How to Start a Daily Deals Business: $1,000s/mo Sharing the Best Bargains in Your Niche (Greatest Hits)

22:34I am really shocked by that. I would have thought Amazon would be a pretty big chunk of the revenue pie. Yeah, I wish. No, unfortunately, they are nothing. Nothing right now. I wonder if you'd be able to run it through like a sub-affiliate like Skimlinks or one of these other services just to even get a piece. Because like you said, you're still staring at this stuff. Yeah. Yeah, that's really surprising. Yeah. Because I'm thinking like, shoot, you're going through all this trouble. Dude, I'm sourcing these deals daily. What are you talking about value add? Like, of course I'm adding value. I save people a ton of time every day.

23:06Oh my goodness. Yeah. I mean, maybe they look at the website and back to scrappiness. If you check out the website, it's not the most beautiful thing in the world. I'll be honest. I started in a weekend in July, 2021. The updates since then, very minimal. So it's based on a standard WordPress template. It's a little janky. It's one that hasn't been updated in five years, but it gets the job done. So maybe they also looked at it and said, oh, this website is a little, not the prettiest. We don't want to sort of associate. The other piece I'll say on a more serious note with Amazon too is one of their things is pricing.

23:40So for them, pricing is critical. They want to make sure affiliates are always providing the latest. And they actually encourage a lot of people not to include pricing. They don't want the user to expect it's$10 and they go and it's actually 20. So partially by the nature of my business being this deal is going to last 24 hours, eight hours. If I hover up there, it could be gone within a matter of hours. And then I'm sending sort of misleading people in their mind. I actually wrote some scripts for them to try and solve this problem and go back and forward with them to basically be like, Hey, if it's an Amazon deal, remove it within 24 hours.

24:17And I thought that might address it. And then they're like, they let me back in. And then they said the thing about values. Gosh. I don't mess with Amazon. It's a tricky one. Yeah. Sorry about that. That's troubling. We were talking a lot about technical details and AWS is written by engineers for engineers. It's like its own secret box in itself. But these are all solvable problems. Like you said, hey, I didn't have a huge technical background. I was able to solve it. And even for the, in my case, with the shoe business, I found outsourced developers to build this whole system for me. I wouldn't know the first thing about it other than like trying to, well, how would we logically go through this to minimize resources?

24:56So these are solvable problems. If you're curious, like don't get hung up on that. And there's always the manual way to do it, too. Although I think this is much more sustainable long term. Now, I want to ask about the email list because this is something that, hey, if I'm posting these deals directly on Reddit, and if I'm already subscribed to this subreddit, not a lot of incentive for me to join the email list. but at this point, over 30 ,000 subscribers. So obviously people are signing up for it. Talk to me about growing the list. A couple of things in terms of list growth here. So one is sticking in the footer of every single Reddit post.

25:32I have a little bit of an other section that says, hey, you want to get these deals in your inbox? Click on this link and sign up, which actually generates, I don't quite have the numbers off the top of my head, but it's getting a number of people signing up, maybe about 10 people per day, even people who are obviously seeing it in Reddit. I think it's another way to hit them. Maybe they are browsing Reddit at work. It's probably not quite as acceptable as checking that email where they're sort of grabbing a coffee. So maybe there's a little bit more appropriate in terms of another channel. They don't want to miss them.

25:59And that's kind of a nice thing there. So that's one. Reddit's definitely a source and continues to grow even if people have seen it there. The second one is Facebook ads. So I've done a ton of Facebook advertisement over the course of the business. I would say probably of the 30 ,000, I would say probably about 10, 12 ,000 of those came from Facebook ads. It's not the cheapest way to get started. I think my cost per acquisition is about$1.25,$1.30, which I've tried to do the calculation on is actually worth the payoff. And it's a bit of a question mark. I imagine it's a run break even for me, given I get sort of small increments when you're on an affiliate business, but it's been a big source.

26:39And then the third one was actually a giveaway. So there was a company called Golf Advisory Council. Basically, what they do is among other various marketing channels, they actually bring together different companies and sponsor a giveaway. So this was a St. Andrews giveaway, sort of Dream Scotland golf trip. Basically, what you end up doing is if they worked with a local golf company, I was part of it and maybe like five other sponsors and everyone contributes to the prize pool. So that includes the trip. I gave some gift cards from one of my partners. People give golf bags and values end up being quite high.

27:19It's maybe like$10 ,000 for the winner. And then basically everyone kind of pulls together, promotes it. And then as part of it, if you want to enter, you give your name, your email, your phone number, all of that stuff. And at the end of it, they draw out the winners. I think it was one person and their friend. And then everyone who contributed and sort of paid to sponsor gets the email addresses on the other side. So what this ended up doing, I think it netted about 80 ,000 emails. And then what you had to do and trying to do this in the above board way and like sending a couple emails. If you don't get the engagement and you take them off or sort of as soon as any spam reports are unsubscribe, they're gone completely.

27:55But basically whittled that down to about, I think it was maybe around 15 ,000 of people who are actually interested and engaged in keeping those engagement metrics. A big one for me is obviously open rates. I try to keep my open rates around 40 plus percent, which is pretty good, I think, on a daily email to keep that consistency over the tenure. What's the email service provider that you're using? Self-hosted. I mean, if I'm extrapolating out, it's in about 22 emails a month to 30 plus thousands. That ends up being about 700, 750 ,000 per month, which if you're trying to do it on a MailChimp or others, becomes very pricey.

28:32So I actually self-host it on AWS via a program that's called Sendy. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Basically, I think AWS or Amazon has simple email send or something like that. And I think it's a fraction of a cent per cent and allows me to do all of that for less than a couple hundred dollars a month. Yeah. Gosh, I'm not a coder. I'm not technical. But you're like throwing out all these like, well, that's not the off the shelf solution here. It's not as easy as signing up for ActiveCampaign in my case. But no, I've had some other friends have recommended Sendy too, especially as the list grows, where all of a sudden I've I mean, I talked about this in a recent episode.

29:10having to pay like 7 ,000 bucks a year to ActiveCampaign for a list a little over 100 ,000 at this point. And so it's like, this would be the more economical way to do it. But then to be able to do all of the automations and other features, that would be a whole nother ballgame to try and set up on my own. I can imagine. Yes. But targeting 40 % open rates, that helpful. And so we're trying to find a similar giveaway to be a part of to a rising tide lifts all boats. say we can band together, we can all promote this thing and collect some more emails in that way, and then scrubbing those down. These are some freebie seekers, like they're not going to engage like, okay, well, how many net new subscribers do we get from that?

29:50I think that makes sense. On the Facebook ads, is there a particular image or ad copy? Like you probably split test different things. Like what's working there to drive email signs? That seems low, buck 25, buck 30 per subscriber. That seems like pretty strong acquisition. Basically, I think it's four or five images. The first one is like sign up to daily golf steals, the best deals, coupons, and something else that kind of like catchphrase there. And it's got a nice little arrow at the bottom that says like, check out to learn some more. And then you scroll over. And then the first thing it says is like, we partner with all the biggest golf brands and then lists sort of like four or five in there to find the best deals.

30:26And then the next one sort of shows, I don't know, a copy or an image of the best deal. We've got four golf balls. And then one of them's got is gold and it's got like a dollar sign. And then the last one, I think in there, it's got like an arrow says like sign up now to get the best five in your email, sort of in your inbox. It's kind of like a carousel slider type of post. Yeah, exactly. Carousel. I'm sure I could do better if I spent the time on it. It's working. I mean, I started those from almost the following month after that one saying, okay, yeah, I think it was about that timeframe started them.

30:58So it's been running for a while now. I'm sure if I had an expert back to kind of my mentality here is give it a go, kind of figure it out. And then at a certain point, if it's worthwhile, go and hire an expert to do it better, like the AWS on the automation tool, bringing that online. But there's no tracking to say, okay, I know that long-term an email subscriber that opens 40 % of the emails and buys three pieces of new gear a year is going to be worth$5. So I will happily spend a buck 30 all day long to get them on my list. I tried to back into it. If I'm honest, using expected clicks. Okay, what is the value of my click?

31:34My clicks actually are earning per click is pretty low. I think we're about 10 cents per click, which isn't great. And that was one of the things I compared notes with Cameron. That said, it kind of works out. I would say it's probably about breakeven, but the interesting parts of the conversations you can have. Like that's, I talk a bit about the revenue smoothing concept, starting to work with more one-up partnerships. It's a lot more compelling to say, I've got a newsletter of 33 ,000 people. I will be able to guarantee I'll put a deal in front or between that and Reddit about 30 ,000 to 50 ,000 golfers.

32:07I couldn't, even if it's more pricey or I'm not quite breaking even, you start to have those types of conversations that I think starts to get the flywheel going. Yeah. A little more social proof. That makes a lot of sense. All right. So the email goes out every day and it is generated through the help of these HTML generated things you copy and paste into from the Excel sheet? What deals do we find? And hopefully we get a 40 % open rate. Hopefully people go click and they buy the things. Like what's a typical commission rate in this niche? I mean like five to 10%. I don't know what's average.

32:42It really varies based on size, based on the partnership. I would say it ranges from 1%. There's a couple, I don't really spend a ton of time with them just as a result up to my highest are about 20%. If I'm trying to extrapolate out there, it's probably the bigger guys are starting to be into the more of the range between like five to 10%, sort of the big names you've heard of, Global Golf, Callaway Pre-Owned are a couple of my big ones. And then when you get into more of the 15 to 20%, that starts to be sort of smaller brands who need to try and attract that attention. They're more the direct to consumer kind of scrappiness using affiliate channels versus the other guys have just that negotiation power.

33:25That said, I have also, and back to the social proof, back to the tenure, you can start to engage and start to negotiate with them too. I'm having the conversations. I regularly talk to my guy from Callaway Pre-Owned a bit about what we could do together, talking about commission rates as well. So it's back to if you can generate and demonstrate the value and the numbers kind of start to be compelling. I say to people, hey, on a monthly basis, I'll get, I get about 750 ,000 impressions to a million impressions. I'm generating 130 to 150 ,000 clicks. And it's like, all right, me as Callaway pre-owned, it's worth a conversation and start to demonstrate that value after a couple of years.

34:03Yeah. So you're able to sell like sponsorships in the newsletter. What does that conversation look like? Yeah, it's translated into that. And I think about the phases of a business. One of the big ones for 2023 was how can I put more money in my pocket on day one, as opposed to just relying on the affiliate. Like especially in daily deals, your revenue looks like this based on how great a deal did we find yesterday for today. So part of what I was trying to do this year is a couple of things. One is almost like pre-purchasing deals. So the ability to say, I want to do a package of four deals every single month for the rest of the year and giving them effectively a discounted rate.

34:41I'm doing flat fee, which is kind of nice. They get the upside, but I'm getting some fixed money in that side. So one is package deals. And then the second is sponsorship, which you highlight. This would be probably more with like the direct-to-consumer brands or something. Yeah. Although a couple of big ones. So Callaway Pre-Owned is actually a sponsor on the newsletter themselves. So they do it, which is great. That's kind of one piece is package deals. I do that with a couple of golf ball companies. I do it with a couple of apparel companies. The second is the sponsorship. And if I look at it kind of I've got a few different properties at this point.

35:11There is the newsletter, which is generating 15 ,000 impressions, 17 ,000 impressions on a daily basis, which is great. So you can sort of do a bit of a sort of a banner in the middle, one at the bottom, one's there. And then the second is Reddit. So I have a little bit of an other section. I'm trying not to blow it up too much, trying to sort of be thoughtful about not spamming there, but also having the space there that's getting a lot of impressions. I kind of feature a couple people, might cycle them through as well on a monthly basis. And then the website as well as a third one, although that's kind of smaller.

35:45So that's really where the fixed piece is. As I put a couple of grand in my pocket from day one, as opposed to just waiting for the affiliate to get there. On Reddit, do you post once per day? Like, here's the top five things that we found. Are you making like individual posts for each of those deals? Yeah. So it's all consolidated. It's here's the top seven callers. So it's kind of like, here's the seven daily deals. And then at the bottom, I have an other section that's effectively... It's kind of like, sign up for my newsletter. Hey, if you're a veteran or first responder, here's all these companies that give you discounts.

36:19And then kind of a couple other things in there. So Global Golf, really one of my big partners, I plug them in there. So that's kind of how it works. Okay. Does the website matter? Like if the majority of traffic is coming through email and Reddit, do people go to the website? Honestly, not really. But you need it. I mean, coming back to the affiliate pieces, I couldn't go to an affiliate program and be like, hey, I've got a newsletter. I mean, maybe you could there, a newsletter at Reddit. They want to look at something. Yeah. They want to see something that you're actually applying with. And it generates some traffic.

36:53When we talk about SEO, you start to get trickling in. Like if you search golf daily deals, I think I'm in the first spot or a couple variations, but you're getting, I don't know, 20, 30, 40 clicks per day. It's really small kind of in the grand scheme of things. So, yes, you do need it. The other piece, and this was more of a discovery for me this year, and we talked a bit about from the get-go not trying to spam seven links that go to daily golf deals that then go to affiliate. I was trying to do two to three because I didn't want to create that additional friction for people because you see a big drop off as well.

37:27What I found is actually the website and the template that I put together actually has almost a create some redirect for you. So it goes www.dailygolfsteals.com slash go slash Callaway pre-owned deals, something like that. And then it's got a number after it. I can actually copy and paste that redirect, but then use the affiliate link and put it into Reddit. So starting in 2023, once I realized this, I just actually every single thing that I put in Reddit, whether I'm getting a commission, I'm not getting a commission, I'll just use that slash go, which then rather than monetizing three out of seven deals, I was then able to monetize seven out of seven deals, which was also another kind of boost to start the year two.

38:10If that makes sense. Sorry, help me understand that. So that's like an affiliate link redirect plugin. It's not even a plugin. It's basically just part of the native functionality and this template that I found. But yeah, it basically creates a redirect link that Reddit is happy allowing me to post. And it effectively goes Reddit. You click the link. It goes Daily Golf Steals. It redirects. It goes affiliate link. It goes website. So it's kind of created an artificial and a redirect in there that just allowed me to effectively, as I increase my traffic on every single click by 40%. where I was losing them when they were clicking through to Daily Gulf Steals as an interim.

38:50And then the second click. To the user, they're not stopping on your website. They're flowing directly through to whatever they clicked on, like whatever the deal was that they clicked on. Which is a win-win for them. I mean, people... And back to your question about how does the community react? They don't... Some of them probably don't even know that Daily Gulf Steals actually exists because they're just clicking that link if they're not paying attention to the bottom. What's the theme or template for the site? The theme is Clipper. It's one I think I found on one of the WordPress marketplaces way back when seemed to function out if I needed.

39:19Clip is the name of it. Gotcha. Well, thanks for sharing that. So we've got the affiliate partnerships. We've got the sponsorships. Anything else monetization wise? That's it so far. My philosophy on all of this and why I've kept doing it is build an audience. To me, building an audience and whether you monetize via affiliate, whether you move into physical product or something like that. It's just giving you a base. But right now, it's all about affiliates and sponsorship. Sounds good. And then between the email, between the Facebook ads, between Reddit, anything else you're doing to proactively market the business?

39:54It's honestly conversations like this. So we talked about SEO search engines, really not a huge source of traffic. That's largely a result of not having the right backlinks, the right type of engagement. So having great conversations like these, and we got featured in a blog via one of my affiliate partner kind of platforms, they wrote something. So pieces like that, I think just getting some of that link juice should also help. We talk about, when you talk about search engine, I guess there's a lot buried in the long tail. I mean, if you think about it, I've got 4 ,000 deals out there. So there's actually a lot of content and a lot of long tail phrases.

40:30If you specifically search this very one-off and wrote deals at the end of it, If I can actually boost my domain authority, there's probably a decent chance I could actually end up on that first or second page and start to get the trickling in, but just haven't focused on building those backlinks to date. Yeah, even if that is long since out of stock or that deal has expired, you're hopefully getting traffic to it. Maybe they set your affiliate cookie and maybe they find something else that is in stock or that is relevant, or maybe they sign up for the email list. I missed this one, but it sounds like a cool service, so let me sign up for this.

41:05Does that make sense? We'll get you a good backlink for a period of the show. So about an hour on the deal sourcing side, an hour on the operational side. That's a day in the life. Anywhere else the time is going? I mean, that's really impressive to build something to this level in just a couple hours a day. Then that's the nice thing is like, it's two hours of my contractor's time. My time really is spent around the edges. So a couple of things. It's true, that's not even you. Like somebody else is doing that. And they're doing their email formatting. It's not like, oh, even better. I don't even touch it at this point in time.

41:37So I mean, my time is spent on a couple of things. One is partnerships. So that's both engaging with these affiliate partners, having some of those interesting conversations, building some of those new sort of new sales, new relationships, some of that fixed sponsorship. So I call it revenue generating activities. And then it's a bit on like, how can I improve or keep things sort of running behind the scenes? So if we need to create a net new template or just something, I'm building that out myself or working with my developer to do so. So it's all kind of like improvement behind the scenes and then generating revenue.

42:08At this point, I'm probably spending about three to four hours a week on it, I would estimate. And then that spikes based on if something's happening or we need to spend some time. But consistently, I'm able to set back. It's all nice to have, let's call it, as opposed to need to be involved in the day to day. That's right. I imagine there's some seasonality to it. But hey, we got Black Friday coming up. We got holiday shopping season coming up. So it's never a true off season for golf, despite summer being, I imagine, a little bit higher. So that's really cool. If you had to start over, anything you'd do differently?

42:39If somebody else is staring down the barrel of like, man, I should do daily deals in my own niche. Like, what would you do differently to accelerate? I'd say it's gone pretty, honestly, it's gone pretty well. I think I'd just be more efficient in some of this stuff. Like the automation probably would have tried to bring that in sooner. So just recognizing, to me, consistency, everything in this, you can't be a daily deal site if you end up only doing it four days a week. So anything that you can do to be that consistent every single day, making it in a way that actually allows for your lifestyle.

43:12And you can have another job, have a family, have a life outside of work. That would probably be one that I might try to pull a bit earlier. Yeah. Weekly deals or whenever we feel like a deal is just didn't have the same ring to it. Yeah. I've experimented. I think another one maybe I've started playing around with is even niching down a bit further. So one segmentation I did on my list is left-handed versus right-handed golfers. Yeah, I saw that on the opt-in forum. Yeah. Yeah, which has actually gone surprisingly well. It's back to how can you give me exactly what's relevant? And I think lefty golfers, I'll say it, they feel kind of left in the dark.

43:49People don't like them as much. So the fact that now they have their own special email, I mean, open rates on that 60, 70 % and click-through rate is about 10x what I get on my regular newsletter. So it really seemed to be quite effective. And maybe there's a niche here back to niching down. It could be lefty versus righty. There could be a room for lady golf steals, just as another avenue that I think is sometimes overlooked in the golf world. Yeah, that's really interesting. Yeah, the lefty, they've been burned too many times clicking on the left, it's only a right-handed club. Like, I'm not doing this again.

44:20Oh, it's specifically for left-handed clubs. Like, okay, I'm going for it. That's really interesting. So we got an opportunity to expand vertically. Like I can go deeper into the golf niche and serve the women golfers or serve left-handers, or I could expand horizontally. Like I could take this model using the automation and knowledge that we have of what made this work. We can expand horizontally into different niches, like, and go kind of broad that way. I mean, maybe we're just early days of this. I mean, do you see it becoming a full-time thing? Where do you want to take it? Yeah, I think it'd be interesting.

44:53I'll just add a third leg to your one. It would also be geographies. So one of the things that I keep getting people on Reddit asking me for is Canada deals. Back to people left out in the cold. They feel like, oh, they see all these great deals I'm doing for the US. And then they say shipping's$50 on this club. Yeah, that negates any deal that was once there. Yeah, exactly. So that would be another potential angle. As far as the future, yeah, I mean, I'd love to do it full-time. I think if my attitude here is if I'm being able to have this type of traction of success in my four to five hour model a week, what could I do if that's 10x that amount?

45:25That's definitely on the horizon. If I can consistently sort of hit my goal in terms of revenue, especially throughout the offseason, it would be amazing to do that and really see, do you start going and doing that Lady Golf Steals? Do you go and do another niche? Do you do another geography? As I said, you've got kind of a, I'll call it a waffle iron here. I've got the template, I've got the tools, I've got the newsletter, I've got the processes, got the people. If I had more time, you might start it again. Though the only tough part I'll say is Reddit's an amazing asset here. I'm not sure if there's that same asset that you can get that base for others, but we'll see.

45:57Check in with me again in six months' time. Yeah. Lock in those other domains. We'll have to do a follow-up and see what's going on. So again, dailygolfsteals.com. Check David out over there. Really appreciate you joining me. this is such a cool business and especially the way you've got it set up to, yeah, it's daily, but hey, it's automated and outsourced for the most part. So very cool to hear. Let's wrap this thing up with your number one tip for Side Hustle Nation. Show up every day, be consistent, be putting a product out there that people are excited about. And I say, do it in a way that works for you.

46:27Really try to find that, I'll say consistency to get to a point where you say, there's something here and make it work for your lifestyle. There is opportunity for automation, figure out yourself or figure out some help to get you there exactly i think that showing up every day is super underrated and i remember my brother had this like habit tracker that he showed me at one of our side hustle meetups i think it was spend five minutes a day writing or spend five minutes a day on my website and it was like once i sit down and do it i might find 15 minutes or 30 minutes but it was just like as long as i did five i get to check that box and feel that completion element in the Jerry Seinfeld thing.

47:02Don't break the chain, write a joke every day. It's like, build that habit, build it into really part of your routine, part of your life there. So appreciate that. And even though the side hustle show is not daily, it's something that has become a part of, well, it just happens every week. You know, if people are like, well, how do you do it? Like, I don't know, just every Thursday it just happens. So I like that, that call to consistency. I like this call to automate as much as you can. Like, how do I work smart? Like there's got to be a way just versus manually checking 15 different sites and browsing the clearance section or something like, no, no, no, no.

47:36There's got to be a better option here. So working smarter, not harder. And then what really helped it take off was finding a crowd of people who wanted this stuff, rather trying to build something completely from scratch and being a good steward of that community. Reddit in this case, which can be very fickle, can be, hey, we don't want you promoting your stuff in here. So trying to be helpful first. And that goes with a Facebook group, a LinkedIn group or any type of community that you're a part of, but like leading with value. Hey, I found some great deals. Cool. This is awesome. Again, dailygolfsteals.com.

48:07Notes and links for this one are at sidehustlenation.com slash David. While you're there, I think you should check out the list of 20 other hobby niches that you might be able to apply the same general business model to. Again, sidehustlenation.com slash David, or just follow the show notes link in the episode description. Now, what to listen to next. If you like this model, we mentioned it on the call. It is episode 485 with Cameron Stover. That was hunting gear deals, very similar business, but had some different promotion strategies. Again, 485, another daily deals site example. And if you don't like that model, that's fine too.

48:44We've got hundreds of other side hustles to choose from. In fact, I've been interviewing awesome entrepreneurs like David for the last 10 years. It's crazy. So go binge on the archives, go find one. That's a fit for you. Or, you know, why not build yourself a personalized playlist of the episodes that are most relevant to you? You can do that at hustle.show. All you got to do is answer a few short multiple choice questions and you'll instantly get that custom curated playlist that you can go add to your device. Again, that's hustle.show. Let me get the time machine fired up and we'll be right back to check in with David here in 2026.

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51:50So since we last spoke, it's been a bit on steady sailing with the ship. I hired one of the contractors who was helping me out full-time starting in the summer of 2024. He's nicely taken over all aspects of operations, deal sourcing, deal prep, and the like. And then he's also helped me start to go a bit horizontally when it comes to golf-related deal sites. So moved into Canada, moved into women's, but generally things are chugging along. Are you running those as separate brands or is that like a subcategory of the main site? Yeah. So the Canada is a separate brand, recognizing distinct audiences.

52:27The women's, It's a little bit of an offshoot. We were using the same Beehive account for sending out emails and the like. We are starting to peel it off, but currently you would still go under a sign up for Daily Golf Steals and be able to opt in there. OK, and just check the box if this is going to be more applicable to you. Got it. Exactly. Yeah. I believe the email list was the main driver last we spoke, as opposed to, you know, website traffic, because the deals are constantly turning. You got to get it in front of people immediately. Otherwise, it's going to be expired. And I think you were around 30 ,000 subscribers.

53:02Has it grown since then? Yeah, marginally. I mean, it's probably closer to 35 in that type of a realm. We also try to be quite thoughtful about keeping the list clean. So it is a bit of one in, one out in terms of continuing to use Facebook ads as our growth engine. People get stale. People don't want necessarily five emails a week. So we did also spin up a weekly email, a bit more of a weekly digest there. And then the other one is Reddit. So that was a huge audience and driver and really how we got our start kind of traffic from day one. The other piece is we moved beyond just our golf, which is a huge one and a half million person subreddit to actually also start our own subreddit branded as our daily golf steals.

53:45So that's also been quite effective to get that stronger engagement, more upvotes, more visibility, where it actually often rivals our golf just based on that strong engagement upon the same platform. That's really interesting. So I was going to ask, I noticed the just golf subreddits doubled in size since you started. So hopefully, attaching yourself to a rising tide, hopefully that translates into, you know, more sales, but starting your own. I'm curious what you did to seed some level of engagement or membership or sense of community over there. Yeah, I mean, the piece that we did, and, you know, our golf, maybe you'll see how they feel about it, was actually putting in there to say at the bottom, hey, if you want more of these deals, regular updates, get them a little bit earlier.

54:29We actually then linked across. So it was people who were regularly already engaging in our golf. They knew that they would get them about one and a half to two hours earlier than you might on our golf. And that just got to feed it. And then I think it's as you start to see that growth momentum, Reddit would also actually push it, kind of as a suggested subreddit. to other relatives who may be hunting on our golf and i think now we're 18 000 something in that realm if memory serves me correctly and again it's just the number of upvotes will consistently get there is much higher than our golf because it's just a concentrated interested community as opposed to our golf is a lot of people some of whom are interested or not um you just don't quite get kind of catch that fire that we consistently do on our daily golf deals got it But yeah, that's kind of a cool way, siphon off a little bit of that audience who has proven to be interested in what you have and kind of bring them into the fold as just another semi-branded touchpoint.

55:32Exactly. Yep. When we last spoke, you had, I think, a newborn and had dialed in the processes pretty well. I think you said, I'm really working three or four hours a week on this business. Is it still a side hustle for you? It's still a side hustle. Yes. I mean, that was I remember we spoke, I think it was three weeks after I had my first kid. So you had to excuse the red eyes and lack of sleep. But yeah, generally kept in that three hour a week. I will say very much my mind goes to the next opportunity and the like. So kind of with Toby, who's my full time employee in place that has freed up that focus to try and experiment and tinker with a few other aspects or a few other ideas.

56:17a couple of those we played around with so we tried to go horizontal so one of the ideas we started was actually pet deals recognizing everyone loves their pets and wants to spend money and there's just a lot of money flows through it and we tried it didn't have a ton of success we got to a couple thousand followers signups on our newsletter kind of seeding the same facebook ads approach but the engagement wasn't there and i think the other piece is it's tricky with the economics, at least when it's a golf driver,$200, the ticket size is large enough, but pets putting out a collar or a ball or things like that, just the economics were very difficult, especially on Amazon.

56:57So we did that for about, I'd say, three to six months and then pulled the plug even with some of that traction on signups. So that was kind of one place that I started touching. A second one is also actually recognizing throughout the years, we've worked with so many different affiliate networks, platforms, programs, and the like, was actually to build out a directory. So we launched late 2025, something called Avid Affiliate. And the whole premise is putting together a free database of all of the affiliate programs I could get my hands on. So we're up to about 40 ,000 with some of them actually cross-network, putting the information, earnings per click, commissions, and the like.

57:40So as you are thinking about starting a deals business or just trying to find that next program, we're hopefully there to help with that discovery layer through my own frustrations and trying to source future programs. Okay, so this would be a competitor to, like FlexOffers seems to have a big database of these different tools. It's similar, but slightly different because I think they're actually plugging into, you sign up for FlexOffers and they will kind of have sub-affiliates you can work with. For us, it's like, you don't need any signup. You can just go and browse and will tell you, hey, this is on FlexOffer or this is on Impact or this is just kind of like where to go and start.

58:18So trying to help with that discovery process, network agnostic and no signup requirement. So is that going to be display ad driven or what's the monetization for you? Yeah, yet to be figured out. It's been an interesting growth path so far. I'll say we were going with the programmatic SEO type of approach where you spin up all these individual pages. for a while google loved us we started to see the trend go like this getting to 10 000 impressions 20 000 impressions per day couple hundred clicks and then it fell off a giant clip as well and kind of flatlined from there i haven't quite figured out what the monetization model would be i think if i could get the traffic pumped up probably the primary would be referral traffic to these networks so these networks themselves are looking for that next creator or person who doesn't come yeah yeah or they often are willing to to provide a bounty if you are able to to pass along that type of a partner yeah i feel like i've seen something like that on share a sale which is now a win whereas like you know you refer a new affiliate publisher to our network will give you 10 or whatever they earn for the first six or twelve months yeah i don't know what it is but something like that that makes yeah i think that's that's definitely one path and then the other natural path you go is through sponsored listings so let's say that someone reached out and they've just started a golf brand they want to be the one that when someone searches golf they're at the top of it and they've kind of got that prime placement charge them a hundred dollars a month for that but again you need sufficient traffic to to be able to monetize like that so we're we're working on it i think there's something there i just need to to find that right right channel especially with Google be putting us in a bit of a black box right now.

1:00:04Yeah, I'm still bullish on the directory website model because I think, I mean, I think it's a really cool value add for users. It's like, you're going to go through the trouble of aggregating all of this data that is maybe kind of hard to find on my own and putting it in one place where I can filter and I can digest in one spot. And we've done a couple directory episodes and each time I hang up being like, yeah and i have some directory experience myself and it's like yeah i think this makes sense even in the age of ai where you know a content-based business or an informational content-based business is slowly dying or maybe rapidly dying in some cases but this one seems to have a little bit more of a moat around it yeah and i'd say it's interesting i mentioned that google approach i think they saw that we span up 40 000 pages they indexed 28 000 very quickly and then similarly on the traffic it's the converse i've actually seen chat gpt specifically be a source of traffic not anywhere what i was getting on google but one of those consistent clips source of traffic has actually been chat gpt so they've crawled the site they understand yeah um and just another way that it feels like structured directory data and the like is something that these llms actually quite like and are able to digest and use you mentioned amazon as part of the swing and a miss pet site were you able to get the golf deals back in the good graces of amazon associates we did yes so uh one of the ways is actually mavely which is one of these kind of sub-affiliate partners you can sign up with mavely and get access to it it's like 800 programs for the light uh we already were in decent standing with them and they brought in amazon so you rather than you going on to Amazon Associates over to the side, they actually put all of the tracking, all of the link creation, the like within it.

1:01:58And that was a good onus for us to be able to get back in and kind of the good graces. And we use that as leverage to be able to get our Amazon account up and running again. We did learn our lesson on make sure the deals are deleted within 36 hours. So we've got that automation in place. But so far, so good. You are a master of systemizing these complex tasks, like these price comparisons this day versus that day. Does it qualify for a deal? How can we automatically populate the HTML in our email and our Reddit thread? Like to set all that stuff up is it's a lot of brainpower and upfront work.

1:02:38But then once it's running, it's running. And you're kind of I'm impressed with your ability to kind of be hands off and say, well, well, now I can move on to the next project or try another experiment. Yeah, exactly. I've got to spend those four hours as best I can every week. I'd say also AI, new superpower involved in trying to set up those automations and creation too. That's, I find, very high leverage to only build in that skill set. Any tools specifically that you like on that front? I've tried a few, dug in specifically with Cloud Code. I'd say the combination of Cloud Code, Cloud Co-Work, kind of piecemeal around it.

1:03:18I just got the best results, but I do have accounts with Perplexity, Gemini, and Clodd, using them for slightly different use cases. I've always found Perplexity is quite good for quick research, very responsive, goes quite deep. And then for anything coding related, I've had the most success with Clodd personally. Anything else that's got you excited going forward? The other one I didn't touch on, but was a, so I had a second kit back in December. So then correspondingly had about eight weeks of leave initially, which I think unfortunately for everyone involved starts to get the gears turning on the next business.

1:03:57I'll say got the spark from parenthood, fatherhood for the second go around and launched a new deals, a new deals format. It's called dad deals. You can go to it's basically just dad.deals trying to do a long form approach of what we're doing with daily golf steals. So daily golf steals, very quick hit. just here's information go and get it versus dad deals the mantra here is apply it for life so long lasting must have a good warranty great reputation behind it and then we're actually writing going deep including using ai to to do that level of research on why this over the competitors what is the one drawback that you need to know so trying to take more of a the hustle meets deals for dads and the like.

1:04:43It's not exclusive to dad. We're doing outdoors products. We're doing barbecues. We're doing garage, but trying a different, slightly different approach in the world of affiliate on the deals front. So that's one I spun up. And then the second I've been playing around with is building on that directory idea, using AI to scrape government data, structuring it in a way specifically in the real estate market to help comparison shop. So we're looking at primarily Scotland, one of the places we actually want to move with the family in the next couple of years. But scraping, they're called property factors.

1:05:20But think about them as HOA managers, very structured government data, tribunals process where complaints can go. How can we package all that information together? So we've started a website called Compare Factors. Really, the intent being how can you make the best decision when you're looking at making a replacement? so dabbling more in directories using that as very much as my ai use case and and delight yeah this is interesting i'm on the dad deals site or just to the landing page now which is uh the copywriting is it's a lot of fun curated by dads who refuse to pay full price so that one's fun and then the real estate one yeah i was thinking you say comparison shopping and so i'm thinking like well this house versus this house but it's like one layer deeper than that it's like i need a new property manager and you know these companies you know what who knows if they're any good right like so what kind of reviews do they have what kind of credentials do they have like the information is out there but it's in a bunch of different sources or it's hard to find or it's not presented very nicely so you can build kind of the better looking front end and hopefully get some i assume lead gen uh deals on that as far as your monetization it's basically the opposite of daily golf steals in every form and fashion.

1:06:31I think about it, it's a very high ticket. I mean, that's a relationship where they're getting paid a management fee for an extended period of time. It's evergreen content. It's not expiring within 36 hours and you have to go and source the next one. And those are two things that I think I'm just trying to counterbalance here with the portfolio versus the daily deals, which I'll say is certainly a slog. So trying out directories using ai um it's just getting fantastic results in terms of being able to spin these things up quite quickly yeah i think the daily deals stuff is very valuable for consumers but very tedious as the creator to constantly recreate the product every every day if that's the promise a couple times a week for the dad deals but yeah the directory a little bit slower paced slower moving doesn't doesn't need updating every single day yeah well very cool anything else that we missed you want to take out your crystal ball and predict where things are headed in affiliate in seo in directories i don't know where you see this going i think affiliate space is getting tougher um some of the conversations i'm just having even with our long-standing partnerships it's previously very generous i think just uncertainty especially in the golf space seems like people are paring back on the directory front structured data is very interesting to ai models and the like So I'm bullish that while a content site or a blog might be struggling a little bit more these days, I'm optimistic that if you can present unique, insightful data cuts and the like in a new way, AI can actually be your friend as opposed to a competitor on that one.

1:08:07So that's my hope. My plan is to try and copy and paste and build out a lot of these types of real estate directories across different geographies. And fingers crossed when we catch up in two years time and where are they now? I'm hoping to move to Scotland. And finally pulled the trigger on leaving the day job. But well, we'll see when that happens. Yeah, you can be full internet entrepreneur slash early retired and living the dream. Well, David, it's very exciting. I am inspired by what you've built. I really like this idea of taking an existing skill set and saying, well, now that it's working and relatively hands-off, like what else could we apply it to in a similar space and lather, rinse, repeat, some of the backend architecture and then some of the marketing tactics that worked.

1:08:56And, you know, the upfront startup costs is very, very low, low risk at this stage of the game. And then this play towards structured data as a more evergreen type of business. So I think that's really interesting. Thanks for stopping by. Thanks for sharing your insight once again. I also owe a thank you to our sponsors for helping make this content free for everyone. We've been talking deals in this episode. So sidehustlenation.com slash deals is where you'll find all the latest offers from our sponsors in one place. 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 with a friend.

1:09:34Fire off that text message. Let them know they should 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. Hustle on.