Revenue in Examine.com’s first 2.5 years of existence: ~$10,000

Revenue in the past year: $700,000

I’ll likely write more about this later, but the basic steps were (this post was inspired by Adam Bornstein’s post on top 5 ways you’ve known you made it):

• I harnessed my career capital (knowledge in building up websites).
• Conversely, I did not try to do things I had no domain of knowledge in (research). I know more than the average person, which is important so we can discuss issues and come to better understandings, but at the end of the day, the business decisions were mine, and the research findings were not.
• I built up an awesome team – both directly involved in the company and people who I could turn to advice for.
• We took the long long road. Seriously – it’s amazing how much money supplement companies offered us. Hell, we’ve been told we could be iHerb’s #1 affiliate, which would net us ~$50k/month
• We didn’t spend on useless things. Relevant to the point above, Kurtis was pretty fantastic about keeping his costs to a bare minimum as we built up our reputation.
• In fact, I’d say our #1 focus was quality and reputation. We were in no rush to release a product. We were in no rush to sell to our audience. We showed them we were about value.
• We focused on something we could sell every day, not just during a hyped-up launch period. Having experienced a dozen+ fitness product launches in the past few years, I can tell you that most products make 75-90% of their revenue in the first 10 days they launch. For us, that # is lower than 20% (and affiliates generated maybe ~25% of the launch sales).
• We acted big. We tried to be professional from day one. Now that we are big, it feels like a comfortable suit! At the same time, I’ve tried to be as accessible as possible (and now so is Kamal).

Slowly but surely we carved out our own niche, and eventually became so good they couldn’t ignore us.