Famous for selling the business for $1 million dollars in his first year at Uni, Kieran shared his secrets at our Web Entrepreneurship Conference in March.
Kieran started Holylemon.com when he was still at secondary school. Originally, it was just somewhere to share funny animations with his friends. As a couple of years passed, he realised that he was getting a number of hits from people he didn't know, all over the world. He became interested in Keyword optimisation and challenged himself to increase the number of hits every week. Gradually he improved the website, making the content more appealing by offering funny videos to download. Ultimately, years before Youtube, he embedded videos!
Things continued to improve steadily from here – there were 40000 people coming to his website each month but the website overheads were getting ridiculous. One month, he received a huge bill that he simply couldn't pay. He had to go to his Dad and ask for the money or it was all over. His Dad agreed, only based on Kieran's assurance that next month, the site would be profitable.
That was it. In just a couple of weeks, he had to learn all the secrets of advertising online and apply them. Apparently he didn't get much school work done for a while! He experimented with different types of advertising, CPM – banner ads, and CPA – targeted adverts for the user base. Eventually he stumbled across a technique for daisy chaining high value ads to make reasonable money. By now, he was up to 150,000 hits per month.
Finally, the business was profitable. He managed to automate it, allow user generated content and found a moderator in America who happily selected a "featured video" every week for two years. Kieran outsourced the development and soon he only had to spend 1 hour a day on the business.
At this point, he felt that it was time to sell the company. He was off to Uni and knew he would have less and less time to spend on the site. Eventually he found a buyer through a fantastic referral and was offered $1 million dollars: an incredible amount that he simply couldn't refuse. The sale process was incredibly stressful and he was constantly worried about the deal falling through. However, near the end of his first ear at uni, the business was sold!
Wow. What a legend. And it doesn't stop there. Since then he's been involved with a couple more internet based start-ups; securing millions of venture capital along side his awesome £600,000 nest egg.
Check out PSU – PlayStation Universe
- 0.5 million readers a month
- 4 people in-house and 15 freelance writing articles for the site.
And Playfire, a new social network, and Kieran's own project
- Used his substantial network of contacts to find £1 million of funding
- Already has 110000 people signed up!
He also recommends the "Freemium" model:
- First service is free
- Premium sections are restricted to "Pro" users.
I really enjoyed hearing from him and I hope he comes back next year to update us on progress!
All the best,
Big Fish.
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