Ramon Van Meer returns to My First Million to tell the story of how he bought a dog ramp business for $300K and scaled it to $35M in sales. He and Shaan walk through the playbook for buying underoptimized online businesses — finding deals, doing due diligence, using SBA loans — and look at real listings. Ramon also shares his entrepreneurial origin story, from a Dutch construction company at age 20 to a soap opera spoiler site he sold for nearly $10M, and the mentor who changed his life.
Speakers: Shaan Puri (host), Sam Parr (host, referenced/brief), Ramon Van Meer (guest, CEO & Founder, Alpha Paw)
Welcome Back and Twitter Fame [00:00:00]
Shaan: Well, I remember we were at this burrito place and you were like, “If I could buy this cup for five cents and sell it to you for seven cents — that’s my passion.”
Ramon: Yeah. I feel like I can rule the world.
Shaan: The guest from episode 2 — one of the best episodes ever of this podcast — and then it was taken down for a bit. I don’t know what happened, there was something we had to take down, make a little edit. People started hitting me up: “Hey, what happened to Ramon’s episode?” That’s how much people cared. They wanted to know. People were just kept attracted to that episode even while it was still in the library. Something happened, some people noticed — which was amazing to me.
And now you’re Twitter famous.
Ramon: Yeah, as of today. Well, because of you and Sam. Because as of today, you and Sam retweeted me and I got like almost 8,000 followers overnight. I went from 2,000 to 11,000 within 24 hours.
Shaan: Wow. Okay, well it’s not just because we retweeted — I retweet a lot of stuff. You told a great story. I’m going to find the hook here, because you did a good job. Did Sam write this for you, or did you have him edit it? Because this was so well done. I felt like — you can’t, this can’t be your first thread. How did you start off this good on your first thread? How did that happen?
Ramon: Well, Sam helped with the whole tweet. So Sam actually helped me. He said, “Okay, this one would work. This is the concept.” A little bit like how you format it, then he gave me a little bit of guidance — “I would start with this, I will do this, I will explain that.” Then of course I explained it.
Shaan: So what’s the difference? This looks great. How would you have started it normally? What would your v1 have been?
Ramon: Well, you and I are friends, so you also know me personally. Sam too. Typically I would not start off with, “I bought something for as little as X and now we’re doing Y.” I don’t want to brag, yes. But Sam said, “No — you need to do that.” And you know, it’s true. Why not just explain it? That’s what gets people interested.
And now I think we have 7,000 likes.
Shaan: Here’s what you said: “Two and a half years ago I bought a dog ramp business for $300,000.” Already interesting — what the heck is a dog ramp business? “Since then I’ve sold $35 million dollars of dog ramps.” Boom. That’s the hook.
Ramon: Yeah, you know, this little thing turned into a big thing. And then the promise — why you should read this thread: “I’m going to explain why I bought it, how I scaled it, and why I bought a business versus starting from scratch. But first — dog ramps?” And then the little hand pointing down.
Shaan: That is — you didn’t take my power writing class — but that is exactly what you would have been my star student doing. It has all three elements. I call it the frame: I bought it for $300K and I’ve sold $35 million. So that’s the wow factor — why should I pay attention, why do I stop scrolling? You have a scroll-stopping number. You have a curiosity gap: what the heck is a dog ramp and how did this guy do it? And then you have a promise — I’m going to tell you A, B, and C. But first, dog ramps. You give them a lightweight entry point even if they don’t want to know all the operational stuff. I do need to know what the heck a dog ramp is. So, beautifully done.
And then you tell the story. The story is kind of amazing because people know I have an e-commerce business but they don’t know what it is. What they don’t know is it started because we were hanging out in your backyard and we were talking, and the whole time your phone was just going ching. I didn’t even know what it was. It’s the Shopify notification sound. You didn’t even notice because it’s always just normal to you. Your phone was sitting on the table and I was like, “Do you need to get that? What is that sound?” And you go, “Oh sorry, that’s sales.”
I was like — people love this idea of passive income, make money while you sleep. But this was even better. You were just chilling and having fun and money was just being made for you on the side. Just a little cha-ching every five minutes. And it was literally in that moment I was like, I’m going to do this. I’m going to start an e-commerce business, because I can’t sit here and just let Ramon have all the fun. So you inspired me, for sure.
Ramon: That’s awesome. Yeah, I had to turn off that notification eventually because it drove me crazy. Every time there’s a sale. But it was fun in the beginning — almost like an endorphin release each time.
Shaan: And if you’re on YouTube watching the channel, you can see the ramp behind Ramon — he’s got all the products behind him. So the company’s called Alpha Paw. That’s your thing.
We’re going to talk about a couple different things. I thought it’d be fun to have you on as substitute teacher for Sam. And like any substitute teacher, the class always has more fun when the sub comes in. I want to talk about buying and selling businesses — how you do it — and we’ll go through some examples of what’s out there. Then we’ll jump back and dig into your story. But first I want to give people a crash course on this process of buying businesses.
The Playbook: Buying Businesses Instead of Starting Them [00:08:30]
Shaan: Because I was amazed when you told me you bought this business for $300,000. Did you buy it off Flippa or Quiet Light or where?
Ramon: I bought it on a similar broker — like Quiet Light — they’re not around anymore. But it was a similar broker, not Flippa, more of a traditional broker.
Shaan: And when you bought it, I was sort of like — what the heck? Who does that? I didn’t even know anybody who does that, buying off these random websites. I thought $300K was a lot. And I was like, dog ramps — what the heck? And you had told me then: the business is doing good, the person really wasn’t doing any marketing, they didn’t run any Facebook ads. So you just saw a clear growth lever. Break it down — why do you do this? How do you do this buying businesses thing?
Ramon: I think it’s also about personal preference and skill set. Some people are really good at going from zero to one — real builders. Others are really good at going from one to ten — scalers. I’m not really good at building. I’m better at scaling. So I like to buy versus build because it gives you a lot more speed, it gives you history and data.
It’s similar to real estate. I try to find crappy houses that need to be fixed up, but in a good up-and-coming neighborhood. Like, okay, good market, there’s product fit. If this house was amazing you could rent it for two, three, four times what the current owner is getting. Same with websites — I look for websites that have good product-market fit, have history, that aren’t necessarily doing well. I’m not looking for websites that are overly optimized. I tend not to buy from other internet marketers because they’ve already done all the things I probably would do, so there’s not much room for growth.
Shaan: So what was the dog ramp business like when you bought it? Describe what you saw and what made you decide, I’m going to buy this one.
Ramon: It solved a real problem. I wasn’t even aware it was a problem — I have a pit bull, not a small dog. But there’s a real problem for a niche audience that you could really target on Facebook. Those were the good old days when you could niche-target on Facebook. There was not a lot of competition at the time — not a lot of people promoting ramps on Facebook, Instagram, or even Amazon.
The website was very crappy. I knew that if we switched to Shopify and improved the copy, the pictures, the conversion rate would likely increase. And the two founders were not doing any Facebook ads — no paid acquisition at all. Even though they had a decent-sized customer database, they were not emailing existing customers, let alone doing cart abandonment flows.
So this was: good market — pets. A house that, if you renovate the kitchen, the floorboards, the countertops — like redoing the website and the branding and the copywriting — you get a better property. And they weren’t even trying to rent it out. They didn’t post it on Craigslist, they don’t have flyers in the neighborhood, which is: they weren’t doing paid advertising to get customers.
Real Deal Examples: Crossword Site and Goat Milk Soap [00:17:00]
Shaan: You saw it, you bought it, you grew it. What’s another example? Let’s walk through some real listings and you tell me what you like or dislike about them.
Ramon: So there’s one — a crossword puzzle website. Think of words-with-friends type games or Scrabble. There’s a website where you can put in your letters and it gives you a bunch of word recommendations.
Shaan: A cheat website.
Ramon: Exactly. And I kind of love it because there’s nothing to do. There’s probably a database that’s already pre-built. You build it basically once and then it’s just driving SEO traffic to your website. This one is for sale now for nine million dollars. They started it in 2017, does $3.5 million in revenue. Because there’s no real team needed, it’s almost all profit — about $3 million of profit. It’s just printing money. I like these types of niches where not a lot of people think about them but there’s definitely a huge search volume.
Shaan: Two pieces on that. First — with something like this, how would you try to grow it?
Ramon: So I personally won’t buy it right now because the price tag — I typically only buy things in a couple hundred thousand dollar range, not millions. But without knowing too much about the current business model, I would definitely try to increase RPMs — how can we squeeze more advertising dollars out of the same traffic? They get tens of millions of visitors a month. I looked at a couple similar websites and I think there’s a huge opportunity by placing ads differently just to increase RPM. Similar to how if you have an e-commerce site you want to increase conversion rates, if you have a content site you want to increase RPMs.
Second, I would do research. If there’s a huge segment of people that love Scrabble, what other games do they like? Maybe build a sister website that does Sudoku or whatever. Those are the two things I’d focus on.
Shaan: Most people say I don’t have nine million dollars. When you first started looking at these websites, you also didn’t have enough money to buy one. Tell the story of how you first started going to these websites even when you couldn’t afford them.
Ramon: I’ve actually bought and sold websites starting with $500 and sold it for $1,500. I started on Flippa twelve years ago. I bought a piñata website — a company that sells piñatas where you can send in a picture of someone, and a company in Texas makes a piñata of them and ships it directly to the customer. I bought that for five thousand dollars that I scraped together, improved the website traffic, made my money back in two and a half months, and then sold it a month later for $22,000. Not huge numbers, but those really helped me grow and get a lot of experience.
Then when I started Soap Hub, I saw a similar website for sale on Flippa for $100,000 — it was in the daytime TV niche. I didn’t have the money. I had like a couple thousand dollars. But I thought — hey, let’s see if there’s something here. Let me do a small test, build a fan page, see how the engagement goes, see if there’s really something there, and then grow from there.
Shaan: I guess we should explain that. You created a soap opera content site — a website basically saying, “Hey, you’re watching Days of Our Lives or The Young and the Restless — here’s the recap, here’s the spoilers of what’s coming next.” A spoiler site for daytime soap operas. And who the heck thinks of that? You ended up selling it for nine or ten million dollars cash. From a guy who has never watched a soap opera episode in his life. People love that story because it was so random but also interesting and relatable.
Ramon: I didn’t overthink it. I didn’t write a business plan. I just went on Upwork: “Hey, looking for a writer who can write soap opera spoilers.” Put up a very simple blog just to test — would people go from Facebook onto a blog and read the story? That’s how it basically started. Started with 10 cents a day from Google AdSense, then a dollar a day, then ten, and that’s how it grew.
Shaan: You were getting business ideas by going on these websites. You saw a website for sale also in the daytime TV niche for $100,000. You were like — cool, I don’t have $100,000, but if this is worth $100,000 maybe I could make something like this. When I met you, I asked you, “What’s your passion?” Silicon Valley style. And you were like — there was a cup on the table — “That’s my passion. I like to buy things and sell things for a little bit more. I’m basically an internet marketer and I don’t care if it’s cups or dog ramps or soap opera spoilers. I love the process of business and selling things.” I was like, that’s amazing — the self-awareness and honesty.
And when you were testing ideas before you created the soap opera site, you made like 30 fan pages on Facebook. Because at the time you could promote a fan page for cents — get a bunch of likes, test what topics people were most engaged with. I think the top three were something like right-wing politics, soap operas, and wrestling?
Ramon: Yeah, wrestling was really popular. Soaps, politics, wrestling, and cars were also pretty high up.
Shaan: And you were like — I hate politics, I don’t want to do politics. What’s the next best one? Soap operas. Okay great. Hire this woman in the midwest to write blogs every day about soap operas, drive traffic — selling paper cups, basically.
Ramon: Exactly. I just didn’t really overthink it.
Shaan: Okay let’s look at a couple more deals. Give me another one.
Ramon: So this one I just saw an hour ago. It’s a goat milk soap website. What the heck is that?
Yes — so apparently goat milk soap is better for the environment and they say it’s cruelty-free because a lot of traditional soaps do testing on animals. So they claim — and forgive me, people who know about goat milk soap, this is the first time I heard about it. That’s what intrigued me. It could be a product that people who use it are already passionate about. Like people who are into keto are super passionate. There are tons of these examples where it’s a pretty small niche but people are so passionate that they spread the word for you.
So this website — you can find it on Flippa, just search goat milk soap — it says four years old, $20,000 a month in profit, 29% profit margin, and it’s selling at a 1.8x multiple.
Shaan: So that’s — let’s say $20K times 12, that’s $240,000 times 1.8 — so it’s selling for around $425,000?
Ramon: Correct, $425K is the asking price.
Shaan: Amazing. Walk me through how you think about something like this.
Ramon: First I do a little research on the product. Does goat milk actually work? Is it more of a gimmick, or does it actually solve a problem? Are people really interested? And again, if it’s a gimmick, that’s fine too — it doesn’t mean you won’t buy it, it’s just important to know. Back to the piñata example — not all business ideas have to be a hundred million dollar idea. A million dollar a year business is amazing.
I’ll look at how many people in the US search for it. You can use Google Trends or search volume trackers to see how many people are searching for these keywords. I’ll look on Instagram — is there a rabbit fan base? Are there Facebook groups? Then I’ll also look on Amazon — is this sold on Amazon? What’s the trend? What are the sales? You can use a tool called Helium 10 to see how much revenue a listing is doing. It’s an amazing tool for research. I do the same for pet products — I look at what’s trending on Amazon, what’s blowing out the water in sales, and then research whether we should also start selling that.
Then I look at the business stuff. Is the trend up, down, or flat? Most businesses I’ve bought were either flat or down because that’s how you get a good deal. Even if it’s flat, even if it’s not trending up, I’d still potentially buy it.
Are the traffic channels diversified? Is 90% coming from just Facebook, just email, just SEO? That could be risky — especially if it’s all paid traffic from Facebook, because Apple can make an update and suddenly the paid traffic landscape changes. So I’m looking for diversified channels.
Then of course revenue, profit margins — can I pump more money into Facebook and put a dollar in and get three dollars back? Or is this more of a long-term play where I have to create SEO content?
And what you’re buying — are there trademarks, patents? In this case they have a 43,000-person email list, 33,000 SMS subscribers, social media following. In my opinion those are all valuable assets. When I bought Alpha Paw, they had a huge Instagram following, a huge Facebook following, an email list, trademarks and patents — all included in the sale.
Financing Acquisitions: SBA Loans and Seller Notes [00:30:00]
Shaan: So let’s take a business like this — $400,000 listing. How does it work if you don’t have $400 grand lying around?
Ramon: You can use SBA loans to buy internet businesses. An SBA loan is basically a small business loan. A few years ago they started funding internet businesses too. You can borrow up to 90% — so technically you can buy something listed at $400,000 and only put down $40,000. The interest rate is pretty low, anywhere between 5 and 7%, so it’s higher than a mortgage but much lower than a traditional business loan.
The second thing you can do: you can always negotiate. So instead of the asking price of $400,000 all cash, you can offer: “I’ll pay you $250,000 cash up front at closing, and the remaining $150K I’ll pay spread out over the next 12 months, interest-free.” Every time I buy a business it’s never 100% cash at closing. I always have 60 to 80% cash at closing and the remaining is either a seller’s note or an earn-out. That keeps the seller engaged and helpful, plus it lowers the amount you have to borrow.
Shaan: Let’s just do a little loan calculator. SBA loan is, what, a 10-year loan?
Ramon: Yes, 10-year loan.
Shaan: So let’s say you did the full amount, no seller financing, just for simplicity. You put down $40K. You’re going to take the other $360K as an SBA loan at 6% for 10 years. Your monthly payment on that loan is going to be about $4,000. This business makes $20,000 a month in profit. You take the $20,000, pay back your loan for $4,000, you’re left with $16,000 of profit every month right now. You could buy this today and be making money. And you only put down $40,000, so it only takes two and a half months for you to get all your equity back. Then you’re profitable every single month and you can reinvest some of that into growth.
Ramon: That’s more than most people are making at their quote-unquote safe job.
Shaan: And the beauty of SBA loans is they look at your personal credit history, but they really make their decision based on the business. They won’t fund you if there’s too high of a risk. They really analyze whether the business can pay the interest month over month.
Ramon: I actually spoke with Joe Valley from Quiet Light today and he told me a story — there was a woman who bought a business for $1.25 million with an SBA loan two years ago and just closed and sold the same business for $5.5 million. She only put 10% down, so she didn’t even put $200K down, and her return was around $4 million. If done right, SBA loans are a really great leverage tool to get into internet businesses.
Shaan: How do you make sure you’re not buying a lemon?
Ramon: I get asked that a lot. When you go to Flippa.com, be really careful — it’s a marketplace where anybody can just upload their listing and basically claim whatever they want. The due diligence is on you. If you go to a broker like Quiet Light, they do all the vetting for you — they look at the business, verify everything is legit, so the risk is much smaller.
But regardless, if you’re new to this and it’s your first business, you can hire a due diligence company. Centurica — centurica.com — is one of the biggest, most well-known ones. You pay anywhere from a couple hundred dollars up from there depending on the listing price. They look through all the traffic, verify the revenue, verify everything they claimed is legit. They can come back to you with, “We looked at all the data. You were going to buy it for $1.2M but we think it’s actually worth $900K — here’s why.”
Ramon’s Origin Story: Construction Company at 20 [00:40:00]
Shaan: Okay, so those are businesses you could buy. How did you become you? How did you figure out how to do this? Give people the journey.
Ramon: My first real business was a construction company. I was 20 years old, out of a job, and had to pay rent. A co-worker of my mom said, “I need a painter to paint the inside of my house, I’ll pay you X” — I forget the number, but it was worth a month’s salary and I could make it in three days. I thought, this is amazing. I can be my own boss. The harder I work, the more money I make. If I can do this in one day, I make a month’s worth of money.
Now, I’m a high school dropout — officially, anyway. I stopped really going when I was 14. In Holland you have to go to school until 16 by law. They actually gave me an official waiver because no high school wanted to accept me. But that’s a different story.
So on Sunday night she paid me. On Monday morning I came up with a name — “House Improvements” or “Home Improvements,” one of those two — designed some very ugly business cards, made a one-page website, and put an ad out on the Dutch version of Craigslist. And I thought: you know what, let’s not do only painting. Let’s do everything — construction remodeling from A to Z.
Shaan: You don’t know how to do any of that, by the way.
Ramon: No. I barely knew anything. So what gives you that confidence to say I’ll renovate everything A to Z?
I think that’s the naive part of me that I still have — let’s just see if I can get a job and then figure out how to solve or do the job. So an hour or two later I got an email from a guy saying, “Hey, I’m looking for an electrician — I’m rewiring my whole building.” I said, “Sure, no problem. I’m a ninth-grade dropout, I’ll be there in three hours.”
I went out and bought an official construction outfit so I really looked the part, and went there the next morning. Disclaimer: I would not have done anything that could potentially kill people. But I just wanted to see — maybe it was something simple.
He gave me the tour and it was like I couldn’t even understand the words he was saying. The floors were open, the walls were open. I was still playing along but in my mind I was like — there’s no way I can do this. Plus it’s dangerous. So he went out to run some errands. I waited for him — I didn’t want to just ghost him — and when he came back I said, “Listen, I’m going to be honest. I don’t know anything about construction. I don’t know anything about electrical. I just started yesterday. I want to build a construction company but I don’t know anything.”
Because he was an entrepreneur, he laughed his ass off. And he actually gave me work. He said, “You’re hilarious — just help me carry this box over here.” And he paid me the same hourly rate he would have anyway.
And I think — if we have young listeners — it’s so important to do those things when you’re young, because if I did it now at 40 years old it’s not endearing. It’s not “oh, I appreciate your hustle.” It’s “you’re a con man.” But if you’re young, take advantage. You can get away with so much more when you’re showing hustle.
He gave me a really good tip: to own a construction company you don’t have to know everything or do everything yourself. He said, “If I were you, find freelancers. You focus on getting the projects and outsource it to freelancers.” That’s what I did. Found an electrician, a plumber, everything you need — a whole crew. Two weeks later I got a second job and I didn’t do anything. I just had my crew. I sold the job for $10K, my cut was around $5K, and that’s how the construction company basically grew.
Within a little over a year we were at 20 to 24 people depending on how many projects we had, and we were doing close to a million euros a year in revenue.
Shaan: And you’re like 20, 21 years old. What’s the ending — happy or sad?
Ramon: Very quick version of the scaling part — it might be helpful. The big problem with construction is every job is two to four weeks and then you have to find another job. Really hard to keep the guys busy and make sure projects align. So I thought: who can I find that will send me projects consistently?
Real estate investors. They buy apartment buildings all at once and they all need to be renovated at once. So I went to local real estate meetups — which was horrible, I was way too young, a blue-collar guy among all these fancy people — but one thing led to another and I met the biggest real estate investor in my region. He was literally buying apartment buildings at foreclosure — between 20 and 100 buildings a month at the time. He became my client. I never had to search for a new customer again.
Then I made a bunch of mistakes. Cash flow projections was one — similar to e-commerce, you can grow yourself into bankruptcy. In construction, I have to pay the crew every Friday, I have to buy supplies, but I only get paid at the very end when the project is done. The faster you grow, the more money you have to put out in the open and wait for. I just didn’t do cash flow projections.
Another thing: growing too fast, having to hire people I normally would not have hired, and really losing grip of the business. It started to break. I had to close the company after about three years.
The Mentor Who Changed Everything [00:52:00]
Shaan: Our mutual buddy Suli was at my house this weekend. He said something like — there was a mentor figure who really changed the course of your life early on. Is he talking about that guy who gave you the insight about hiring freelancers, or is there somebody else?
Ramon: That’s a different story.
Shaan: Tell that one.
Ramon: This was before the construction company, when I was almost 18. My mom kicked me out of the house — I had to figure my stuff out and pay rent. So I got a job at the Dutch version of Best Buy. A couple weeks in, I was like, this sucks — long hours, whatever.
There was a guy who came in wearing a nice, expensive suit. He wanted to buy something that was out of stock. He gave me his business card — “Software Solutions.” I didn’t know anything about software or programming. But I knew: there’s a lot of money to be made and a lot of opportunity there, because this was the early internet days — before 2001, before the internet bubble.
I didn’t know what he was doing but it was something in software, and how you knew it was good was he came in in a fancy suit. I had separately been thinking about the internet — always trying to build these schemes, like buy this product in Germany and sell it in Holland. The internet was just this whole new world of opportunity. I just didn’t know exactly how to get started.
So I started stalking him. “Hey, I want to get a job at your company.” He said no, they’re not hiring. But I kept respectfully stalking him for months — three, four months — to the point where he said, “You know what, I’m so sick and tired of this in a good way. Let’s make a deal.”
“If I give you a book on Friday, we have an internal exam for programmers. If you pass that exam, the company will hire you and give you a six-month internal program to become a Microsoft developer. But you have to promise me: if you fail this exam on Friday, you leave me alone for the rest of your life.”
I said okay. He gave me a book on Microsoft Access database programming. I studied like my life was depending on it, did the exam, and I passed. Not with flying colors but I passed enough. So they gave me a job. For the next six months they trained me — I became a Microsoft software developer. They gave me a company car, a laptop, a phone. It was insane.
That guy really changed my life. Learning how to code is helpful in other ways beyond the code itself — you analyze problems and situations differently when you know how to code.
Shaan: But today you don’t consider yourself a coder — you’re not the one going in and making changes to your e-commerce website, right?
Ramon: No. I learned Visual Basic back then and that language doesn’t even exist anymore. I know how to read PHP and HTML, I know how to do it, but I never actually do. I think it’s more about that mindset of debugging — finding bugs in a 10,000-line codebase, having to narrow down where the problem could be. That mindset, you can use in all kinds of real-life situations.
Would You Rather? [01:02:00]
Shaan: Okay, we’ve got five minutes left and you had a game you wanted to play at the end.
Ramon: Would you rather — let’s give the people what they want.
Shaan: First one: would you rather be the CEO of Apple or the president of the UFC?
Ramon: President of the UFC, like Dana White? Too much travel. Event planning — when I threw my wedding I was like, this is the only event I’ll ever throw. And for the UFC, every weekend they throw a mega wedding. So no way. And I also wouldn’t really want to be CEO of Apple. So I’ll take neither — I’ll just buy your company for half a trillion and then peace out.
Shaan: All right, that’s awesome. Would you rather have dinner with Jay-Z or take $500,000 cash?
Ramon: Five hundred thousand dollars cash. Easy.
Shaan: See, I thought you might be a unique-experience person.
Ramon: No, I’d take the cash too. There was a whole debate — people say you should take Jay-Z. But for me, right now, I’d take the cash.
Shaan: I’m in the same boat. The dinner is most likely going to be kind of lame. But you know — maybe maybe we hit it off. Five hundred thousand, though — you could go buy your charity dinner with Jay-Z for $90,000 and have the rest left over. Or buy a goat milk soap website.
Ramon: Exactly. Would I rather have that goat milk business today or dinner with Jay-Z tomorrow? I’ll take the goat milk business today.
Shaan: Would you rather bootstrap a million-dollar business or have a VC-backed $10 million-a-year business?
Ramon: I think I would rather have the VC-backed $10 million business. Once you can get a business to $10 million, the odds of getting it to $50 or $100 million are quite high. I think zero to ten is a lot harder — more likely to round down to zero — than ten staying at ten. At $10 million, what you’re really saying is, stick with it a little bit longer and you’ll be at $30, $40, $50, $70 million within two or three years.
And a lot of people think VC means you’re VC forever, that you’re in this endless chase. My experience with VCs has actually been quite different — they give you the money, they might advise you to do something, but it’s your call what you do. You can raise one round and never raise again. They might strongly advise you to do something, but it’s on you to say: “Are you going to fire me? Do you have the power to do that? If not, then I’m going to need you to sit down and let me do what I’m going to do here.”
Shaan: Very quick one for listeners who have an idea but not the capital — would you tell them to try to get VC money first, or get the company started, get some revenue, and then do the VC route?
Ramon: This is going to sound clichéd, but it’s true and whoever is doing this needs to hear it: raising money is not the goal. A lot of people say, “I want to talk to you about what metrics we need to hit to raise our Series A in nine months.” I understand what they’re saying and it’s good to be thoughtful, but there’s this implication that raising money is the milestone. It’s actually the opposite. I have a business outcome I’m trying to get to — 10 million in revenue with 20% EBITDA, 20% market share, grow 20% a month. You have a business outcome in mind, and then you ask: do I need more money to make that happen? Yes or no?
Money is the fuel. It is not the destination.
So when you start, when you have the idea, the goal is to get one customer, ten customers, a hundred customers, a thousand customers. You start doing that. And then at some point, if you get stuck because you truly lack capital — you need to buy inventory or your paid ads are working and you just need to spend more to get to the next milestone — then you raise the money. Don’t raise as your excuse to go do the business.
Ramon: And you also see a lot of people who think they need money to launch a business but actually don’t. They think, “Oh, it needs to be pretty or it needs all these features.” But maybe they could just start with one feature, get a Fiverr designer to do it, and just get started.
Shaan: My favorite people to fund are people who have created a company, made all the mistakes, ended up with a small win where they got a taste of winning — but not enough to go retire on a yacht. Because the next time they start, they’re not going to waste six months on design mock-ups and branding and getting the trademark and all this other stuff. They know what the traps are. They know what you really need to do versus what you think you need to do. There’s a big gap there. Usually even if somebody tells you — experience is the best teacher, because the voice in your head, from most entrepreneurs I meet, is giving you bad advice the first time through. And that’s okay. Go do it, learn those lessons, and the second time you’re much better off.
Ramon: I agree.
The Boxing Match [01:10:00]
Shaan: Last question: would you rather do a boxing match against Sam, or do an Ironman with me and Suli?
Ramon: I’d rather do the boxing match with Sam. That sounds more fun and exciting than an endurance race. I’ve always wanted to feel what it’s like to be in a real fight. I got into one or two little altercations when I was younger but it was always like I hit the kid and then he ran away, or he hit me and then it got broken up. It never was: okay, let’s do this — no one’s going to break this up, the point is to actually fight.
Although, Sam is definitely on horse tranquilizers — whatever he’s taking, that guy is built like an absolute monster right now. So I need a little training period.
Shaan: A lot of people actually are because he’s been posting videos of us sparring. And I think he wants to become a fitness influencer now. To his credit, though — when people post, they cherry-pick what makes them look good. He does the opposite. He posts videos of you hitting him and him going down. A compilation of liver shots and falling down, over and over again. And to his credit, he started four or five months ago, not doing it every day, but he actually got really good really fast. You’ve been training much longer, but he’s improved quickly. And a lot of people on the Twitter comments are actually voting for you versus Sam.
Ramon: Yeah, maybe we should give them what they need.
Shaan: Let’s give the fans what they want. We need like a Kickstarter or GoFundMe — if a certain number of people pre-buy a $10 pay-per-view, we’ll do it. Whatever — ten thousand pre-buys? Ten thousand pre-buys at ten dollars, that’s the goal. Then we’ll do it.
Ramon: Let’s set it up. Give me four months to train.
Shaan: Four to six months. We each get one good boxing trainer, do whatever we’re going to do, both end up shitty at boxing, and then we do it.
Ramon: And then maybe Suli and I can box too as the free undercard?
Shaan: Yes! We should get anybody — it’s a CEO boxing tournament. Stream it from a really small, ratchet boxing gym. Ten thousand pre-buys — that’s a lot but I think it’s doable, especially if you get the support of the listeners.
Ramon: We’re saying it now. Just have to see — we’ll get them a link. Let’s do it.
Shaan: I can’t wait. Alright, perfect. Ramon, thanks for being on. Where should people find you?
Ramon: Now that I’m Twitter famous, it’s @RamonVanMeer — all together — on Twitter. Go follow.
Shaan: And go buy some dog ramps. If you have a small dog — I have a Maltipoo, I have four of Ramon’s ramps in my house because it’s a lifesaver. Otherwise your dogs get injured backs jumping off couches. Imagine jumping off something that’s three times your height. That’s what they’re doing. So go buy some ramps from Alpha Paw.