Adult Site Broker Talk Episode 236 with Brad Mitchell of Mojohost – Part Two of a Two Part Episode

This is Bruce Friedman of Adult Site Broker and welcome to Adult Site Broker Talk where each week we interview one of the movers and shakers of the adult industry and we give you a tip on buying and selling websites. This week we’ll be speaking with Brad Mitchell of Mojo Host in part two of our two part interview. We’ve added an event section on our website. There you can find out about all the B2B events in our industry and there are discounts on selected shows. Go to Adult Site Broker.com to find out more. Speaking of events, I’ll be at the X-Biz LA show January 13th through the 16th and I’m looking forward to seeing everyone there and talking some business. Contact me on our website to book a meeting at Adult Site Broker.com. To register for the show, go to xbizla.com and I’m proud to announce I’ve been nominated for Community Figure of the Year at the X-Biz Executive Awards as part of X-Biz Honors January 15th. It should be an exciting night and I hope to see you there. Now time for our property of the week that’s for Sable at Adult Site Broker. We’re proud to offer a white-labeled cam site that’s rapidly growing month over month. It’s tracking to more than double its business from 2023 to this year. This is an excellent opportunity if you’re already in the live cam business or want to enter it. All traffic is either direct or organic. This is excellent for a company with cam traffic or one willing to purchase more traffic for the site. Best of all, the site is easy to maintain. Someone could easily add additional sites through the admin system without doing any more work. This gives you truly passive income with zero hours required to maintain it. Only $479,000. Now here’s part two of my interview with Brad Mitchell of Mojohost. Why haven’t you started selling GPUs for language learning models to Mojohost customers? I gather from the call you said you were on today that you’re in the process of doing that. So that’s a tremendous question. So the answer to that is the economics don’t make sense yet. Here’s my very high-level view on this. I’ve been in the web hosting business for 25 years. We’re a privately held company. My sales are north of $10 million a year. So no, we’re no Google. We’re not that kind of scale, but we’re not small either. I really do think we run a respectable size business. What’s interesting to the stock market, though, isn’t hosting companies. It’s when you look at valuations and multiples, it’s obviously AI is hot right now. Different solution providers touching that space, either whether they’re making the hardware or they’ve developed the software or they have some other type of solution. They are getting the most attention and the most investment right now. What I believe I’ve observed is there’s been a race of new companies that actually don’t function like a traditional web host. So they don’t really have servers to sell you and all that other stuff. But basically, what do they have? They have GPUs in a data center. It’s a very thin offering. Some of them are bundling with that smart software that makes it perhaps easier to build and deploy your ideas inside of those workspaces, which is really cool, but that also takes a pretty substantial investment. What I see is my view in the marketplace right now is it’s not my moment yet to be having that hardware in stock. Why is that? Because it’s not retailing for numbers that are realistic. It’s only part of the solution and the smallest part is honestly ever, what is the hardware cost? With GPUs, like the stuff I was looking at today, I think the precise example, not I think I know. The precise example was NVIDIA H100 GPUs and I was looking at a solution where my effective cost per space per GPU was about 40,000. So it’s still quite high and as I’ve analyzed, there’s a lot of providers out there selling access so you can go and rent a GPU from dozens of different companies and pay by the hour. I think that the lowest of those retail prices today are currently pretty fair. For me, I don’t want to productize it and sell it unless I really, truly feel like it’s my time and I can do it better and give it an additional value. What I also see is there’s a lot of different ways to use this technology. There are a lot of different learning models. There’s a lot of different GPUs. And so if I go heavy into say one GPU model versus or if I have like two or three or four of them in a shopping cart, really what I would see as relevant would probably be like to go spend about a million dollars to buy this stuff. But then I’ve got it on the shelf. I don’t necessarily have any of it pre-sold and that risks the greater business. So I’m looking for my slow organic growth. I’m interested in having conversations with people that have already gotten out of that like, "Hey, I’m just tinkering somewhere and I’m willing to spend 50 or 200 bucks a month." Like, I know that I need to be able to bite off medium and more advanced users that have say developed a model and they want to have it running online in a more cost effective or meaningful manner that I can work with. But that tends to be the buyer that’s ready to spend 500,000 or thousands of dollars per month. I’m still looking for the right moment in time to position us with the right product to make those available. And I also see that it’s going to create a lot of new technical support requests because everybody’s trying to do something and nobody knows how to do it. So I don’t want to create a mire and the Moja host support system of busying up. Like I have some technical debt that like I would need to say super train lots of senior sys admins on these environments to get them ready. They handle the questions. So for me, it’s a multifaceted person. I wish it was as simple as I could just buy the metal, throw it in a rack and rent it out. But as I’m understanding all of these solutions, they’re really just not that simple to deliver and there’s more to it than that. So yeah, I’m sure the technology will keep improving. It certainly will and the product life cycles are changing. Like even as I was looking at that purchasing opportunity today, which was for new systems like apparently some company had ordered $15 million worth of GPUs and didn’t take delivery. They’re sitting assembled new in box. So that’s what I was evaluating. Even as I was checking that out, I realized each $200 is now worth of market, which is the next iteration. And of course, has all of the gains that have a next version of that you would expect. So I say for now, keep dreaming, start experimenting, build your sandbox, talk to others and try to figure out how you could meaningfully impact your business. Maybe perhaps starting in small ways, but look at what’s that bigger vision. My vision for really using the most brilliant of AI models not yet developed or to market, I theorized internally like, "Hey, could we train models to learn from the hundreds of thousands of support tickets that we’ve done with customers and then feed in all of the operating system documentation and all of this other stuff and other good reading to come up with something that we could use to leverage at a low protected tier of support to make it smarter than, in other words, like a functional systems administrator, but using AI technology. But of course, then we’ve all got nightmares about Terminator or Judgment Day. SkyNet, right? So those are keys to the kingdom that I would never hand over. But I have to imagine that there are really smart ways to leverage that. And of course, over time, we’ll find out ways to do this. And how would that benefit Mojohost? Will that could make us more efficient? And then how would that benefit our customers? Well, that could make pricing maybe less, right? Because really our biggest costs aren’t the data centers and the servers. It’s always the people. It’s payroll. Absolutely. Where do you see the hosting industry heading in the next five years? That’s a really good question. I believe that it’s going to be the case that you’ll continue to see smaller hosts shrivel up and die, either by acquisition or just failure. While consumers tend to have this expectation that their hosting should be either the same price or get cheaper year over year, what’s actually happening is any amount of hosting service provided that’s high touch is becoming dramatically more expensive. And this is furthered by huge changes in the world’s data centers and power, power in North America and power in Western Europe. So in the last couple of years, especially since the start of the war in Ukraine, my power prices basically increased to 100%. Power prices went up. And then when power prices came back down, I wasn’t actually given those discounts back by the data center. They just kept the prices high. Why? The data center I met in Europe, which was originally a Dutch owned, was acquired by a publicly traded American company, which of course, their goal was as it should be to squeeze out as much profit as possible. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem that they’re running that balance of being reasonable and providing good value to their customers. So the other thing that’s happening in data centers worldwide is GPUs are changing the power requirements, which is rendering a lot of data centers incapable of serving the future because they just don’t have enough power infrastructure. But besides that, the massive consolidation inside of the data center space globally has increased prices. So what it means is your typical small business owner hosting company that does less than a few million a year in revenue is really not of capable sophistication to figure out, in my opinion, how to survive. So what you have in the tens of thousands of small hosts and small reseller hosts is you have hardworking entrepreneurs that are operating a small business, much like you might go up to a Patisserie at the corner and buy an iced coffee and get a bagel or croissant that they made there. What you’re getting when you’re buying from a small web host is somebody that has, when I say small, I’m talking like they’re really small, revenue is less than a million dollars. They’re working for a job and they’re probably not even getting paid as well as I might pay them if they came to work for me, owning their own business and they’re on call 24/7. And it’s going to become increasingly difficult for them to be competitive in an ever-changing marketplace. So my observation is when I go out and I surf lots of other sites because I try to stay aware because I’m always trying to make sure we’re providing good value. But I surf everyone else’s websites and I look at their shopping carts and I see which products they’re offering. And you can really tell that a business is going the way of a dinosaur when they don’t have any relevant technology available for sale. Like nothing that’s been made in the last two, three or five years or if they’re just showing really old CPU models, to me that’s personally a dead giveaway. So I think it’s the case we’re going to continue to see small hosts go out of business or become relevant or just not be able to survive the grind of that. And I’m not digging on that. That’s how I started. I started at zero and it was really, really hard all those first years, but it is really tough. I did an acquisition of another industry web host and it went so well. I did this just in the last two years that nobody even knows who I bought. But I would tell you what I learned from this experience and they were a great example of a perfect acquisition for us. The guys working in that business had all the same core values that I did. They were honest. They were hardworking. They believed in giving exceptional service and they always were trying to be a great price for their customers and they were almost 100% adults. So really perfect match to be acquired by Mojo. I was able to buy that business, hire all of its employees and make it a win and pay them better than they were making before and give one of those two owners who today is one of my very valued friends and works for Mojo. More support to be part of a larger team, a better salary. I was also very happy that I was able to make it a win financially. But that was a business that was actually older than Mojo host. Well, that’s rare. Yeah, there’s only a few of them. Unfortunately, well, I guess it’s public knowledge now, but I would give the example of a host that was also older than Mojo host that just failed this year. They literally closed their doors. Not viable. It was IS Prime. Oh, I didn’t know that. Yeah. And there’s not that much that I can say about that except that it seemed to be a sad example of what was a great business was well run. They really always did a fantastic job supporting their customers. But it’s an example of I think you need to grow and achieve a certain size and keep growing. But it’s very hard if a business plateaus and doesn’t have continued investment technologically. That wasn’t a small business. It was bigger than this range that we’re talking about. And you know what? They were great guys. The owners. The owners were fantastic people and so were the technicians. But all those people, I had to go out and find new hosts and they had less than 60 or 90 days to do it. I’m happy that I was able to help a few of their customers and get them moved in time because I was really worried for that. Posting is not an easy business to be in. It’s always going to be the case when you search online that you can search and always find something cheaper. But it really is a very, very complicated business. It’s hard to pull it all together and it’s hard to keep doing it year after year and be relevant and be good at it. But I’m proud that we’re still here and I’m happy that my clients are happy. That’s good. So with this attrition, how is this going to affect other adult entertainment entrepreneurs? I don’t know that it will too much because I think in the natural order of things, survival of the fittest, there’s always change. It’s always the case that companies go out of business or change. But I think it’s certainly the case that over time, people will come to realize that they’re going to have to pay more for support. The real, real moving figure in all of this is what does it cost to keep the customer happy? Build everything the right way and support them in the ways that they need to be supported. You can’t just keep taking away from that and optimizing it. It really is an area that needs to be invested in. Every business, whether it’s my business or the smaller ones or the bigger ones, to retain the best of our employees means we need to have amazing competitive benefits and we need to give proper appropriate raises year over year. You need to really do all the right things to keep your staff. As I create new products on a pretty regular basis, and then I’m always reassessing the products that we have and how we price things, like I was just going through this exercise last week, I was creating the next generation of all of my products. As part of that exercise, I was having to analyze what should that checkbox look like if someone wants to buy complete full support. I had to be realistic about that. I think that to answer your question, this becomes a challenge for somebody that is really legitimately in business, but wants or needs to pay less than a couple hundred dollars a month. It depends what level of interaction you need with your web post, but I think it’s the case of someone’s deriving their full-time income from their websites online. I tend to think that buying a managed support plan is one of the best values you can get out there, because even if you’re going to pay $100 or $200 or $300 on top of your server or your virtual space price for that support, if you can get all that support that you need when you need it throughout the entire course of a year, say $200 a month or $2,400 a year, I mean come on, let’s compare that to paying a consultant. I guess, what’s your other option? You find someone that you hope that they’re available when you really need them for as much as you might need them at that exact moment in time, and maybe they’re going to want to charge $50, $75, $100, $150 an hour. I think it tends to be a pretty good value. So I know you married your beautiful Ukrainian wife, Ola, over two years ago. So with the war in Ukraine raging on over two and a half years now, how has this affected your personal journey? Well, that is perhaps a deeper question than I’m feeling really capable of answering right now because, but I would say, yeah, it’s affected everything from both a personal and a business perspective. My heart is there with those people, with their struggle, and I’m a part of it every day. Yeah, you have people there. Yeah, I mean, obviously, my family, my anima’s, my many friends that I have in and out of country, and I have employees in and out of country. And it’s really difficult. So I think like everybody else, I pray for peace. I want a just solution. I think that nothing justifies what’s happening over there, and I just want peace is what I want. Yeah. And I’m sure it’s had an adverse effect on business with the team you’ve got over there. It sure has. I mean, we’ve got a number of team members that are at war, and it’s affecting everybody. I think it’s touched everybody’s lives, whether it’s friends, family, or that they themselves have gone to war. But yeah, I’m sorry. I understand. Let’s just hope it ends soon. That’s the best we can hope for. On to better things. What advice would you give someone just starting their own tech business? Well, I think the advice that I would give first and foremost to anyone starting a business, technical or not, is it’s easy to spend, easy to lose, and hard to make back. So as with any business venture, don’t ever risk more or spend more than you can afford to lose. So within all of that, I think today, even with all of the technology and complexity that there is, I think things are still relatively similar and complicated to all of the things that I’ve done. All of these other moments in time over the last 20 years, I mean, I myself started 25 years ago, and gosh, at that time, looking back, you think of all the things you could have done differently. But in all of those moments, it was never really that straightforward to me either. I think as it would pertain to the industry that you and I serve, Bruce, I think one thing has always held true, and that this is that I have always advised people to do something that they feel connected with or that they enjoy personally or that they think that they can do better than somebody else. So for example, it might be the case that someone has more experience, interest, or something to contribute to a particular niche or fetish as it may be, or having an eye for quality, or understanding an audience or a type of content better than other sites. I believe it’s possible to still dream and create and build something of value. I think it’s a unique time in history that someone can create content and publish on so many different platforms, if not their own platform. And it’s certainly going to be the case that the way that we’re journeying and experiencing the internet is going to change a lot over the next several years, the decade most certainly influenced by artificial intelligence and search. I think search is probably going to change dramatically because as I can see now when I’m Googling stuff, I’m very happy to get a chat GPT smart response before the sponsored advertising because sometimes that’s just what I need. I don’t want to have to click on a bunch of websites and hope to find a good, legitimate answer to a question. So where to start? I think you need to start with being realistic about your budget and then you need to, I think it’s a smart thing to do your research, so connecting to communities that can provide additional information, xbiz.net is a terrific example of that, where you can go and maybe be a student first, read threads, read discussion topics, absorb those. Let’s be respectful of each other’s time. So maybe before, it’s not, listen, it’s never a bad time to post a question. I really don’t believe in, I don’t think that there’s any such thing as a stupid question. But I think if someone is really, truly interested, the barrier to entry is higher now than perhaps it’s ever been. That is that I’m not exactly sure, but I think it’s important that people become a student and if you really thought you wanted to make a business or a career, then it is worth the time and the investment to go and bring yourself to a test conference in Europe or in xbiz in Miami or Los Angeles or Internext or AVN in Las Vegas because there’s so much to be learned from people that are willing to experience share. Today I’m doing it on your podcast, but Bruce, each time you and I go to a conference, we have several days in a row of eight and 12 hour days where that’s mostly what’s happening all day long is conversations with other business owners and employees and people with experience and people giving seminars. Listen, of course, not all seminars are great, but it’s generally the case that there’s a lot of information to be gleaned in. If somebody was new, who would they be to think that they are smarter than people that have lots of experience and hopefully some wisdom is coming out of that? Of course, I’m always wondering what is the next bigger great idea or paradigm shift, but I always get excited when people launch new apps or websites or customer journey experiences because none of us are no stradamus or has a perfect vision for the future. Sometimes I’m just excited to see whether it’s coming from someone’s younger, fresher perspective or from one of my old friends that maybe their last good idea was 20 years ago and maybe they got another one. But I do believe that things will always continue to evolve and mature and this is a very competitive landscape that always has been. There’s much to be learned from studying and I think that before anyone gets too serious about it, their first step should really be to do as much research as they can, whether it’s online, if they can potentially in person would be a great supplement to that, especially if you’re able to have that in person experience and filter to make a few acquaintances or friendships for learning people that you can ask questions to, whether it’s Bruce or it’s me or it’s, you know, maybe it’s Corey Silverstein, you know, my favorite industry attorney or any other number of people. There’s a lot of people out there that are willing to give you lots of free advice that doesn’t even necessarily benefit them. They’ll just tell you what they think or they’ll tell you what they’ve learned and then you can try to gauge whether or not it’s relevant, what they think, because it is absolutely going to be the case that there will be people that are younger or older, but smarter and have a unique idea and a fresh perspective and maybe the rest of us can’t see it yet. So you have to learn how to filter that. But I think the best place to start is by really, you know, researching and talking to people and then approaching everything with humility. Yeah, absolutely. Look, I feel really blessed. I’ve been in the industry almost 25 years too. It’s 23 now. And I feel really blessed to have the network that I have, people like you, people like Corey, so many others who I can reach out to and say, "Hey, what, I do this with you. Hey, what about the show? Do you think this is going to be beneficial for me if I haven’t been to a show before?" And for the new people, realize that the people in our industry are very giving. When I first came into the industry, I knew nothing. And I had all kinds of people that were more than willing to tell me about things. Todd from Yankscash is another one who’s just been a tremendous resource and was one of the first people I ever met. So I agree with you that people need to use others as a resource because that’s what we’re here for. Do you think you learn more from failure, Brad, or from success? Failure. Success is fleeting and it’s never permanent. And what is success really? I think when I was going all the way back, I remember just even going back to my first jobs and my perspective on that, it was like, "Gee, someday my goal is I’d be happy if I could make $100 a day at my job. That was $200 or $300 or whatever the case might be." I feel like I’ve learned a lot more from the hardships and challenges because I’m always trying to look toward the future and I try to be a positive person. I usually am, but my journey has been wrought with personal and professional hardships and lessons and none of us really lives entirely inside of one bubble or the other. There’s no one who could take an honest inventory and say, "Well, my personal life doesn’t affect my business." Well, that’s not true, right? Because all the while while we’re facing business challenges, we have our own personal physical health and our other personal relationships and loss in life that we’re contending with. So there’s always so much going on at any one time. I would say from my business experience, and I found actually, I feel like this year in particular, I tapped into it once or twice where I felt like I was making a new choice that I thought was wiser than what I was being counseled from other people that I was soliciting their opinion. I was doing that based on my long history of other failures. So, yeah. So I think it’s always the case that I’ve learned more from failures because it just seems to be how it’s been. I mean, what are the hardest moments? I mean, the hardest moments in life are when you have to take stock in yourself and look at what you’ve done and say, "Okay. This is BS. Things need to change or I’m going to hard fail." I had a moment, and I’ve never shared this, certainly not in an interview, but I mean, I had a business moment. Gosh, I guess it was probably about 10 years ago where at the time I had what I thought was an ineffective chief financial officer and due to some personal circumstances, maybe while I was still trying my best and showing up for work, I wasn’t as effective as I had been for a previous year or two and some things had gotten less efficient. I had a moment where I thought the business was going to fail completely. It was running at a staggering loss and at that moment in time, I didn’t happen all at once, but it was like a bunch of it happened slowly and built on and then there was always business challenges, a bunch of other random things happened that necessarily couldn’t have been predicted. Then I was looking at six-digit monthly losses on a cash flow basis, which was not something that I was able to personally sustain or make better. What did I do? I had to get over myself pretty quickly. I realized that I had my head in the sand for some short period of time that I was in denial about what the problems really were and how severe the potential challenge was. I had to say all these little quips like, "Pull yourself up by your bootstraps." I really had to get my head out of my ass and reinvest to get back into the details of the business, get back into looking at every single budget item, whether it was even a $15 a month spend, look at everything in the business. At that moment in time, what did I do? My best banking partner there was American Express. I went and borrowed $900,000 on a short-term loan from Amex. I think I had that on a 12 or an 18-month loan. I woke up early every day and I stayed late as often as needed. I worked the weekends and I worked every single day trying to find an improvement of hundreds of dollars or thousands of dollars that I could add back into the business. I made the hard choices that needed to be made about replacing key employees that weren’t pulling their weight until such time as I saw myself through that crisis and into the next pasture of, "Hey, it was a win to get the budget back to zero." And then to get the budget ahead. Business is always changing and ever-evolving and it’s never quite that simple. Even at the scale and size of the business as it was for me at that time, which was large, not as large as it is today, but it was a lot. I think in those years, the gross revenues were $678 million somewhere in there, but it was a journey. And I got through it and I learned a lot more in that experience than other ones. I’ve got lots of failures. Like I am still contending with this year I announced a new suite of cloud products, which are brilliant and they work great and they’re priced right. I got no industry traction. So do I see that as distinct failure that’s going to define my business? No, because I did that as a calculated expansion and investment in the business and it just means that my marketing approach was wrong. Maybe the product was wrong, but that’s something I’ll continue to work at and I will come up with what’s my version two approach. So it wasn’t enough that I went and press release that and talked about it at some trade shows. So there’s more to that. So I’ll get to the root of that and then I’ll, I’ve got in my mind what’s kind of like a next version of product and product announcement or a re-productization of what we’re selling at Mocha Host that I think is better than everything we’ve done cumulatively together. That’s a smarter way to approach the future. Sometimes the hardest choices you make as a business owner or an entrepreneur are to realize, recognize, you know, when something’s failed, call it quits, you know, you do that to kill a product, kill an idea, move on to something else. And in those moments, I think, you know, out of that comes real personal growth. Absolutely. What travel and trade shows are you planning in the next six months and how do you select which conferences you attend yourself and which ones your sales team attends? Sure. So I keep talking about how hard it is to run a host team business, but you know, it’s my goal as much as possible. I’d always love to have someone from Mocha Host that every what we would consider to be be-to-be industry trade show. I only have so much time and availability and, you know, it’s in the same as true for each of the other two travel employees, which, you know, it’s me, it’s Natalie, it’s Roland. And so my goal is that between the three of us that were at least one of us is as many places as are available. And then when it’s most effective, maybe we’re all there. You know, so for us, based on travel and budgets and timeliness, that’s certainly a test show for us in Europe. So my six month view, I got internext and AVN in Las Vegas. I’m going to be personally attending that. I’ll also be attending ex-bus in Los Angeles in January. And I’m looking forward to the next edition of Taston’s in Phil Spain. There are other trade shows. I guess I don’t have the full calendar in front of me right now, but it’s certainly the case that between Natalie and Roland, I don’t know that there are any other shows over in that European geo, but they’re likely to be in attendance at other affiliate marketing or adult related industry trade shows. Okay. And finally, how has your approach to marketing and sponsorship changed in recent years? Well, during COVID, I spent a hell of a lot less. Didn’t we all? I think like all of us, we didn’t travel so much. And then when we went, you know, so there was a real add back, which was great because I was able to basically zero out of sales marketing, travel, meals and entertainment budget and just put it all back into investing into our staff and new technologies. I was able to borrow from that budget. And then when things got normalized again, you know, I sort of started again from zero with the marketing and travel trade show budget. I think for us, my priorities, you know, continue to evolve over time. It’s very important to me that we’re, that we’re providing our clients with the best experience and that we’re visible and available at the events that matter. So it’s always important to me that we are in attendance and I think sometimes it looks like perhaps a larger sponsor than we really are. So maybe that’s by design or my invention, but I’m always trying to be very strategic about how we spend money. I’m less likely to just pay to put our name on stuff and more likely to try to create a more personable experience. Like for example, I do pretty well with managing a cocktail, you know, Mojo host cocktail hour or evening as it may be like the early bird at Tess. Always a great event, by the way. Thank you. Well, I like that not because I like buying necessarily buying a thousand drinks, but because that’s an example of a place and time range where we can personally interact with more than dozens. Usually it’s a couple hundred people and have, well, before the show gets too busy. So like I look at that as a strategic spend, I want to show that, hey, we’re still here, we’re relevant, we’re still participating. I’m not just pulling back our participation to save money and put more money in my own pocket. So I try to make sure that what we’re spending is reasonable and makes sense in the scheme of things. I mean, to give you, I guess, a higher level view on that, it is less than 1 to 2% of our gross revenues that we spend in total between all sales, advertising, marketing, travel, trade shows, meals and entertainment. I think I could almost, I think if I said 2% of our revenue, I think I could throw affiliate commissions in there. Most of our business is not driven that way. So I’ve always been very lean on marketing. I wish to be honest, my challenge is, hey, listen, if you’re out there and you’re brilliant at Google AdWords or you’ve got some other ideas for how you could help me grow qualified leads on Facebook or any other avenue, please reach out to us because I’m trying to figure out how to spend money to generate qualified leads because it’s not that simple. I know how to do things the old-fashioned way. You can drop me into a trade show and put me at the center of our there and I will talk to people and be sociable and try to be educational and try to connect people with other people, which is another great way to form relationships is to make those introductions to the say their next bill or potential website or traffic partner. I love doing that kind of stuff, but that’s a hard way to scale a business. It’s very boots on the ground, very hands-on. And so my future goals are to figure out how to get smarter at marketing my brand and growing my business in ways that are scalable because even scaling, adding more mojo salespeople or brand ambassadors, sales representatives, that is not an easy challenge. You just can’t throw anybody out there. First of all, hosting is a complicated sell. I won’t say what I’m thinking because you know exactly what I’m thinking. Don’t go there. No, I won’t. Your people are outstanding, by the way. Roland and Natalie, phenomenal. And I get a lot of joy seeing them really believing in the brand and as they tell me, I think that they really like their work and their jobs and the travel that we do. And they really also like me feel real great when we get all this positive customer feedback about how we’re changing people’s business or saving them money. Roland’s a client, right? Yeah, he’s been a client for a long time and then now he works here. Yeah, I didn’t even know that till I talked to him at Tess in September and he told me about all the tube sites he has. No, his sites aren’t exactly that, but he’s an affiliate marketer. So Roland’s had servers with Mojo for years. So I definitely wouldn’t categorize him as a tube site owner. It’s not exactly that, but he’s always been an affiliate marketer, I think. So I’m not exactly sure the time span on that, but it’s been for a very, very long time. Statist-like customer becomes a happy mojo employee. So we’re all working on that together and our challenge as a group and for each of us individually is how do you continue to find additional success in a space where we have a reasonable market share, right? So learning from failure as we talked about earlier and trying to apply that towards the future is me trying to figure out sort of that where do you go from here or if like we weren’t able to sell somebody, but yet I’ve known them for 10, 15, 20 years and there’s still not a customer. Some of that is can maybe, should I move on or is there something we could do different? So we’re always trying to take our own inventory and see how can we do better to improve results. Because really, I would say it’s even better for the industry. I mean, not just because Mojo supports the industry, but because I can continue to create bigger and better solutions and share more and give more back the bigger the company gets because unlike most other businesses, sadly for me personally, but better for the betterment of all the clients is not all going back in my pocket. It’s just never been like that. I actually, for most of the last 20 years, I’ve just been on a pretty static salary. And of course I’d like to raise, but I really like to tinker and build cool, better things and I’m real proud of the fact that we built our own data center in the last five years on sort of deep platformed ourselves in that way that we’ve been able to actually build our own real clouds for storage and for compute. And this gives people a safe place on the internet where they can go and build their website and their infrastructure and they don’t as long as you’re doing good on this business, they don’t have to worry about being deployed for them because at the end of the day, I’m not accountable to shareholders, the stock market or public views. And this is a safe, reliable place. Like I’m all in, like we have aligned interest. And as more people buy from me, I’m able to do better for more people. It’s almost kind of like the idea of like a membership club. Weren’t you already in the industry before you started Modra host? I was. I had originally, I started very green. I did not at first build my own sites. I started, I quit my day job and bought somebody else’s websites and you know, in that process, I got defrauded by the seller. I bought stuff that wasn’t, wasn’t right, wasn’t licensed properly. I had to delete everything. I don’t even want to go through all that. But yeah, I mean, I, I did all that. And then, you know, I reinvented that business. I went out and I bought all new license content. I rewatched all the domains, you know, did all this stuff. And then, you know, almost from the very beginning, I had always had space and power in a data center. So I had my own server there. And after the first conference, I went to, and, you know, I met some friends and then I started, you know, co-locating and basically being a web host. It was kind of like it was Brad doing what Brad had to do to pay the bills, right? So I had some extra space and I had some extra power and some extra bandwidth. So it started real humbly with, with Mojo and I was never a savant when it came to being a payside owner, but I did it. I did it for several years. I was pretty good at it, but, you know, I really gravitated toward the hosting side. And then when, once that became like, I remember, I remember sitting in a meeting with a consultant and I said, man, like someday I just really want to sell, I wanted to sell a million dollars a year. I think it did a little better. Yeah. And but, you know, but this all started with, you know, my first goal was actually to just get a livable paycheck. And at that time, way back when it was, I was like, you know, I could, I could feed my family if I could pay myself 50 or 60,000 a year. Right. So that was like, but my first goals were was I need to be able to have enough personal income from that where I can pay my mortgage and, you know, put food on the table and then, you know, kind of grew from there. Exactly. Well, hey, Brad, I’d like to thank you for being back with us on Adult Site Broker Talk and I hope we’ll get a chance to do this again soon. Thank you, Bruce. I really appreciate it. Thank you. So, here today is part three of what to do to make your site more valuable for when you decide to sell it later. Last week we talked about making a good offer and how to structure your site. Next, keep your website design up to date. Do a redesign from time to time. People will tend to think your site is the same as ever and click out of it without even looking at it if something doesn’t change. So keep it fresh and up to date. Times change. So should your website. Look at what your competitors are doing and see what it is you really like. If you know a site to be successful, look at what it is they’re doing and do some of the same things. I’m not saying copy their sites. I’m just suggesting you improve your site by looking around a bit. You’ve got to keep up with the times or you’ll end up being left behind. Also, keep an eye on your competition and make sure you’re offering everything on your site that they are or more. Don’t just look at their design, but make sure your offers are good and competitive. The same goes for your content. Do you ever wonder why one site does well and others don’t? Check out the competition’s content. What are they doing that you’re not doing? Be willing to make changes. People can’t understand why they’re losing sales to a competitor, yet the competitor is clearly doing everything better. Amulate success. Make sure everything on your website works well. Make sure all your links work properly. Check them on a regular basis. If things don’t work, you’ll lose customers. People are not patient these days. People’s attention spans are like that of a nat. They click out immediately and go to the next result in Google if they don’t find what they’re looking for. If the site is hard to navigate or if things don’t work. Check all your internal scripts and plugins and make sure they’re updated regularly as well. We’ll talk about this subject more next week. And next week we’ll be speaking with Anthony Rivera of the LAL Expo. And that’s it for this week’s Adult Site Broker Talk. I once again like to thank my guest, Brad Mitchell of Mocho Host. Talk to you again next week on Adult Site Broker Talk. I’m Bruce Friedman. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) [BLANK_AUDIO]