When his son was born, Alex Goldberg wanted to de-risk his finances.

“The fact that most of my net worth was tied to my business no longer felt smart,” he said.

His bootstrapped portfolio of five websites, including the largest Fin vs Fin, had seen stable earnings and growth since launching in 2019. Just four years later, the company’s annual revenue was $1 million — and the team was lean. Goldberg worked with five remote contractors.

But when he went to sell at the end of 2023, Goldberg faced a number of challenges. High interest rates had slowed down M&A activity, and the holidays dragged out the process. But the biggest challenge was Google’s algorithm update, which cut his sites’ organic traffic in half.

Here’s how he waded through it and sold for multiple 7 figures.

Buying out his co-founder early on

When Goldberg launched his first successful affiliate website, he worked as a senior growth marketing manager at Houzz where he managed 8 figures in annual ad spend globally, he shared on Flip My Site.

“It was there that I realized: as fun as it was to grow someone else’s company, it was time to build my own,” he said.

On nights and weekends, he began building affiliate sites. In 2018, he launched Fin vs Fin with a business partner, Healy Jones. Fin vs Fin reviewed the best wellness products and coaching services. With smart SEO practices, organic traffic steadily grew, and Goldberg quit his full-time job in 2021.

In 2022, as the site continued to grow, Goldberg negotiated a buyout with his business partner. With Goldberg working full time and Jones in a passive role, the 50-50 equity split didn’t make sense, Goldberg told They Got Acquired.

The co-founders explored a few routes and decided on a buyout. To land on a fair valuation, they got several third-party valuations and took the average. Every six months for 18 months, Goldberg paid installments, an arrangement called seller financing.

“Our agreement was that ownership transferred 100% to me upon execution of the contract, so I could operate freely, and I was on the hook for payments every six months, regardless how well the business performed,” Goldberg said.

Flipping the switch on paid growth

Up until 2022, Goldberg focused on growing Fin vs Fin through organic search and monetizing the site through direct affiliate partners. But he saw larger websites profiting more from paid media.

“We already knew which keywords were lucrative organically — why not pay for that traffic, too?” he shared.

Goldberg started slowly at first, bidding on keywords via Google Ads and Meta. Then earnings took off. In 2022, Fin vs Fin earned $70,000 in monthly profit, annualized to $840,000, according to Goldberg’s post on Starter Story.

This paid traffic also helped diversity revenue — and “added a ton of incremental value to my brand partners,” he told They Got Acquired.

At sale, the Fin vs Fin portfolio of sites had partnered with more than 300 brands and had approximately 30,000 monthly visitors to Fin vs Fin and about 50,000 total across sites. Annual revenue reached $1 million.

Goldberg kept his team lean, working with five remote contractors — a virtual assistant, developer, designer, editor and two writers.

Selling Fin vs Fin after 4 years of growth

When his son was born, “I decided to look into taking the chips off the table,” Goldberg said.

In addition to de-risking his finances, he was ready for a new pursuit. “Revenue had plateaued at 7 figures, and the effort required to scale to 8 no longer excited me the way it once did,” he said.

He found a buyer through Quiet Light brokerage to assess the market’s response and ultimately expedite the selling process. His broker helped him build his sales packet that positioned the business as pre-qualified for SBA financing, and Goldberg also decided to package all five websites together rather than sell each individually.

“This was intended to diversify traffic (concentration risk), increase overall earnings (low earnings risk) and remove concerns about me directly competing with the buyers post acquisition (non-compete risk),” he said.

Within three weeks of listing, Goldberg received 10 letters of intent (LOI). He chose the highest bidder, but they withdrew their offer within 24 hours, stating they weren’t a good fit to run the business.

He then chose the second-highest bidder and began what would become five months of due diligence, dragged out due to the holiday season and further negotiations.

About three months in, the buyer expressed concerns about declining organic search traffic, which drove roughly 80% of traffic and accounted for approximately 50% of revenue and 75% of profit.

Goldberg attributed this drop — which cut the sites’ organic traffic roughly in half — to Google’s Helpful Content Update. This algorithm update impacted search rankings and therefore traffic for many content sites.

“This led to many difficult conversations, and ultimately downward pressure on the overall deal size,” Goldberg said. The buyer negotiated a 15% discount in deal value from their initial offer.

In March 2024, the sale was finalized for 7 figures — around 3x annual earnings — to a small family office in Florida.

Since the sale, Goldberg said he’s excited to be on the other side of the negotiating table as he actively searches and evaluates opportunities to buy a cash-flowing business. He has also launched an in-depth course to teach content site operators how to arbitrage paid media — the strategy that led to his successful exit.

Advice from a founder who successfully sold his content business

After sharing his story with They Got Acquired, Goldberg outlined his lessons learned for founders looking to sell:

1. Try not to sell your business in Q4 if you can help it. Time kills deals, and banks essentially close for the holiday season.

2. Ask your buyer to show you how serious they are with a meaningful refundable deposit if you’re unsure they can afford the transaction.

Buyers generally have a strong incentive to let diligence drag on for as long as possible. At some point, Goldberg asked him to deposit $30,000 into an escrow account that he would only return when the deal closed. Once they wired these funds, he knew they were “all in” on the deal and just needed the bank to underwrite.

3. Diversify your earnings as much as possible before you sell. Every bit of concentration devalues your business, or worse: makes it unfundable. Examples of areas of focus include:

  • Number of clients. If three churned tomorrow, would it be devastating to your bottomline?
  • Average revenue per client. If your top client left tomorrow, how would it impact earnings?
  • Source of traffic. Do you rely heavily on one marketing channel or multiple?
  • Revenue streams. Do you monetize customers with one product/service or multiple?
  • Quality of earnings. Is your revenue mostly project based, recurring or recurring?
  • Industry or geography. Are most of your customers in one industry or region that could be eliminated with a single disaster like COVID?

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