Exciting opportunity to take over an established business that provides clients with outstanding PR while making a killer profit.
Watch the interview below to learn a bit more about the owner and his business.
Tell us a little about yourself. What’s your background? How did you start with Good Noon?
I opened my first company in 2010 when I was 28 years old. We were developing mobile apps and managing digital marketing campaigns. The company did so well that within the first year my main clients were Novartis, General Electrics, L’Oreal, and many more. The business was then successfully merged reaching over a hundred employees – 15 on my side and about 100 from the other company – then sold a few years later.
Considering the entrepreneurial success we had, I reached out to several PR agencies to get our story covered. During this 6 years period, I hired one of them. This agency was charging us about $3,000 in “monthly fees” with a year minimum contract. They said they would reach out to journalists and surely we could get someone interested in covering us. Truth is that we didn’t even know what we were paying, and wound up with minimal coverage.
So, I started contacting journalists myself and building relationships with them; I also started purchasing bulk packages of press releases, drastically lowering the cost of a single press release per client. I got more results in a month doing so, that in 3 years with that agency – particularly using the network of relationships I created by doing marketing consulting in SF and Silicon Valley – and through the coverage generated I realized another way of doing PR was actually possible. That’s when I started GoodNoon.com
How much time does it take to run the business? Who else is needed on the team and do those relationships come with the sale?
The key skill of this business is, of course, content writing. This in the form of:
a) Writing blog content to keep the current rankings;
b) Write press releases and articles for clients.
Now when it comes to point a) the work is minimal since we receive several “guest post requests”. These bring to us some revenue (we charge $49 per guest post) and they help in keeping our blog content “fresh”. As per point b) if you don’t have experience writing, I’d recommend hiring someone.As per marketing, we keep two people from Venezuela to help us with email marketing campaigns; they work only a few hours weekly. Overall (lead scraping and their hourly cost) this campaign costs us $200. Although this marketing support is marginal (I’d say that it counts for 7% of the whole income stream) its overall ROI is high since we were able to get in past big clients through it, so I’d recommend keeping it alive.
What sort of knowledge would a new owner need in order to keep this business running as is?
Honestly, there is not much knowledge needed: an understanding of the format difference between products – press releases, organic coverage, link building – and the list of journalists and press releases distributors to contact once you have received an order.
Product training and media coverage list will be provided to the buyer.
Have you marketed this business? If so, how and how has that worked out?
New clients have been acquired mainly through SEO and partially answering industry-related questions on Quora. During the course of the years, we got a good percentage of recurring clients – mostly agencies reselling our offer – and that became our main sales channel. I did try AdWords and influencers campaigns before but we encountered difficulties in pushing sales through as both channels came up to be expensive. Hence we preferred shifting this budget to SEO campaigns.
Can you list a few opportunities for a potential new owner to continue growing the business?
Two out of the 3 products GoodNoon sells (hence press releases and link building excluding organic coverage) are fully scalable. One experiment we did in the last months that seemed to work is offering the standard distribution of press releases at a very low price then upselling a large coverage. Once published a press release we would ask clients if they’d like to have it distributed in USAToday (or BusinessInsider for that matter) at 400% of its initial cost. Many people accepted, we figured out we could even distribute press releases for free using this model, and still be very – maybe even more – profitable.
