Examine.com has grown up: $700,000 in the past year
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solorwell.com
I absolutely love Examine.com and have shared it with many friends, but I seriously questioned that move from both a business and helpfulness perspective.
1. From the user's perspective, it's helpful to click right out and get the product if you want it.
2. From the business perspective, that's a shit load of Amazon cookies to be dropping, and you're not compromising your message since you treat all supplements equally and back it with research.
Thanks for creating an amazing resource!
While we linked to only the generic search from Amazon.com, it's easier to doubt the research when we still profit from the sales.
Examine.com is run as a lifestyle business. If we wanted to maximize revenue, we could easily 2-3x our revenue in the span of 6 months. Just not our approach.
Any questions, just ask.
Wow it's been like ... 4 years since we had lunch?
And speaking of The Oak ... http://www.schwarzenegger.com/fitness/advisory-board scroll down :)
In terms of generating revenue or people who spread the word ... reddit was honestly not a big deal.
Major traffic sources? We have about 25+ sites that send us 100+ visitors/day. For example, "garcinia cambogia" is one of Dr. Oz's favorite (bs) fat burners. Quite a few sites that rank high in the Googles for that phrase link to us as an unbiased source.
Lastly, every time there is a study getting a lot of buzz, people ask us to look into it. And once we do, it gets shared a ton. Our latest one - http://examine.com/blog/high-protein-diets-linked-to-cancer-... - got us roughly 100,000 visitors over the course of 3-4 days.
Lastly, our brand is pretty strong. Our top two referral keywords are "Examine.com" and "Examine"
It all adds up.
Where's my t-shirt you promised me 5+ months ago? =]
-Tk2oG
> Soylent
Beyond the link that MDS100 posted, I personally think it's a bit shortsighted. Paring food down into some kind of overly simplistic "consume this" ignores all the social and psychological aspects of eating (not to mention the satiety considerations of chewing something versus drinking it).
As a replacement for food, I think it's foolish. As something to help you get to X macros in a pinch ... well, I'd rather take a protein shake and then mix whatever I was missing into it (need fats? Nuts. Need carbs? Tons of additions)
Speaking of which I've been meaning to update it since I discovered that rice bran is a better option than marmite.
1. You're background is in SEO, how much do you attribute SEO to Examine's success thus far?
2. Why do you think it took 2 years to make decent revenue?
With that said, SEO has not done much for us. On top of that, I've had enough experience with Google that relying on it is my last priority. At this time, Google generates < 50% of our traffic, which is uncommon for major sites.
2. It took time to build up the trust and reputation needed, AND for US to build up the knowledge base required to be able to monetize it.
We could have tried to sell guides right off the bat, but a lot less people would have used it, and its quality would have been a lot less.
Plus, supplements have been historically quite the shitshow (you should see all the gossip and innuendo that flies around on my facebook when it comes to health and fitness and supplementation). That meant it took longer for us to convince people we were legitimate.
I'm a big believer in career capital, and it takes time to build that up.
Maybe there's a supplement or interaction that you think might be interesting but can't find any solid research on?
Maybe there's something that has weak evidence / poor experimental design that you'd just like to get to the bottom of?
Not sure how you'd turn that into real money, but maybe there's stuff that just "gives you an itch"?
We do have plans to start publishing some of our research as meta-reviews, but give us a bit of time on that.
> into real money
Honestly, not concerned about that. That's the benefits of a lifestyle business - we're (quite) cashflow positive, so we don't obsess over a thousand here or there. It's just to get really solid research (especially in nutrition) is quite cost prohibitive. Maybe in the future we can be involved in some grants and study design, but nothing concrete.
Always a pleasure watching your success - congratulations for taking the long, hard road and grinding away.
I know we can't work together much due to your wise philosophy of non-affiliation, but I'll always look forward to working with you in any venture, whether it's this one or the next!
Congrats once again!
You should start accepting Bitcoin on your site! It would let you increase profits ~3%. My company Moolah.io lets you do it for free, hit me up at jonathon@moolah.io
Thanks!
I'm wondering why you didnt setup examine.com as a wiki (I read somewhere that it is a Wordpress site right now).
Each of your landing pages are heavy and (I assume) are constantly being edited. How do you manage that process ?
It'll be nice to know the plugins,etc. you use for the site - its brilliant for a quick encyclopedia-ish wordpress setup !
Quick comment - it might be a good idea to go SSL by default on the site. Your register/login pages are also non-ssl.
We have a wiki-backend, but the reality is that our subject matter is far too specialized.
The edits are not as frequent as you'd imagine - one of our guys does the lead research on our page, emails the editors, and then they all hash it over, partly via email/asana, and partly with online editing. Then when they are all happy with it, it goes to the copyeditor to clean up (another fittitor!)
You can also click on the "History" link to see how a page has evolved.
RE: SSL - yes. We are working on rewriting the entire code base from scratch, so that is one of the things on our massive todo list!
And thanks for the kind words.
We've tried to be as non-condescending as possible. It's not hard being right, it's hard to teach/show someone the truth.
One example of a successful generic domain is bodybuilding.com which I believe was bought for $30k a long time ago and then developed instead of sat on.
Simply put, $50 is incredibly high for an eBook — particularly when the site itself hosts a large quantity of that information for free.
We think more along the lines of the Picasso Principle: http://www.psychotactics.com/blog/the-picasso-principle/
The Stack Guides greatly simplify the process. They are NOT for everyone. But for the layperson who doesn't have the time and/or energy to figure it out themselves, it's well worth the investment.
One thing that really stood out for me was the endorsements. Having perhaps the most prolific researcher of recent history Adel Moussa (Prof Dr Andro) vouch for you guys, and on the other hand one of the best prep coaches Matt Porter on the same page... That's big.