RYB 900: The Story of Building The Brand "FreeUP" and Selling 4 Years Later with Nathan Hirsch

I’m excited to announce it’s our one year anniversary of launching Brand Creators Academy. To celebrate, we are open for registration from October 26th-October 30th. Head over to brandcreatorsacademy.com. After we close registration, we’re going to change the process and will start taking applications. This will allow us to see where you are in the process and if you’re a good fit to join Brand Creators.   Today we have Nathen Hirsch on the podcast. He recently sold his company, “FreeUp.” He’s going to share with us why it happened, how it happened, and what he is working on now. He’s also going to share his tips on how to build a successful business and what it takes. Let’s get right to it!   The Process of Selling FreeUp   When I originally started FreeUp, I wanted to build a sellable business and have the opportunity to sell it if the time was ever right. Last year I had a client reach out to see if my partner and I would be willing to sell the business. The offer we received was very reasonable. It required a lot of due diligence on both ends but turned out to be a win-win situation for both the buyers and us. There are only so many ways that you can grow a business, and I knew that I wouldn’t want to take on investors, so selling the business was always something that I had been willing to consider.   How We Expanded FreeUp’s Target Market   Once we decided to expand our target market with FreeUp, we went after the marketing niche. We were able to get a lot of influences to promote us. It’s a lot easier to get in with tier A influencers within the eCommerce community vs. the marketing space. However, we slowly chipped our way up, and by the time we sold the business, we were focused mainly on the eCommerce and marketing space.   We were also very diversified in our marketing efforts. I would say the most successful marketing efforts came from podcasts and affiliate links. We also had success with content swaps and networking on social media. We actually scaled the business without any paid ads. It was tough to track ROI with paid ads with FreeUp, but with my new business, we’re starting to test out paid ads now that we have the other aspects of our business figured out.   How Nathan Handled Tough Times In His Business   I realized that FreeUp couldn’t scale when I was the one taking all of the calls and talking to everyone who wanted to join. By year three, we had to hire VA’s to take calls to streamline the process. It also took us a while to work with developers to create a better experience. It just took us a while to figure that all out. It was also stressful during the sale of the business. It was tough to spend so much time selling the business and balancing managing the business at the same time. It was overwhelming to know that they could back out of the deal at any time. It was really tough when the sale was finalized because we had to tell our entire internal team. We hadn’t told them until it was final in case it fell through.   It wasn’t until a few days after we signed the agreement that we were able to celebrate. We sold our business in November of 2019. I spent some time with my family, and after that, my business partner and I decided that we wanted to continue working together. I spent the next few weeks listening to quite a few podcasts and learning about managing properties to see what we wanted to do next.   However, around the same time, we had a lot of people ask us if we could share with them how to hire a VA. From those questions, we create and launched a course the week that COVID hit. Our goal was to get 100 people to sign up, a