700: From $9 to $350K: How I Built and Sold an AI-Powered Website

26:12And that drove a huge amount of users to us and also drove some top media to us as well. Because ultimately, if you're like a journalist and you're doing research for an article, you're going to take a look. You're just going to go and Google potential companies that you can like review. And so that's how we got into like Rolling Stone magazine. We also got into Forbes. We got into a bunch of other media like Forbes. And so that was huge also for like our general recognition. and on the other end being able to say, hey, we were all in all of these media and again, increase our conversion rates.

26:48I will add as a note that actually chasing media or like chasing PR mentions like that, it works really well now if you want to help, help you to rank on ChatGPT, but it doesn't actually drive that much sales to your platform from the media company itself. The reason is that these are not vetted leads. These are people who just reading the news or whatever, they see, oh, that's an interesting article. They may or may not click on that, but they're not going to say, oh, hey, I'm going to go buy that right now. That's really where, you know, with SEO, with people searching for buy AI headshot generator or related keywords, they are ready to purchase.

27:30They are completely at the bottom of the funnel. With media, we really We had almost not zero, but very close to zero sales. So that was the thing that we tried and it didn't work that well. Okay. Yeah, it makes sense. It's more like that social proof. Hey, we got this mention in Rolling Stone. We were written up in Forbes and it's a validation more than a traffic driver, a sales driver. You tell your mom. Yeah, for sure. Anything else on the SEO side that was proactive? Because it's like the SEO world for listicles like this, it seems like it's been taking a beating the last couple of years where it's like we're just going to put the AI summary at the top.

28:09And maybe if you're cited in the AI summary because it's like a buyer intent type of keyword, then that's good. But it's everything else is pushed farther and farther down the page. It is pushed farther down the page. I would say if you're in the affiliate game right now, that is really, really tough. The one place that we haven't really seen so much of an impact is in like YouTube videos. So, whenever your YouTube video is being surfaced in the AI overview, people will still click in on that and actually watch that video. Of course, generated text does not have that same thing. But then on the brand side, whenever you're trying to rank on ChatGPT, that is a complete different game because that is a huge opportunity.

28:47And so a lot of that is about, you know, the amount of mentions that you have. PR mentions there help a lot. And also, if you have a legacy of existing SEO content that is already in the training data of LLM site, chat, GPT, or Cloud, you are much more likely to actually be recommended. But yeah, it's definitely still like very, very new. and it's impossible to track because most of the time GPT or AI overviews won't even link to the actual page. So what we see though is that branded searches are up a lot where, you know, ChatGPT actually gives you the recommendation. You go and Google that company and then you click in.

29:30Oh, okay. They're not going to link directly to you. We're not going to make it necessarily easy to follow their citation path, but they'll mention the brand by name and then, okay. Okay, got it. Yeah, exactly. And it's actually really helpful to do like a little bit of an audit about your brand. Make sure that, you know, you ask ChatGPT, what is the best solution for this kind of thing? And you want to be asking about a problem that your company solves. Then secondly, I really highly recommend for you to do an audit about what do people say about X? X being your company or your business, because you're going to see exactly where that is coming from.

30:06It's going to tell you what people think about you based on a couple of citations. And those citations are publicly available. So you can kind of see where ChatGPT is getting all of that information from. Sometimes that's actually your own blog, your own pages. And if anything is kind of not okay, you can go in and make those adjustments yourself. What do you do if people are bad-mouthing you online? You're like, well, I got a reputation management problem. It depends where they're bad-mouthing you, right? And if it's something that you can actually do something about. So let's say that that's like a blogger.

30:40I highly recommend that you reach out to them. You know, if you, for example, like you change your product and maybe they did a review of you in the past. You added a feature. That feature can now be mentioned as well. Send them an email. Be like, hey, I know in the past we didn't have this feature, but we do have it now. You'll see that I think a lot of people are kind of scared of emailing blog owners or doing that kind of outreach. But a lot of the time people are very used to this in the blog world and they don't mind that kind of inbound at all. Yeah, it will help some keep their stuff up to date.

31:12Yeah, exactly. All right. That's part of the listening audit, asking the AI, well, what's my reputation like out there on the interwebs? And hopefully you start to improve that over time. Well, I think if you're scared of that, it's not necessarily that it's not happening. it's that maybe you don't want to know which is like a different kind of thing but it doesn't mean it's not happening yeah usually it's not going to be that bad i think you'll be like pleasantly surprised by how you can also find really great things that people are saying about your business and so it can be a very positive experience yeah more with tanya in just a moment including getting traffic and sales from social media her is it ai quiz and prepping the business for a sale coming up right after this.

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34:32We're showing almost the before and after of like what it came up with. Before afters are like the bread and butter of the AI headshot industry. It is the number one driver of anything, of any sale, because a lot of our like path also was like word of mouth. So word of mouth, like seeing a friend of you posting their AI headshot on something like LinkedIn or Instagram is huge. It's huge if you actually know what that person looks like in real, because they're always going to post their best photo and they're going to say, oh, my God, I can't believe this is an AI headshot. and you're going to look at that and you're going to say, oh my God, I can't believe that's an AI headshot because the realism is extreme at this point.

35:16But I created a quiz about like, I think a year or so in, and this whole quiz was about, it was called AI or not. And so you just started the quiz and then you would see a photo and you had to guess AI or not AI. And nobody passed this entire quiz without at least getting one wrong. And most people couldn't get more than like a five out of 10. Because in a world where you have to guess if something's AI or not AI, you start becoming skeptical about everything. People listening are probably nodding like, I bet I could do better than that. I could pick out an AI picture. And it was lovely. I mean, that was such a fun thing because basically, actually, you would put that quiz, you would submit your photos, right?

36:02Like the way it works is you have like 10 photos of yourself, you upload them, and then you have to wait like an hour or so So before you get your photos in your inbox, your results. And so whenever you uploaded those photos, we would encourage you to go and take that quiz. And like you, everybody will be like, oh, I'm sure I can like tell the difference. Guess what? We can't. Right. Because when it comes down to it, in 2025, a lot of people are taking photos of themselves and a lot of people are also editing photos of themselves. Sure. And so the difference between a photo that is edited and a photo that is AI generated becomes smaller and smaller as both of them basically are going towards more artificial and less artificial.

36:43People very much like to say, no, I can always tell when it's AI. I encourage you to go and take that quiz because I think it's very unlikely that you'll get a 10 out of 10. Less than 0.1 % actually got a 10. Wow. Okay. It is hard. We'll link up the quiz for sure. I like this call to make it visual in a visual service or visual business like this. It makes perfect sense. And so the challenges for whatever business you're in is like, how can you find the equivalent of those before and after type of pictures? Were you doing anything to proactively like encourage or incentivize people to share those new headshots on LinkedIn after they got them back and say, wow, look at what the multiverse generated for me?

37:23Yeah, we would. If you shared your results, we would give you an additional 50 headshots free of charge. Oh, okay. Yeah, but that was a very manual process. You basically had to email us or we're just like see it in monitoring and then we DM you about what your username was. And then you would send you what your link was and then we would give you those extra headshots. I think a really like tough lesson that we learned was don't try to automate things if they are too hard to automate. We spent so much time trying to automate it that it would have been so much faster if we hadn't tried it and if we just like proceeded with manually doing everything.

38:01So it's like find the balance between like creating systems and just doing things that don't scale sometimes. Fair. Yeah. Find yourself a virtual assistant too and just handle that process. Yeah. I'm personally prone to trying to over systematize everything. And it's not always to my benefit. Talk to me about the transition from trying to actively grow and run this thing to now saying, well, maybe now's the right time to find a buyer, to hand it over to somebody else, to take it to the next level or to start working on other projects. What's going through your head at this point? And, you know, I've taken this as far as I can go and I would love to cash out.

38:40There are a couple of things at play. The first was that as co-founders, we were all looking to go our own path and pursue different projects. For me, that was an AI SEO project that I really wanted to pursue. And secondly, within a very fast changing field such as AI photography, you never know what's going to shift in the industry and make it very difficult for you to continue selling your product. And so when we started looking for buyers that actually coincided with the time that Chachi PT's image generator had just come out, the latest version. And so a lot of people are talking about, oh, you can just upload a photo of yourself and then you get like an AI headshot out of that.

39:22The results were not there. When we tested, you couldn't really get the same kind of output from it. But it was close enough that we got kind of, I wouldn't say nervous, but we were open to the opportunity of having an actual sale. right so i think within these kind of like very you know cutting edge companies if you will when you are making something that you can easily be replaced by chat gpt and you have a potential for an exit that was super super attractive to us so for us that path was super super helpful to have flippa where we listed our business and then we were able to find a seller very quickly so that I was really, really lucky, I think.

40:07I was personally quite not anxious, but I definitely kept in mind that, you know, our business could be completely destroyed going to zero from one day to another if GPT or somebody else would actually bring out a free AI headshot generator. Yeah. I see this with a couple of like caveats because for example, TikTok, I believe has an AI headshot generator embedded in and it didn't touch any of our business. And so there are a couple of these things where even if ChatGBT had built out an entire AI headshot generator, it probably wouldn't have decimated us one day to another, but it would have definitely stalled our growth, firstly.

40:50And secondly, we were a one-time purchase product. So it's not that we had existing MRR to build off that could stay consistent over time. Yeah. How did you position it then to potential buyers? Because it's like, there's no recurring revenue here. It's like, we have a track record of consistent revenue, sure. And we have these SEO assets that continue to drive sales and we've built up this reputation in the industry, but we're starting from scratch every month. And it's like, well, how do you build up? The revenue is still going to be there after you take over. Well, we definitely don't say that.

41:25But it's a really good question. And so you kind of want to think about the margin business from top to bottom. Like, let's say at the top, you have like offline businesses who have like brick and mortar and like offline employees and all of that. And for them, a digital product like ours is something that is like insanely great. Right. And so you take it like a little step further. And in the end, we ended up selling to an e-commerce player who was used to having offline inventory to having a lot less margin and dealing with a lot more logistics. And so that was a really great way for us to be positioned as well, because this e-commerce player was basically saying, we are really great at doing paid advertising.

42:12And we were horrible at doing paid advertising. We never really did it. They were great at doing paid advertising. They wanted to move away from selling physical products, moving away from things like logistics. And here we were, a completely digital product that we had never tried to do anything with ads. and had no experience with it. So there was a really high potential for them to be able to push those ads and also not have to deal with logistics. So that was a huge part of that upside. Yeah, they've got some margin to play with, probably much more so than a physical product business here.

42:46Where, yeah, shoot, we can, if we know the paid ads game, we know the paid traffic game, we can probably apply this to another business. Yeah, I think if we had been talking to another kind of like SaaS business that had been a recurring revenue business, it would have been completely different because they probably would not have been as interested in buying a company that was like a one-time purchase product. But again, kind of looking at that pyramid of what kind of margins exist, what kind of business models exist, your business model could be super interesting to another company and you could have absolutely no idea about it.

43:23So the big learning for us with Flippa really was that you never know who your buyer might end up being. And I definitely could not have predicted that he would have been an e-commerce player. So you never know. Yeah, I would have expected a photography service or another AI headshot type of company where we can roll this under our own umbrella. Yeah, that wasn't really on my radar either. But interesting, when you put it up on a marketplace, you know, it gets a lot of exposure and you never know who's going to find it. Yeah. And we ended up talking to a couple of other potential buyers as well.

43:57I had no idea what to expect the first time that I was talking to a buyer. I did prep with a Flip M &A support person and they were amazing. That was super, super helpful. But outside of that, that first kind of conversation was really about like, oh, I need to understand the narrative of our business so much better, as well as things like the financials, understanding the P &L. And I highly recommend people to just start super early with all of your admin and really understand the financials behind your business and all the potential for growth that there is. And then having those conversations with potential buyers because you will just get so much further, so much further than I did my first couple of calls.

44:39Fair, fair. One thing that I did want to circle back on was this transition from one-off sales, B2C, to selling thousands of headshots all at once through corporate contacts, enterprise clients. Were you proactively pitching the PR department? Like, hey, when was the last time you updated everybody's headshots for the website or something? How did those bigger ticket sales come about? I wish that I had done that and that it had worked. It definitely, so we actually try to do like email outreach and I would do the thing where I go to Apollo and I get a bunch of emails from like our target demographic, which was actually head of marketing and I would email them and we got very little responses on items like that.

45:24And so what helped a lot more was, again, SEO, looking at terms related to team headshots, positioning ourselves as great for remote teams, right? Because our product was perfect for remote teams. If you're a remote team, how are you going to get headshots of your entire team where actually the background is similar and they're wearing the same kind of outfit or at least the photos are in the same style? The fact is, it's completely impossible. You just cannot. You can't send a photographer to different cities around the world. You ideally don't take time during an offsite because it's going to take you like half a day of like very valuable time where you're flying out like 20 to 50 people to one city for like four days and then you're going to take half day out of that to take photos it's just not going to happen yeah what's worse is when you onboard a new person they're not going to get the same photo it's going to get really awkward on your meet the team on your landing page it's going to be a completely different kind of background again there's no clear solution to this and so with AI headshots for remote teams, that is a perfect solution.

46:30You can get new team members onboarded. You just send them an invite link to Multiverse AI and that's how they can actually get their own headshot without it needing to be different or a different background. So in terms of that, like our positioning on SEO is super important. Having things like samples and kind of mini case studies, super helpful. I also think that tapping into your personal network and asking people who are business owners, maybe giving, you know, a company like 10 free headshots, asking them to post about it on LinkedIn are very, very powerful strategies because that kind of word of mouth recommendation is huge for conversion rates.

47:15It's just really something that time and time converts so well. Yeah, these people at these companies know people at other similar companies and, you know, the circles run pretty tightly together, I think. Yeah, they really do. We've got the founder, Tanya, YouTube channel. You've got ranking on AI.com, the new AI-powered SEO agency. What's next for you? What's got you excited these days? It's really just kind of AI SEO and GEO. GEO. This is the new acronym. This is the new acronym. I don't know how I feel about it. What is it, generative? What does it even say? Generative engine optimization.

47:50And GEO is really about how can you get Chad GPT to recommend your business and not your competitors, right? And so this is, in my opinion, the most exciting field that there is right now within marketing. Because you're really looking at, first of all, how does AI work? And you're merging that with how does SEO work? And so those are literally my two favorite things. and for them to coexist in one kind of channel, I think is super exciting. Where do you think they diverge? Because it seems like if you rank well in Google, that's where ChatGPT is pulling a lot of this stuff from, it feels like.

48:28So is there a different path for GEO or is it just a new name to an old thing? There's a lot of overlap. So a lot of the overlap actually exists because ChatGPT now in a lot of its searches is using the Google search API. They're using a third-party API called SERP API that is pulling Google searches and then surfacing them as citations in ChatGPT. But ChatGPT doesn't always do searches. A lot of the time what it does, it sticks to its old training data. And that can be like six months ago or maybe even like a year ago, depending on where the cutoff is. And if you are in that database, if you are mentioned a lot, you will probably surface.

49:08But ChatGPT is really about mentions. It's not about ranking factors. And what's more, ChatGPT is probabilistic, which is an annoyingly complicated term to just say that you might get mentioned one time and not mentioned the other time. If you ask, what are the three best podcasts for side hustles? I mean, probably every time you will say side hustle, but it's going to give you three completely different answers if you ask three times because AI never gives you the exact same answer. And so same thing with GPT. Sometimes it's going to surface you and sometimes it's not. A lot of that is then you trying as a business to become the default, part of the default mentions.

49:48You want to aim to be mentioned eight times out of 10, not 10 times out of 10. And a lot of that, again, you're talking about a volume of mentions, right? So let's say that you are super popular with Reddit users and Reddit is the most cited domain in ChatGPT. By far, double that of the second most cited. Okay. That's from like Ahrefs top 100 domain research. And so if Reddit mentions you 100 ,000 times, but you don't even have a single blog post, you're actually still going to be mentioned by ChatGPT. Whereas that's very different with Google, right? You could be mentioned 100 ,000 times in Reddit, zero times on any other page, and you might not surface as the top keyword for your actual Google search.

50:34Okay, so that's something that you can proactively do is try and build up your body of press mentions, your media mentions, and proactively build up your Reddit reputation and citations there to feed into this new GEO world. Yes, absolutely. You basically want to make training data for your own business, right? So think about what is your user audience actually searching or what are they prompting ChatGPT for? If you can guess the exact prompt that your audience is searching for and then answer that in your own blog post that is formulated as an FAQ, you're like 10 steps ahead already of everybody else.

51:12And so that FAQ type content is something that is hugely beneficial because ChatGPT basically is looking for questions that are being asked on the web. And if they are similar to the prompt, it's going to surface that answer in a way that is very similar. It's probably going to paraphrase it. That sounds like a good hack. Would you not take it too technical? Would you put that as a separate page, a separate post? Would you have a list of FAQs all on one page, different variations? your crawlability still matters a lot right so like ideally it's in like a heading type format a huge thing that i recommend a lot of my clients and i have clients who are doing anywhere between two million dollars revenue to two billion dollars revenue a year so really big companies i always recommend them to have a great features page and ideally that's you know a lot of the time it's very hard for like technical reasons to create your features page in a way that it's like SEO friendly.

52:09So do a blog post where you're talking about all the potential use cases of your actual product in an FAQ format and you're going to do really so much better on ChatGPT. A big part of that is also that a lot of the time when people do their own brand audit and they're asking about like a feature of your product or does your product do this or does it do that and ChatGPT says no it doesn't do that is because you're not explicitly sharing that on your own website, or you're not explicitly sharing that in your features page. JGBT isn't really good at reasoning. If you're not saying it verbatim, it'll be very hard for it to pick it up.

52:47Okay. No, this is great. And I imagine there is a lot more. So make sure to follow Tanya on YouTube at Founder Tanya over there. We'll link up for LinkedIn as well. RankingOnAI.com is the new site, the new project. So we'll link that up to Tanya. This has been awesome. I'm taking a ton of notes. Lots of things for product builders on the affiliate side, on the SEO side, on the GEO side. Let's wrap this thing up with your number one tip for Side Hustle Nation. Don't give up. Success is just failure to failure without losing any kind of enthusiasm, I think is the biggest thing I've learned. Well, and then some successes sprinkled in there along the way, it sounds like.

53:26So very good. Don't give up. We've got a couple of takeaways from me before we wrap. but what is looking for those low-cost marketing channels that can scale really like the seo-driven focus here headshots for remote teams best ai headshot generate right like these long tail kind of high buyer intent type of keywords and then the other thing like if you don't have a recurring revenue business then you're gonna need recurring sources of traffic right and so here's a one-off purchase business but we had consistent sources of traffic which made it attractive to potential buyers down the road. And then it's telling that story, telling those, the features and benefits, you know, the one-off customer and then the thousand person company customer was like, oh, you want consistency behind the backgrounds.

54:08Yeah, we can do that. And then for the buyer, the ultimate buyer of the business was like, it's a lot better margins than your physical product business. And by the way, paid ads untapped, right? You know, you're going to be able to take this thing, take the keys and run with it. So telling that story to both kinds of buyers in the business. And we did an episode earlier this summer on some AI-powered product ideas that you might be able to build. That was number 689 in your feed with Pete McPherson. Beyond that, I do send my best side hustle ideas and updates to 125 ,000 people every week. If you would like to get that too, all you got to do is go to sidehustlenation.com slash join and you'll be on the list.

54:46Big thanks to Tanya for sharing her insight. Big thanks to our sponsors for helping make this content free for everyone. sidehustlenation.com slash deals is where to go to find all the latest offers from our sponsors in one place. Thank you for supporting the advertisers that support the show. That's it for me. Thank you so much for tuning in. If you're finding value in the show, the greatest compliment is to share it with a friend. So fire off that text message. Let them know. Check this out. Until next time, let's go out there and make something happen. And I'll catch you in the next edition of the Side Hustle Show.

55:14Hustle on.