He noticed something about those attempts. The topic of each blog mattered less to him than the work of building it. He liked the publishing, the interviewing and the teaching.
A short stint at a startup was meant to give him stability and time to work on his own projects. Then he was laid off without warning.
He hesitated to write about blogging, since plenty of people already did. But the layoff meant he needed income soon, and he launched in 2017 anyway.
Pete McPherson (Image credit: facebook)
He didn’t have a developer’s background. He used basic blogging
Email came next. His newsletter gave readers exclusive content and updates, and it gave him a way to reach them without depending on a search engine or a social platform. When he first built the list, he asked friends and family for support.
None of this was unusual on its own. Most online publishers use some mix of these tools. What stands out is the timeline. McPherson had spent years learning how audiences were built before he tried to build one for a business that had to pay him.
He also changed course along the way. Based on feedback, he adjusted the products and services he offered. That meant dropping what didn’t sell and putting more effort into what readers asked for.
What the $45,000 sale price does and doesn’t tell us
The pricing model is simple. Courses and podcasts are free. The paid product is a community called Online Impact, which costs $249 a year and offers exclusive content and networking.
Here’s some basic arithmetic. At $249 a year, about 400 members would add up to roughly $99,600. That’s close to the $100,000 figure. It could have come from memberships alone or from several
Now the sale. A sale price and annual revenue measure different things. Revenue is what comes in over a year. Profit is what’s left after costs. The sale price is what a buyer agrees to pay for the business as a whole.
Small online businesses are usually priced on profit rather than revenue. So a $45,000 sale against $100,000 in yearly revenue doesn’t necessarily mean the business was sold cheaply. It depends on costs and how much work the owner did.
A business built on one person’s interviews and voice may be harder to hand over than one built on a product.
The site’s listed tools include Stripe, which handles payments and fits a paid membership. Other tools listed include Google Sheets, Vercel, Firebase and OpenAI.
McPherson’s own account of what he learned is plain. Failure is part of the process. Clarity came slowly, after many attempts. Relationships with other creators mattered. Flexibility mattered more than sticking to one plan.
The $45,000 sale price is the one figure tied to a completed deal. The rest depend on how the income was counted.
What “recurring income” means, and why buyers care about it
Recurring income is money that comes back without a new sale each time.
A one-time product works differently. An ebook has to be sold to every buyer from scratch, so income can swing from month to month. Renewals make the next year easier to predict, and buyers pay attention to that.
Acquire.com is a marketplace where owners list online businesses for sale. Buyers browse, ask questions and make offers. Sellers usually share revenue and profit figures, and buyers can ask for records that back them up.
What does a buyer actually get? Not a shop or equipment. They get the pieces; the domain name, the articles, the email list, the podcast archive and the paid community.
A CPA is a certified public accountant, a licensed professional who handles accounting, tax and audits.
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