Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Joe Speiser, CEO of Little Things (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Let me see if I understand what you’re saying. You had a large audience on Facebook and you wanted to do content marketing to that audience and drive the traffic towards a different site, which you would then monetize with Google AdSense. Is that what you’re saying?

Joe Speiser: Almost. Before we made the change, we would send traffic from Facebook to blogs at PetFlow. These blogs were mostly pet-related content but around that content were advertisements. Those advertisement were helping us pay the bills and get us to profitability.

Sramana Mitra: What is the scale of the Facebook traffic that allowed you to do this?

Joe Speiser: Over the four years that we built out the audience, I think we had a million fans on Facebook. We had a really strong following.

Sramana Mitra: It doesn’t surprise me that it was big but I think the problem that Facebook has created for most people who have invested heavily in these pages is that they charge you to show the post. They’re not showing the posts organically anymore as much as they used to. How has that impacted your business?

Joe Speiser: It depends on when you look. Back in early 2014, they weren’t charging.

Sramana Mitra: The algorithm change happened later in 2014, right?

Joe Speiser: Yes. We definitely saw a huge decline in traffic. With that decline came the clarity to focus more on higher-quality content and less ads to strike that balance. I think it was a big wake-up call for the industry. I think that people who listen to what Facebook was saying – what they want on the site and what they didn’t want – are in a better place now than they were back in 2014. At least, that’s true for us.

The blog at PetFlow turned into Little Things in August 2014 as we realized that the opportunity on the media side was significant and we wanted to take advantage of that. We spun out the media business called Little Things. We’ve been scaling since. We definitely saw the decline in August 2014 when we launched but we’ve been up every single month since then. We’ve never had a month where we’ve declined in any meaningful way.

Sramana Mitra: This Little Things site now has its own traffic. What level of traffic are we talking?

Joe Speiser: According to Quantcast, we have about 70 million uniques. In the US, I think it’s about 45 million people.

Sramana Mitra: That’s not coming from Facebook. That’s coming from organic Google searches.

Joe Speiser: It’s from everywhere. Facebook is definitely a big piece of it but we get a ton of traffic from a lot of places. We have partnership with AOL, Yahoo, and MSN. We see traffic from Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, but Facebook is still a big focus of ours.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Joe Speiser, CEO of Little Things
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