Just the tip:
You’d figure that massive websites out there have it under control. But, there are times and reasons that large websites out there that may not want to do things because it may go against their interest. There is an arbitrage out there that can lead to some business opportunities. Im going to cover an amazingly successful one, then my idea for a tangible business…but I’m not exactly sure how to monetize or capitalize it. Maybe you can figure that out (ok, I have some ideas and we will talk about it, but how far does it go?)
Quick Off Topic:
I first ran across one of these businesses by watching the My First Million podcast. They spoke about a guy making $2 million a year running a search for OnlyFans. Wait…what? OnlyFans wasn’t suppose to be a porn site but…hey, if it pays, take the money. So OnlyFans doesn’t have a search like you see on Pornhub but thats what people want. So, some other guy did it. He created a profile search and does what is essentially PPC ads to monetize the site. So each time a person searches on his site, finds a “creator” and subscribes to the creator, he makes money. Most people are wondering…why doesn’t OnlyFans just have a search? Its a family friendly site and all of those fetish search terms is not what they want to be known for. Bring on the supplemental website.
Quick Thoughts
Cost to get started: [1]This is a single $ ($,000) business to get started. Simple wordpress website should be fine. Maybe need a scraper or something depending on what site you are supplementing.
Ease of business: [1] – While it takes a little technical skill to start up a website, I think if you hire if out, the rest to get going is all grit.
How big can this grow: [2] I think this type of business could be in the low hundreds of thousands in income but could be way more. Just depends on what you are offering and what site you are supplementing.
Resource level: [1] It doesn’t take much to get started. Hire out the parts you don’t know (probably tech stuff)
Can I pull it off: [5] For sure
A rising tide lifts all boats
JFK
Why This and Where is It Going?
JFK is right. If you can jump on a rising tide (piggyback on a huge site like OnlyFans), your asset will grow with that site. Its much easier to jump on the bandwagon than it is to start from scratch. The OnlyFans search guy is making $2M a year because how popular OF is. So the OF thing was on the MFM podcast about 6 months ago and I filed it away. Last weeks dive into online courses brought me into Udemy research. The new idea is a play off the Udemy platform. So Udemy is a public company and worth $2.167 BILLION. $725M in sales with FY 2023. This is big platform and a coat tail to ride.
So if you look into the creator side of things, you’ll find that if a education creator (the person who made the course) gets 97% of the money that was collected IF!!! they use a instructor led affiliate link. If the instructor brings the student to the Udemy website and they buy their course, they get 97% of the money. If they dont, they only get 37%!!!! WTF Udemy takes 63% of the sales. There is a HUGE reason for the course instructor to try and bring their own people to the platform vs having people go straight to the site and sign up for the course. So where are we going?
I think the opportunity is similar to the OF search website. My idea is to work with all the course sellers and build a site that uses nothing but their links. I would build a Udemy price tracker. The pricing is all over the place. One day its $120 for a course, tomorrow its $17.99 and the day after its $9. Then you compound the nonsense with “new customer pricing” which is basically the sale price everyday. So if you want a course and your an existing member, just sign up for another account and use Chrome porn mode to be incognito so they offer you the new member pricing.
So, price tracker website, show the best price and use the instructor affiliate links. So there needs a way to track clicks from your site to udemy using their link. Charge the seller a price per click. Something relatively cheap. $1/click or something like that. With some testing, you can figure out what you really charge per click. You’ll need someone to build a simple scraper, to scrape Udemy daily, to check pricing. You can scrape category pages so there isn’t that many pages to scrape. Couple thousand pages max. Then you need a database to build a tracker. Possibly offer a some sort of notification system for people who want to watch a certain course, this will offer a better user experience. The course instructors should theoretically love this. Most courses can be purchased for $15 on a sale. They get $14.50 if the buyer uses their link. If someone buys on the Udemy search, they get $5.55 for each person buying the course. The instructor can spend $8 per lead and still make more money. If people are dumb enough to pay full price, the instructor can likely pay $30-40 in clicks per sale and still end up ok.
Lets Talk Financials:
I dont have a lot here. The best I can do is think if that company is making $725M at an average of $20 per course is about 3.5 million course sales per year. Lets say your site could gather about 1% of the people going to the site at $1 per click and that equals out to about $365k a year in income. Thats at 1 click per sale. This is rather unlikely and would probably 2-3 clicks per course to get a single sale, so maybe $1M in gross sales. Once the site development is done ($2-3k) its a 95% profit margin business including charging the instructors via Stripe and they pay via credit card.
Lets try a different look at it, because I don’t have great way to guess the numbers. So, if you look at SEM Rush to see what search volume looks like, like “Udemy coupon” and similar. If you add words such as “free, coupon, coupons, discount, etc” you get ~92,000 searches per month. The keyword difficulty is pretty hard so you’re gonna need to know what you’re doing, or get some good IG/Tiktok advertising. But again, 92k searches per month, and say you can rank and get to page 1 of Google, I’d say you can probably get 1/2 the traffic of that search. Call it 50k per month and you’ll likely make $1 per click as they go to Udemy to purchase. Thats $500-600k a year based on this side of the calculations.
How to Get Started:
So you need a website. I think simple wordpress can be done. Cheap hosting, website design and some custom PHP will run you $1500 using a platform like Upwork. You’ll need someone to build a scraper and likely want to run a proxy service. So $500 to build the scraper and $50/month for a proxy service.
- Contact the instructors and get some feedback before you start. Talk to them about their numbers and show them how you can benefit them
- Buy a domain and build a website
- Build a scraper to harvest information daily
- SEO and Insta/Reddit/Tiktok advertising
- Profit 😎
Final Thoughts
This business is totally viable in my mind. This is probably the largest online learning platforms out there. They are publicly traded and unlikely to go anywhere. The platform is nothing without its instructors. They can’t change the structure too much with their instructors or they lose their platform and their sales. They are completely dependent on instructors creating courses. I think the amount of sales coming from this new site, and going over to Udemy, will be low enough to fly under the radar for a long time. Even when Udemy catches on, I don’t know how much they can do.
Supplemental websites have a lot of opportunity. There are other ways you can be supplemental to websites we may discuss in another day such as creating templates, add ons, etc for platforms or websites. I think there are going to be a lot of opportunities out there but you’ll have to go out and find them. Thinking creatively will be the key to this. I think if you find large sites and just google for things like discounts or check questions on forums, you’ll find opportunities.
If anyone ever reads this and wants to partner up on something like this, I have a great website developer, a full time python programmer and some other resources to add. The hard work needed is talking to all the instructors and seeing they would be interested.
