From Living On $150/Week To Making $100k/Month: How My Business Helps Kiwis Find Better Deals And Save Money
Hello! Who are you and what business did you start?🔗
Hey everyone, I’m Denis and I’m the co-founder of Glimp. A business that we started 7 years ago. During that time, I survived on $150 per week for a year, volunteered at Rio 2016 Olympics, lived in 10 different countries and visited more, made lots of friends, and memories, and of course, built a 7 figure business. So, let’s talk business!
We are a utilities, financial products, and insurance comparison website in New Zealand.
Think Skyscanner or Kayak, except in the industries I mention. We help Kiwis (that’s what you call New Zealanders) find better deals and save money. We do this by negotiating exclusive offers and presenting them as easily and as straightforward as possible. That’s the consumer side.
From the business side, we help big and small companies acquire customers. We promote their offers and get paid when customers sign up.
Today, our revenue is about USD 100,000 per month with a healthy gross margin. The goal is to make $1,000,000 profit NZD this year and then USD.
P.S. This is Queenstown, New Zealand ⬇️ You should visit.
What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?🔗
I started my career as an auditor at one of the big accounting firms. And then one day, after 2 years there, I had enough.
I looked around at older colleagues and asked myself “Is this the life I want?”. The work didn’t inspire me. I wanted freedom and change. So I quit my job in June 2015 with only 6 months left to get my CA aka CPA. The highest honor for accountants. If you know, you know.
Two weeks later, I moved alone to Wellington, New Zealand, where I didn’t know anyone, and began my 8-week coding journey.
If you have a fear around money, I lived on USD 150 per week for over a year.
If you asked me about my plan then… I would not have a single idea it would lead me to where I am today, which is Mexico City.
My plan was:
- I want to start a business
- If the business doesn’t work, I will get a coding job
- If I can’t get a coding job, I will go back to whatever I was doing before
The vision at the time was to claim back my freedom, start a business and travel around the world.
During the coding bootcamp, I met my now business partner - Michael. We clicked as we both didn’t want to work 9 to 5. So after brainstorming a few ideas, we settled on our comparison website. The funny thing is… the ideas that we wrote down, of them have been executed by other entrepreneurs.
The comparison idea was close to Michael’s heart, as he is an immigrant from the UK, and price comparisons there are huge. Enormous! So we decided to copy their model and launch the first all-inclusive comparison website in New Zealand. We were the first to include a comparison of many products. The thinking was… if it worked there, it has to work here.
We also naively believed that we will make it work because during our journey many competitors launched and failed.
I barely had any business experience, besides what I learned online. I was fresh. Michael was an ex-electrician and a property manager. He was also fresh.
That meant we had to figure everything out, and we did.
At the time I was living off my savings of approximately USD 150 per week. That included rent, food, gym, and 1 cup of coffee a week. Talking about being thrifty.
I lived like that for a year and four months. Challenging at times, but overall, it was fun. At one point, I moved back to my parents but that was after I went to volunteer at Rio 2016 Olympics and came back home broke.
A few months later, we started paying ourselves equivalent to the minimum wage in New Zealand. I decided I had enough of living with my parents and that’s when I moved to Bali.
This is when my journey of travel, awareness, and self-discovery began.
But we are here to talk business, so let’s talk business.
Take us through the process of building the first version of your product.🔗
I built an MVP in two weeks and started with Internet Comparison. I was an internet geek, World of Warcraft, etc, and it felt right to start with what I know. And that’s prices for different internet plans hah.
As Steve Jobs once said “Good artists copy, Great Artists steal”
Having zero design or CSS skills, I did exactly what Steve said. I went on websites of overseas websites and started to understand how they operate. Some call it, reverse engineering.
In my head, I’m thinking, these guys are spending millions of dollars optimizing their websites and products, so they must be doing something right.
However, I did add my spice to it. After analyzing websites, I noticed they all a comparison of one above the other. Whereas in real life, we do it side by side, so I implemented a comparison of our offers like that.
In reality, it was just two guys trying to apply what they learned during the coding bootcamp. Using the latest Ruby on Rails framework, Bootstrap, and jQuery. We fell into a natural rhythm where over time I was focusing mainly on Front-end and my business partner was focusing on Back-end.
As you can imagine, it was a lot of spaghetti code, which is code that is lacking any structure. One of these days we will rebuild the website.
Describe the process of launching the business.🔗
In January 2016, we launched our website. We just pushed it live on Heroku and… now what?
As you remember, we were fresh, there was no growth hacking or anything.
Luckily for us, New Zealand was going through a massive Fibre roll and the government was spending millions on marketing. So that’s what we focused on.
Around the same time, an overseas internet company entered New Zealand with a market-leading offer. They wanted new clients but they only had a referral program for door-to-door salesmen at NZD 120 on acquisition. We asked them if we can do acquisitions online. They agreed.
We featured their offer and began a simple AdWords campaign. Our budget was $1,000 a month. This was all financed via our savings. And to this day I remember the first lead that we generated. I was frothing.
At the end of our first financial year, we made $60k in revenue and $20k in profit. Not bad. This was purely from focusing on AdWords.
Over time our main source of user acquisition became SEO but it takes time to build it out. So we kept grinding and getting better at what we do while improving our core offering.
We also were trying to get more client relationships. In some cases, it was a waiting game to get noticed. In other, it was someone we knew. And in other cases, it was us approaching them and saying what we can do for them.
When we started we would accept the price that the provider was willing to pay. However, as time went on, we negotiated for better and higher CPAs.
Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?🔗
In the beginning, it was AdWords. This was the main source of our traffic. Since we were bootstrapping, we needed to be profitable from day 1. So I made our website flow super simply to get our users from Point A to Point B.
I put a lead capture where we would collect customer details when accessing a certain deal. We would then use those emails to follow up with them. At the time, I also coded up a simple transactional email so we didn’t pay for the service.
Then I started exploring ways how to generate more traffic and stumbled across SEO. I started diving deeper and quickly implementing the best SEO practices at the time. The most fun I had was figuring out how to write content that ranks. Publishing it and then seeing it at the top of Google’s first page. It was great.
The content pipeline system was simple. It was putting myself into the shoes of a consumer and answering questions they might have. I would also analyze the content our competition was writing and make it better.
Michael and I would reach out and get backlinks with the partners that we worked with and websites in a related industry.
We later got SEO tools like SEMRush to help us with content ideation, and eventually, we outsourced the SEO side of the business. To this day, we haven’t found an SEO agency or partner that was worth the time.
Next, I was analyzing industries we haven't started comparing yet. Seeing where we could easily rank and launch another vertical. That allowed us to rank top of Google’s search for Mobile Plans, Car Insurance, and Power in New Zealand.
As we grew in traffic, we started bringing on more paying partners. You see, at first, for our idea to work we had to sell our service on an acquisition basis only. And we had to include companies that didn’t pay us because they were well-known in New Zealand.
However, with higher traffic, we were able to onboard new paying partners and get better exclusive deals. And the exclusive deals meant customer retention because they weren’t able to find these deals anywhere else.
We also tried leveraging Facebook, forums, and groups to promote those deals. However, the best we found was SEO and Adwords.
How are you doing today and what does the future look like?🔗
Our gross margin after ads are anywhere between 50% and 70%.
Up until 2020, our business has been doubling in revenue every year. In 2019, we started to expand our team and by the end of 2020, we had 20 full-time staff mainly from the Philippines. We had a call center team, marketing team, operations, and developer. The idea was to grow the business and streamline operations.
Since that point, our business has been through a lot of ups and downs. Some people worked out great and some didn’t. It was a learning experience for me too because I never really managed a team. Currently, we are a team of 6. The biggest lessons were:
- Find the right people
- Make sure they are kept accountable for the deliverables
During the two years, I am not going to lie, I relaxed and thought the people I had could run the business. And I guess they did, the question is how well. I also wasn’t enjoying the business. I managed to achieve my goal of living anywhere and working whenever I want. And yet, it felt meaningless. Looking at this now, I was going through some internal growth. And still going, and what a ride it is.
We let go of all of our marketing team at the beginning of 2022 and replaced them with contractors. I was paying more per hour but was getting better results. Great success!
The year 2022 was also the worst in terms of profitability, achieving a loss in September. It was time to do something about it.
In the second half of 2022, we let go of our operations manager and made more staff from full-time to hourly. I also found that our email automation was turned off for over a year. We generated about 3000 emails a month at that time. I didn’t want to think about how much revenue we lost. So I found an email team to help us with it.
Within 2 months, we were back to making the highest profits we’ve made in a very long time.
I’m forgetting to mention that we also improved our conversion rate from 6% to 12%. However, I’ve been working on this since June 2022, so it was a gradual process.
Short term plan is to continue putting the right people into the right seats within the business. I want to increase profitability and automate as much as I can.
The aim is to then find other opportunities and figure out the next stage of life from business and personal perspectives. Remember, the internal growth journey I talked about?
We are currently at crossroads on whether to continue building within New Zealand and dominate it. Or go for a bigger market.
Currently, we have 150,000 email subscribers and growing by 5,000 a month. The question that lingers in my head “What would it look like to have 1,000,000 New Zealand subscribers?” After all, the population is about 5,000,000. “What about 100% of the New Zealand market?”
It will sound a bit embarrassing but the goal right now is to generate $20k profit from our emails through sponsorships and other means. At the beginning of 2023, it was $0 and we are already at a $5k mark.
I am also having an SEO play where I am making exact keywords domains in New Zealand, such as BroadbandDeals. The idea is to outrank us and our competitors and take a market share that way.
And another idea we explored is partnering with the largest media company in New Zealand. We want to leverage their traffic and create the biggest comparison service in the country. Then, we would be playing at a different scale.
Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?🔗
Timing and luck play important factors. It has been proved to me many times during my journey. Combine that with hard work and you will get results.
When it comes to evaluating people you want to have a clear idea of their responsibilities and objectives. Using those objectives is how you will evaluate them. For example, if you agree with someone on 10 pieces of content per week, and only receive 5, you discuss that with them next week. If it keeps happening, then you have a basis to take action. Simple and effective.
If I knew the above earlier I would’ve let go of some of my employees sooner. They were the right people but in the wrong seat. Or the wrong people in the wrong seats. It just wasn’t serving anyone.
Also, as someone who gets emotional about this matter, it allows me to look at it more objectively.
What platform/tools do you use for your business?🔗
We’ve built the website on Ruby on Rails. For our hosting, we use AWS but when we started it was Heroku. For CRM, it is Freshsales, and for email, we use ActiveCampaign.
On day to day basis we use Slack and GSuites, it does the job. We used Favro for project management, but now we are moving back to Trello for simplicity.
What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?🔗
I think it was the 4-Hour Work Week by Tim Ferris. I read it before I started my business journey but at the time, I was hooked. From day 1, the business was fully remote and had no office. We were doing the remote thing before it was cool… kind of.
Another one is Traction by Gino Wickman, I read it in 2022 and it is about setting up operations within the business. The key takeaway is to measure the performance of key metrics on a weekly basis. That way you don’t wait one month to see how things are going.
Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?🔗
Realize that you can always go back to whatever it is you were doing before.
And if you have a fear around money, I lived on USD 150 per week for over a year. Honestly, this was one of the best times for me during my business journey.
So figure out what is your minimum “survival” requirement and you will be surprised how little you need to get by. In turn, you will experience freedom and it will allow you to focus on building whatever it is you are building.
Note: I was single and debt free at the time. But if you are not, I’m sure you can figure out a solution that works for you.
Where can we go to learn more?🔗
And if you want to connect with me and chat about business, relationships, travel, calisthenics, hiking, kitesurfing, men’s work, and many other things... or just want to follow what I get up, then find me on any of the following platforms:
Personal (in order of activity):
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