What is the business model of Great.com?

Summary

Erik has invested $900 000 in the domain name Great.com because he wants to build a company that will change an entire industry from the inside and out.

In this episode, we will explain the business model of Great.com, what industry we will change first, and why we will succeed.

And stick with us, because somewhere in this episode, I will tell you how much money I think that we will make.

Today's episode has been split up into three topics:

1. What is the business model of Great.com?
2. How much money Erik believes that Great.com will make per year?
3. The thing that most people think is crazy about Great.com, that we will give away 100% of our profits. How does it make sense?

Let's learn about what is the business model of Great.com

--
This is a "Business secrets episode". These episodes are very rare, only once per quarter, we will do an episode where we reveal the strategy behind Great.com and how we will succeed.

This is an opportunity for you to get a behind the scenes look at what it feels like to build a company - and also get an update on our progress.

What you learn here is not something you will read in a book. It’s the real story of how Great.com gets built.

1. In the first section we dive into the product of Great.com. What is that we are building and what can it be compared with? What value does our service bring to people? And how did Erik come up with it? Has this business idea always been his dream?
2. In the second section we are looking into what it means to give away 100% of our profits to charity. We are explaining how it works to rank high up in Google since this will be an important part of how Great.com will make money. We are also sharing some personal stories about previous challenges with ranking high in Google and when we managed to trick the big company back in 2012 (and how they tricked us back).
3. In the third section we are looking at how it benefits our business model to give away 100% of the money. How it makes us unique in many ways and creates unexpected advantages for our business that our competitors can't do.

Follow Erik Bergman and Emil Ekvardt on their social channels!
linktr.ee/smilingerik
linktr.ee/emil.e

Transcript

[00:00:00] I had invested $900,000 in the domain name Great.com, because I want to change an entire industry from the inside out. And in this episode, we will tell you about what industry that is, how we will change it, explained the business model of great.com, and why we will succeed and stick with us. Because somewhere in this episode, I will tell you how much money I believe that great dotcom is going to make.

[00:00:34] Like, why would you why would you do this? I just want to make the world a better place. I want to help the world. And I think that I mean, I'm 32 years old. I'm hoping to live for another, I don't know, a hundred years. And it's been really, really positive with technology and see what I can do with that. This is my legacy and my purpose would be to help people and make the world a better place.

[00:01:19] Hi and welcome. I am here with Erik Bergman, as always, who is the founder of Great,com, our company that will give away 100 percent of its profits to help the environment. And Erik made over 50 million euros before we turned 30 when he founded the company Catina Media, a company that went from zero to 300 employees in just five years. And on the side of great, he is teaching entrepreneurship and personal development to his over 250000 followers on Instagram. Erik, how do you feel today with this episode?

[00:01:57] I love the excited hand movement. I feel it gets some warmth in there.

[00:02:04] I feel excited. And I'm here with my good friend Emil, who is this annoyingly smart person.

[00:02:11] But I, I like him anyway. And he is the host of this podcast and as well as our other podcast, Great.com talks with. And here's my creative spirit sparring partner. Let's just stick with that sparring partner who I love creating all kinds of content where this podcast, Instagram things, YouTube stars and on the side of a great he's also running a coaching business where he helps young men to live a more rich and happy life. How are you today, my good friend?

[00:02:43] I'm extra excited about this episode because if you're new here to this podcast, we talk about personal development and entrepreneurship. But every three months we're going to do an episode that is a bit unique where we talk about great dotcom and we'll reveal our strategies and our business secrets to you. And today we're going to talk about exactly that. And the episode is divided into three different topics. And in the first one, we're going to look at what is great dotcoms business model. In the second topic, we're going to look at how much money do we, Eric, believe that growth is going to be able to make every year? And into third topic, we are going to look at maybe the craziest part about creating this business model, which is that we are giving away all of the profits. And how does that make sense from a business perspective?

[00:03:39] Let's dive into it.

[00:03:50] So greater calm is building something that the world has never seen before, and you said in the beginning of this episode that you are planning to change the whole industry inside out. So what do you mean by that? Which industry are you talking about?

[00:04:06] Ok, so let's let's start by explaining.

[00:04:10] The business model, in a sense of what it's similar to, so think of TripAdvisor, you know, these traveling guide where you can read about pretty much every hotel and restaurant in the world and you can read what kind of food they serve, how good the service is, how good the food is, what are the prices and so on about pretty much any place all over. That's the traveling industry and it's called affiliate marketing. And we're going to apply the same thing to online casino. And in the casino industry, you obviously don't serve food, but they have customer support. So you can test that to see who's the best at that. Everyone has different bonus offers and campaigns that you can do is we're going to see who has the most generous campaigns and everything around that and looking into how fast do they does it go when you withdraw money? How fast do you get your money? What kind of things do they do? How fair are their terms and conditions? So we will do the same thing in the casino industry as TripAdvisor is doing in the traveling industry. And just give all the people who wants to play casino all the best information they need to know to know where to play.

[00:05:21] Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So instead of finding a good hotel, they find a good casino. Yeah, but what I'm wondering then is you say that you will give away the money, but charity and Casino doesn't really go well together. How do you explain this combination?

[00:05:38] I completely agree. Casino and charity are in many ways it's it's opposites, but at the same time, I believe it makes perfect sense.

[00:05:47] So my background is in the casino industry. I've been in gambling since I was 16. One way or another. And I've made a lot of money in the gambling industry and so has many other people done. And almost none of that has gone to doing something good. It's gone to rich people getting richer. And that's why I believe if someone creates a company within the casino industry that instead of like feeding the even richer people, take all of those profits and give them to places where they make the most sense, I believe that that's something that no one else would do, and I can do it with the experience that I have. So I think it makes perfect sense because no one else would do it. And this is one of the perspectives of this. We've actually done a full episode for you listening. I think it's Episode 42, which is Casino and charity, right or wrong, where we dive a lot deeper into this topic and the various nuances of if it's right or wrong. But I agree it doesn't make sense and that's why it makes us right.

[00:06:49] So the thing great is doing the world has never seen before is a casino that is giving back all of the profit it makes and. That's how an industry group changed from the inside out.

[00:07:02] Yeah, definitely. Instead of like the regular casinos taking money from people, we want to give away money to people.

[00:07:10] And that is not turned off so often. Not now. How long have you had this idea for? Had you thought of doing something like this since you were a kid or when did this happen?

[00:07:20] I know when I was a kid, I wanted to be a professional football player, like all other kids and the fireman and maybe a police and an air pilot out there.

[00:07:31] Those were the three options. Those were the three men I could have been Spiderman to. But apparently that job was taken and now this business idea came.

[00:07:41] So I ended up in this business after failing a lot of other businesses, I tried to be a party planner that didn't work out, try to build a printer business that didn't work. I would try to be a little lunch guy that didn't work out. All these four businesses I went through in my late teens, early 20s, and then I founded Catina Media, as you mentioned in the introduction, which is a very similar company to this. It's a casino comparison company. I founded that in 2012 and I left in two thousand and seventeen. So five years later, and then the company was valued at, I don't know, five hundred million dollars, something like that.

[00:08:17] So I made a lot of money in this industry and I thought that, OK, this money in this industry could do so much good if someone just decided to do something good for it. So the idea came from a journey of various mistakes. And just I stumbled into that great opportunity many years ago. And I think that it's. Yeah, it's it's too. I have the opportunity. We have the opportunity to make too much of an impact, not to really give this a try.

[00:08:47] Right. And that is something very important that we would take that opportunity. But then I guess with so much money at stake here, I guess there's a lot of other people hungry to take this opportunity that might not want to give away the money. So let's the next topic see how much money do you think it's realistic to extract from this industry and give away? So give it to me straight. Eric, how much money is great icom going to make from the casino industry?

[00:09:25] Ok. Is it OK if I just start by explaining a little bit more about the business model, how things will work, and I'll get back to that to give you some more context? Yeah, I think it's a big part when you build a website like this, which is about guides some information on the Internet. One of the most crucial parts is where do you rank in Google? If you are ranking on top of let's take TripAdvisor, for example, if you're ranking on top on restaurants in New York, people are going to find your website. But if you're a number of 50, no one cares about your website. No one's going to find it.

[00:10:02] So if I search in Google for restaurant in New York's ranking minister, I would come up in the top search.

[00:10:07] Exactly. If you're ranking number one and Google, you're the first hit, which gets the majority of the traffic. So this is called SEO search engine optimization. How high you ranking in Google? And this will be a very crucial part of great dotcom success. And it is a very crucial part of the success of Catina Media, the company that we built before. That's basically so Catina compared to the other websites. But they got all their visitors or a vast majority of the visitors from search engines. So what we were good at back then and what they're still good at is climbing high up in the search results by understanding how Google works. So Google is an algorithm, which is basically a computer program, visiting every website on the Internet, trying to determine how good that website is. And they want to take the best one and put it on top. And they look at different elements of that website. First, they look at the text on that website. So they see, OK, this text, this website writes about casino. It writes about casino bonuses and offers, OK, it's about casino. So they put that website in the casino box, whatever you want to call it, and then they take, oh, this site is about restaurants in New York, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So they put that in the box of restaurants in New York website. So the casinos and New York restaurants are obviously not competing. But then there are a hundred other websites where thousands or hundreds of thousands, all the websites also write about casino. So then Google need to be good at determining which of these websites is the most trustworthy.

[00:11:45] And they do that partly by analyzing the user experience. How do people interact with the website and how fast do the website load? How does it look and stuff like that? But the main thing they look at is the number of links pointing towards these websites. So what other websites have written about this website and talked about it? So the links kind of it's like votes. So if if The New York Times writes about great dot com, it's like they say that a great dot com is an important website and we have the possibility of climbing higher than someone who wouldn't get that link, for example. This is a complicated topic to have managed to explain it in a in an understandable way.

[00:12:30] I think so. So it's kind of like. If you are seen around the cool kids in school, you have social proof, but here the cool kid is a link instead. So now you have a link from The New York Times and then Google sees you with New York Times and understand that this is a serious website.

[00:12:49] Yeah, you could you could look at that. OK, so let's keep with the way the children analogy, even if it might be a bit harsh. So if you see a lonely kid on the schoolyard, you.

[00:13:04] You can assume that that's not the most popular kid or the kid that most people would kind of trust or go to for information, which is sad but true. And if you see a kid who is among other kids, but it's still not the coolest kids, you know that. OK, that's a little bit better. But if you see someone who's wrong, all the coolest kid and it's kind of in the center of attention there, then you know that that's the one that most people would kind of listen to and trust you. And it's the same here with links. And so if there is a website to get no links at all, Google will not trust it at all. And if it's a website to get some links, but from weeker website or lesser known websites, for example, Google would trust it more than the sites. Who gets nothing. But if you see that, like the most popular website that get the links from New York Times and from all the other cool places, that's what Google is going to put on top to make sense.

[00:14:01] That makes sense. You want a lot of friends and the coolest friends.

[00:14:04] Exactly. So basically the websites you have the most friends will be the one who ranks on top.

[00:14:10] And we started early on. So back in two thousand and ten, we started playing around with this. How can we get to the top of Google? That's before even I started. I started playing around with this together with my co-founder, Emily. Beautiful name, by the way, as my other business partner had our and what we did then was we tried to we tried to trick Google.

[00:14:37] We tried to come up with lots of ways to make other websites linked to us either. In the beginning, we bribed them with Spotify invite's before Spotify was open to the public to say, hey, if you get a Spotify, can you link to us? And we paid other websites. We traded links. We we bought lots of different websites to kind of trick Google into getting us links.

[00:14:58] And you're not allowed to do this. You're basically fooling the system and you're not breaking any laws because Google is not the official law. But it's still you can trick Google into climbing on top. Google wants you to just be a website and see who links to you. But we managed to play around this a lot and come up with all kinds of systems. And we took bigger and bigger risks and we felt like.

[00:15:24] Rebellious teenagers making small little crimes and getting away with it, and it works really well for like 2010, 2012, and then daddy Google woke up and came screaming after us with a baseball bat and beat the living crap out of us because we had overstepped Google's boundaries way too much. They launched an algorithm updating in 2012 that crushed all of our websites, basically. And what they do then, if you have been breaking the rules and kind of getting too much links for too many things in a way that Google doesn't see what is appropriate, they can take you out of your search results. So we were ranking number one for lots of different keywords. And then Google just say, sorry, guys, you cheated. And it's like you've been cheating in the Olympics or whatever, and they just take you out of there.

[00:16:18] I got to be rough. I guess you were making at least some money or you had the potential of making money at that point and now you're just back at square one.

[00:16:25] Yeah, we made it. And your strategy is obsolete. Yeah, we made a lot of money before we realized that, OK, we probably deserve this.

[00:16:36] That's just life. But what's interesting here is that this is pretty much how the entire industry still works, because it's very hard for if you're TripAdvisor, it's pretty easy to get other websites to link to you because people want to talk about restaurants and traveling and these things.

[00:16:53] But if you're in the casino industry, it's really hard to get someone to link to. New York Times is very rarely going to link to a casino guide. It's not what people want to be associated with. Just like you said before, like casino and charity doesn't really go wrong, go a long way and people don't really want to be associated with charity. So if you're the casino kid on the school yard, it's it's hard to get the other people to hang out with you.

[00:17:15] In a sense, this this is what the industry is doing and what we are another part that we're going to change inside out. But I'll I'll get back to that. Does it feel like just like you feel like you know, how to climb Google that decently clear?

[00:17:35] Yeah, I think that makes sense to me. And when I think I just don't understand how to do this now, because I when I think of someone that owns a casino, even if it's a casino, I think of guys in Vegas in the 60s with really sharp elbows. And I guess that you are not the only guys who are doing tricks to trick Google. And I guess people do that still today. So how can someone because I guess great is going to play more fair. So how can someone even have a chance if they tried to play fair when everyone else is cheating as much as they can get away with?

[00:18:10] Everyone is cheating as much as they can get away with. Let's let's take that in the third topic and I'll explain it more, more thoroughly there, how we will do it and what will differentiate us. And I can explain a little bit about how this business model works.

[00:18:26] Well, when we get visitors, let's say we managed to climb to the top of Google and someone Googles four Best nj online casinos, best online casino promotions. They then find our website and they can read about these different casino offers, which is the most generous one, how much extra money you get there, how you need to use it, and so on and so forth. And when they then find a bonus that they like from a casino they like they go there and they start playing at this casino. And this is when we get paid. So we get paid on commission for every player who finds us, goes to casino deposits, money and start playing.

[00:19:05] So that's that's the kind of business model. And we.

[00:19:12] We get paid in one out of three ways where the most common one is called revenue sharing, which means that we actually get a profit of the money that the casino makes in profits from these customers. So if this customer plays for five hundred dollars, the casino makes five hundred dollars in profits and then they charge their costs and whatnot, and we get about 30 percent of that. So we might get paid one hundred and fifty dollars or something like that in commission of that player. And then there is a thing called CPA, which is common in commission marketing in general terms of cost per acquisition. And then we just get a flat fee. So we get maybe two hundred dollars for every player, regardless if he plays for ten dollars or ten thousand dollars. And then there is something called flat fees, which is more like regular marketing works. Like just by putting their banner on our website, we might get paid a thousand dollars per month or ten thousand dollars per month or regardless of what it is, it's it's kind of how that pricing model works.

[00:20:15] Is it follow?

[00:20:16] Yeah, that's easier to follow, and it's similar to, I guess, how something like TripAdvisor would get paid.

[00:20:22] Yeah, it's it's definitely similar there. And so TripAdvisor makes most of their money from hotel bookings, and I assume that they get about 30 percent in commission from each hotel booking. So it's usually where it ends up.

[00:20:38] Like in App Store, Apple takes 30 percent of the cut cutting commission. They're kind of an affiliate. TripAdvisor and Hotels.com take about 30 percent on a booking and we take about 30 percent here. That's where it ends up.

[00:20:52] Yeah, that makes sense. Do you want to add something more to the business model or can we move on?

[00:20:56] I want to know how we're going to fight fight these guys. It was one big question you asked me before.

[00:21:03] Uh.

[00:21:05] How much money? I was always going to get away with that one.

[00:21:12] Yeah, OK. So if we look at this, if I look at this from what I've done before, the the biggest website that I had that we built with Catina when when we started out called John Slot's dot com.

[00:21:27] And about a year into that process, we were still using a lot of chiki tricks to get around Google. And that website made about a hundred thousand dollars a month the first year. And later on it's been growing. It's been going up and down and all kinds of things. So but that's a realistic thing that you can accomplish a year if you put really big focus in this and you're using some Cejka tricks. We've been doing this for like a year now, but we haven't really focused on the product. We haven't used any dirty tricks at all and just building up. And so far we make almost zero. But from now on, we're going to start growing. I believe that we could come to one hundred thousand dollars per month in like a year or something from now.

[00:22:10] And Catina, after five years, made about four million euros per month. So it got really big, three, three, four million euros per month. So I think it's realistic to do something similar maybe in 10 years. It's harder today, but you can definitely get to that point. So 10 years from now, I believe it's realistic to make four million euros per month or something like that. So it can be really, really big. And our intention is to do this for the next 50 years and the sky's the limit. I mean, 50 years. Google is a 20 something year old company and they make billions. And I don't see why we're not going to be up there. And competing with Google might be a bit unrealistic, but still not totally unrealistic.

[00:22:59] So long term, the goal is to make billions, but short term, a hundred thousand is a good target, then four million a month and then we'll take it from there.

[00:23:07] Right. And then in the next topic, I'm really curious to understand how are we going to fight with some of the giants that are already in place? I guess, for example, Catina Media, they had since 2012 to build all of these links. How are we going to race past them that I want to hear about in the next topic? OK, I can't wait any longer. Please tell me how we're going to beat these casino giants that have there are eight years ahead of us in time and have all of these thousands of links. We're so small.

[00:23:48] Yes, some of them are actually a lot more than eight years ahead of us. So when Catina started in 2012, there were guys that had been around since the year 2000, and we still managed to outcompete them then. So I I definitely believe that we have the possibility of competing the big ones now as well, because there are we have some aces up our sleeves. And so let's dive into some of the juicy business secrets of how great that. So touch, touch for links are the key and ranking higher up in Google, and what makes us completely unique compared to other casino companies are that we're actually giving away 100 percent of our profits to charity. We're doing things that no one else is doing, which makes us newsworthy. We're also doing a podcast like this. There's no one else doing that, talking about these things, explaining everything that makes us newsworthy. We're also collaborating with lots of different charity organizations because we're giving away money that makes us newsworthy. So we're doing a lot of things in a lot of ways, which makes us not so casini that we can actually get links from sites like Business Insider has been writing about us as far as I know that I'm writing about any other casino websites and hopefully we will be able to get the popular links from all kinds of websites the bigger we get. And my belief is that the more money we will give away, the more of a news story it will be, the more links we will be able to get, the higher we will rank up in Google, the more money we will make, the more money we will be able to give away, the bigger the news stories will be. And you kind of see where I'm going here with this positive feedback loop that it's just going to spiral upwards from there to a pyramid scheme.

[00:25:50] Well, you could call it a pyramid scheme if you want to build a pyramid scheme that gives away a hundred percent of the profits. I think that's a it's a good pyramid scheme. No, I can see that it sounds. Unrealistic in many ways, and. Mean, so far, it's not proven. I can't say for 100 percent fact that this is going to work, but what I can say is that we have already been getting better links and stronger links from cooler kids, so more authoritative websites to great dotcom, thanks to the things that we're doing than I've ever managed to get to a website that I built before. Great dotcom. So in that sense, it's already proven that it works on a small scale and then it's just about how big scale it can get from there. How authoritative can this be? What can we accomplish with this podcast? What can we accomplish with collaborating with charities that no one else can do? How can we get really good at getting New York Times or whatever big magazines actually want to write about us in these kinds of collaborations is something that none of our competitors can do because people don't want to collaborate with the casino websites. And I've been trying to do casino collaborations before when I was in Catina. And I know how hard it is that we've got a very big edge here by giving away all the profits and having these intentions. And my very strong belief, my conviction is that we will actually be able to create this upward spiral that might sound like a pyramid scheme, but I really don't think it is right.

[00:27:30] I said a bit of a joke, but at the same time, some some people I speak to about growth are skeptical. And I can imagine some charities might be skeptical to link. Some newspapers might be skeptical because your guys from the casino industry. Right. And now you're doing a company that gives away money. But what did you get out of this? Like, why would you why would you do this? What's your initial incentive?

[00:27:55] As you said in the introduction, I made over 50 million dollars before I was 30 and I did that in the casino industry. I don't need any more money I got for enough for this lifetime and a few more. I just want to make the world a better place. I want to help the world. And I think that I mean, I'm 32 years old. I'm hoping to live for another, I don't know, a hundred years. And it's been really, really positive with technology and see what I can do with that. This is my my legacy and my purpose would be to help people and make the world a better place. And I believe that the best thing I can do is to build something that takes money out of the casino industry and puts it someplace better. I do a Robin Hood here takes from the rich and casino people and give to the poor and needy everywhere in the world.

[00:28:46] Right. So so how do you make money out of this?

[00:28:49] I don't make any money at all. I, I take Serevent salary. I take zero in profits. I'm never going to make any money from it.

[00:28:57] Ok, but but you still pay the staff of great like how does that work.

[00:29:01] Yeah. OK, so we're going to give away one hundred percent of the profits in great meaning that we still need to pay the staff and we're going to have costs and stuff like that. So if, if in the future, let's say, let's say we at the moment we, I just pay for everything and I do a lot with donations. We do together with a team. But let's say a year from now and we make one hundred thousand dollars per month, then my belief is that we will have costs of about thirty thousand dollars per month.

[00:29:29] And I'm basing this on how it looked when I was building previous businesses, meaning that if we had one hundred thousand dollars coming in, thirty thousand covers, salaries and costs and then seventy thousand is the profits, then we will give away those seventy thousand to primarily climate organizations.

[00:29:47] As it looks right now, it seems like a rather ineffective business model. I mean, you could use the seventy thousand you would give away to grow the business, make a better product, do marketing.

[00:29:58] I don't know possibly, but. This is not really about. A lot of marketing and scaling it that way, I think was unique with great and this business model is that you can run it on a very, very high margin industry, especially if we manage to give away money and get links, is that our competitors used their money to buy the links and buy the publicity. And hopefully we'll be able to get that anyway and actually run it that way. So I don't see us needing to reinvest. Instead, I see us being able to give and very few companies can be run on a 70 percent business profit margin. But I've done this before. I know it's possible and I've seen the competitors out there. But you need that specific knowledge to to accomplish that. So I can see from someone looking in, most companies would reinvest instead of doing this. And I believe that we can do it without that big reinvestment.

[00:30:58] Right. And do you plan to take in an investor something like that?

[00:31:02] If any investor wants to invest money in a company that will never make profit and give away all the profits? I'm open for investors, but it's probably going to be a shitty investment from a regular business at the moment. I'm putting in all the money I put in maybe one one point to one point five million or something so far dollars. And I'm hoping that we will turn it into a profit within a year and we'll take it from there.

[00:31:31] Right, and so let's say you now put on all of your best cowboy gear and you're going to take a guess where greatest in 10 years, how much money do you think we could be making and donating in 10 years?

[00:31:45] I believe four million dollars per month is realistic eight, 10 years from now. Wow.

[00:31:53] That's a lot of money. Yeah. Let's hold our thumbs and hope we get there. So. I think we are coming up towards the end now, so what can someone do to help?

[00:32:04] Great to help themselves moving forward from here is a big part in helping this project is actually helping this podcast, because if we get this podcast where we want it to be, this podcast, it's going to be one part of getting links and publicity for great outcome. It's going to help us to climb the search engines. That's going to help us to make money. It's going to help us to get out up there and and accomplish this and to help this podcast. Right now, a crucial thing you can do is to subscribe to it, because what happens when you subscribe to our podcast is that we get higher up in the various top list on iTunes and Spotify and so on. And these top lists are actually not based on the numbers of subscribers you have or the numbers of listeners, but the ratio between how many listens to it and how many clicks subscribe. So with a small podcast, every subscriber makes a bigger impact. And a lot of people are actually starting to subscribe to the podcast. So we see us climbing on a regular basis and we are so happy about that. So thank you for listening and thank you for subscribing. And if you're not already subscribing, please join all the others and subscribe you to Beautiful.

[00:33:15] There's something you want to add before we quit. Let's end it there. Thanks for today and we'll see you in the next week's episode.