to never really be an issue  apart from minor time difference hassles. Skype is still your best bet for clear, high quality video chat.

Arthur began setting up the website – we decided that all we needed at the beginning was a basic functional decent looking website that contained all the right information and resources. Instead of building it from scratch, we decided to go with SquareSpace because it covered all our needs and was relatively inexpensive.

Note: You really don’t need anything fancy at the beginning – all you’re trying to do is see what works and what doesn’t, and then you can keep iterating as time progresses. But at this stage, your goal should be to get something out as fast as possible.

Meanwhile, I was mapping out how we were going to acquire our first customers and what exactly our goal was in the first few months. For instance, was our goal to reach a specific number of visitors to our site and build exposure and credibility? Or did we want to straight away measure how many eBooks we could sell?

To be honest, I don’t think I was able to properly plan out exactly what we wanted to do.

I also started writing blog posts on topics that I thought would be interesting for students. Now, in our case, this proved to be an okay strategy because we ourselves had been IB students up till recently. However, it’s always better I find to ask instead of assume. So, a better approach would have been to reach out to current IB students and directly ask them what it was that they wanted to hear about, rather than me personally assume interesting topics.

Oh and I forgot: We were also writing the eBook. This was actually really rewarding; we spent a lot of time on it, proofreading each other, asking our friends who had done well in certain subjects to ‘guest write’ for us, and most importantly, we had tons of fun doing it. It was almost very cathartic, after what had been a tough two year academic journey. You can see the frontpage here:

Arthur kept working on the website, he was designing some awesome logos for us and just making everything look really cool. I was pretty luck to start working with someone who has a great grasp of the aesthetic (not one of my biggest strengths), and someone who has a good work ethic in general.

And then soon enough, it was Launch Day.

Launch Day

We created a Facebook Page (this was a huge mistake – it should have been done way before to build exposure even before we launched) and invited all our friends, family, and acquaintances. We thought we were going to explode in ‘likes’ and that we would be able to drive a lot of traffic to our website immediately.

This was not the case. We even went on Fiverr and bought 1000 likes from Facebook because we thought we needed more social capital to get more traffic.

This was also not the case.

We were just targeting the wrong user base – though all our friends were on Facebook, and we had a bunch of younger students who had just begun the IB on there too, this was nowhere near enough in terms of traffic. Instead, we needed to dig deeper and find out where marketing our website would yield us the highest exposure.

So we dug, and we found some goldmines.

The IBO Subreddit

This was by the far the most useful resource to us in our marketing efforts. This subreddit contains about 10,000 IB students sharing their journey, looking for advice, and just redditing in general. We started to post links to our articles and kept asking for feedback. Some of our early posts looked like this:

We started to get some exposure, but we still hadn’t made our first sale.

We had just realized that we had essentially created a product no one wanted.

In essence, we had broken the fundamental rule of internet marketing: to validate before you create. In other words, we should have actually found out (through a variety of techniques) whether IB students wanted to buy an eBook and then spent any time whatsoever working on it.

But we got lucky!

The content we were producing was high quality (compared to anything else available) and hence we gathered a pretty decent following – approximately 100~200 unique visitors per day. After about 11 days, we also made our first sale:

I must say it’s a genuinely pleasant feeling. The thought that someone is willing to pay money for something you wrote is both unbelievably awesome but also stressful. You get this sense of responsibility, almost an air of guilt if you think you’ve not given it 100%.

November 2015 till January

At this stage, we’re no longer posting weekly articles (we’re recycling posts) and have made one more sale after our first one. University life has taken over and we’re being lazy.

We both don’t want to admit it, but we’re thinking the same thing: is this ‘business’ even worth continuing? And if it is, what is its opportunity cost?

Luckily, Winter Break is right around the corner and we’ve set out some time to meet up and really reflect over what we want to do with the website.

We decided that we were going to devote all of January to the business and if we weren’t able to meet a specific of goal 10 sales, we’d shut the whole thing down.

So for the first time, I started intensely marketing and spending 2-3 hours per day tracking down leads. I would go to different forums, such as this one or this one, and reach out to students that needed help.

But I would also send cold, inbox messages like this:

The problem with messages like these is the following:

1. Scammy
2. Lazy
3. Attacking
4. Revolting
5. Robot sounding

I won’t bother explaining this too much but the jist of it is that you’re attacking the prospect instead of speaking to him like an actual human being. You’re also not offering any value whatsoever from the start.

Now, a better message would be something like this:

‘Hi —-username of individual—–,

I just wanted to offer my two cents on how you could increase your score for Paper 2. It seems from your post that you’re focusing too much on sounding eloquent and well-written versus actually developing sound, reasoned arguments. This would also explain why you’re scoring poorly in Criteria B. A way you could improve this is by…..

‘Insert another 2 – 3 sentences of helpful comments’

Let me know if you have any other questions and I’d be happy to help 🙂

Shikhar

See the difference?

You’re focusing on creating value from the outset instead of taking it away from a random student.

Luckily, I worked this out pretty quickly, and we somehow managed to inch towards ten sales.

This was the time to double-in and really push forward. Unfortunately, I was leaving back for university.

January to May 2016: The Study Guides

Boy were we in for quite the ride.

Soon after I started university again, I realized that I couldn’t afford to spend that much time on IB Survivors. I was taking some challenging courses and had other priorities that needed taking care of.

This was a notable problem because most of our sales thus far had come from doing a lot of “labor” work – messaging people individually, manually reaching out to friends of friends who may be interested, doing a lot of reddit responses etc

I couldn’t do this anymore. We had to find a new way of making money.

That’s when we came up with the IB English Paper 2 Study Guides.

Quick Info: For the IB English exam in May, you have to write an essay based on the two literary works (books) you read that year. What makes this daunting is that you have to compare, analyze, and evaluate these books in relation one another. Students starting late find it really hard to catch up and start to panic.

Most students, however, never end up reading those books because of, well, because they’re 18 year old students!

Our Idea:

Offer these students 2000 word study guides, personalized and customized to the two literary texts that they’re reading and also allow them to add in questions they want us to answer.

We were never actually going to write these study guides – no time for that.

Instead, we were going to outsource it to someone who was very good at this work. We used Upwork to find an individual (email me if you want contact details) who was phenomenal and didn’t charge much. In fact, we were charging $100 for each study guide, and only having to pay $30 to get it made.

The best part was that we were getting a lot of demand; here are some stats up till April:

And it’s not like we were giving people mediocre quality study guides – the work was genuinely pleasing. In fact, here are some happy customers:

And here’s another one:

We had no refunds, had happy customers, and most importantly, were not spending too much time actually running the website. All I had to do was relay orders from customers to the individual doing the writing, and just coordinate everything until all was payed.

Yay!

SEO Strategy

Meanwhile we were running this new study guide service, we would also keep posting articles.

And one of our articles did really, really well.

If you Google almost any variation of ‘IB English Paper 2’ – which was a search that really spiked as May approached due to exams, you would see that our article was the 4th result on Google Search.

What did this do? Well:

Our audience size absolutely exploded in April.

Why did this article take-off compared to my others?

I really don’t know, but what I do know is that it offered practical, actionable advice and looked like someone had actually spent more than 30 seconds writing it.

It’s true, that article took me a fair amount of time to write. But I knew that as long as I actually helped my reader, that I wasn’t trying to sell him something and instead was actually offering him value, I’d be doing the right things. Comments like these prove how helpful such articles can be:

But to come back to how this article did better versus other similar ones (that also offer lots of value and were well written), I have no idea. Thus, I’ve learnt that focusing on the quality of my content is much better than worrying about SEO strategies, tools, and specifics. In fact, the the best SEO strategy is to produce great content, which is what we all need to double down on.

Conclusions & Selling the Website

I skipped over quite some stuff but that was most of our journey.

Selling the website, to put it bluntly, was a total pain in the ass. This was the first ever time either Arthur or I were negotiating online and we messed up pretty badly.

I won’t go into too much detail but we sold for way too less – could easily have sold for double (not more, I think) if we had done this properly. But oh well, good to know for next time am I right?

Overall, I’m really glad we started this thing. Learnt a lot, helped out some awesome students, and most importantly had a great time working with Arthur.

Onwards we go, I hope 🙂