 So to my subscribers and anyone else that's landed on this channel I've just finished a video pitch I'll show you everything sort of set up here so that's why I thought I would make the most of it so let me just get this going. Here's my video camera there I've got the lighting here we've got my script on the ground there and I've got Teddy over there he's my object to get my zoom right that's one of my kids Teddy's and I also let's see if I can flip this up I've also got my lapel in and essentially what I've been doing is we've got a bit of a video series running at the moment which is proving to be very successful that's helping us acquire a lot more bike shops on the bikechaser platform it's a platform it's a business that I co-founded with my brother-in-law way back in 2013 so because I've got all the equipment set up and as my subscribers would know I'm trying to test a few things on this channel I thought what might be interesting is to share with you my journey in bikechaser now I know many of the subscribers out there will know of bikechaser but basically it's a marketplace for bikes and what primary model is is we connect local bike shops with consumers okay and local bike shops will use our platform because they want to get leads for their business and if we can generate leads for their business that means they're selling bikes and they will use our platform okay now I'm not sure what the perception out there on bikechaser is but we still very much see it internally within our business as a startup we haven't really got the business off the ground yet yes we have clients yes we have lots of traffic but we don't really have a turnkey business until all of us earning money out of the business and I haven't earned a salary through bikechaser since I went full time on the business in about 18 months ago so this is a cycling station I run a cycling business and I'm really keen to I guess engage with you guys to see if this is a type of content that you would like shared on this channel i.e me talking you through our journey what's happening what's worked well where we're headed etc so this is a bit of a test in this video what I'm going to do is I'm going to condense about five years into five minutes or less than five minutes hopefully so it should bring you up to speed and then something massive happened within our business probably about three weeks ago okay which really has seen us accelerate it so I'm going to leave you with that cliffhanger at the end and depending on how many thumbs up or thumbs down or comments I get also I look at engagement so watch time like the people actually are they tuning out or they're actually watching this so if all that goes well then I'll continue on bringing you along on this journey that I'm going through with bike chaser an online startup business so it's 2012 and I was at a family barbecue with my brother-in-law his name's Jonas and he's Danish kind of sounds like Arnold Schwarzenegger it's very cool and I was expressing frustrations to him I've been road cycling them for about three or four years and I was buying so much gear and I was having to sell it I was expressing frustrations about the available mechanisms for me to sell my equipment online now the Facebook groups did not exist back then so we had things like gumtree ebay and of course bike exchange and while ebay was successful for me it was also very expensive wasn't very focused on cycling and bike exchange seemed to be more focused on the bike stores and the end consumer and gumtree was really no good to me so I was explaining this to him so the next day he sent me an sms and we got together to brainstorm some ideas to essentially create a marketplace for bikes and way back then we neither of us had either worked in the cycling industry knew anything about marketplaces we just thought there was a potential gap in the market now if I knew what I know now about marketplaces there's no way I ever would have attempted this primary reason is other business models that sell a product online so for instance you only need maybe a thousand or two thousand unique visitors a month and you can start selling products same as if same with the service you only need a few inquiries maybe five ten inquiries and you're selling a service you'll be able to make some money with a marketplace not only is it heavily reliant on the technology platform working which we had no expertise in ourselves it's also heavily reliant on a lot of traffic like I'm not just talking tens of thousands I'm talking hundreds of thousands of unique monthly users because what that does is that creates a certain level of activity on your website and that in creates leads for people that are putting products on their website now without them getting leads why would they invest their time putting products on the website so it's been this real chicken and egg and I guess one of the underlying issues as well as we've really had no capital along the journey so knowing all this now if I knew that back then I would have told Jonas to go shove it but we've been on the path and we've learned a hell of a lot and we've obviously had a very positive point now so just going back to 2012 so we decided to do a blog first build a bit of a brand the blog was originally called auction my ride because we were going to try and do auctions and we built a bit of an audience using facebook using our own blog writing content we did instagram etc and we did dick around for a very long period of time because we were both still full time at work and it wasn't until late 2015 that we'd finally decided to not try and build it cheaply overseas which we did which we wasted about six months and a few thousand dollars we engaged a local web development firm called light media and by the end of 2015 we spent about thirty five forty thousand dollars on this website which was a marketplace and we went live back into 2015 and within a few months we recognized that the platform had bugs and issues everywhere and every time we wanted something fixed up it was costing us a few thousand dollars and we were stuck in the weeds as opposed to thinking strategically about how we moved this platform forward so we paused and we wondered is do we just write off this money that we've spent and these years that we've sort of been dicking around in the background to try and get this thing off the ground or do we spend our time trying to look for some web development expertise someone that could buy in the business with resource or somebody who could inject some capital in the business so we could work on the technology platform and also have money for marketing now the guys who developed our website they're called light media they got hold of the fact that we were looking for somebody to buy into the business and in addition to that one of the directors of that business started the biggest car sales website in the Philippines he actually is the co-founder of that business so he not only had all these resources that could help with the technology platform and making sure we could fix all the bugs and take the platform to the next level because really it needed hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on it not tens of thousands and the formula the technology formula for how these marketplaces work particularly if we wanted to take our product to bike stores which was our long-term goal that was really appealing as well so we pitched a business to them and really the reasons why they were interested is because we had a lot of bike stores reach out to us when we started to push the site sort of back into 2015 started 2016 before we sort of died it off whilst we looked for somebody to buy in and during that short period we had bike stores reach out to us saying hey we would love to have another player in the market that we can rely on for online leads and we really dug into that and found out well there could actually be quite a big opportunity here there's one player that's already gone out there and been successful and perhaps there's room for another so that's what we pitched to them they liked what they were hearing and they bought into our business and we essentially sold a massive chunk to Ren who was one director of light media and Chris who was the other we we came to terms and then they spent a lot of time on just fixing all the bugs building capability for bike shops and it was probably not until the start of 2017 where we finally had a product that I felt confident in no but well there's never no bugs but not as many bugs and issues and the reason I say that and what I've learned is every single device operating system web browser etc all has nuances so there's always going to be bugs and issues but we really did fix up a lot of them and we took the platform to the next level and we had capability for bike shops so it started 2017 and we all of a sudden had a platform that we could take to bike shops now what I soon recognized is trying to do a full-time job and do bike chaser at the same time trying to onboard bike shops because whilst we needed the traffic we felt like we needed products first right and in order to get products we needed the bike shop signing up so that was the primary focus and I soon recognized that I couldn't do it with a full-time job so I quit my full-time job I was working for American Software Company in April 2017 and went full-time on bike chaser and a few months later Jonas joined me okay and we signed up about 50 bike shops here in Victoria we were focusing very much on the Victorian market first and we had about 4,000 products which was a pretty solid foundation and after a period of time our bike shops were reaching out to us our clients saying hey where are leads you know why would I invest time into this platform when I'm time poor as it is and I'm not getting the value out of it so that really shifted us this is this chicken and egg scenario into content okay and it was probably mid 2017 where we really started to go hard on content and we spent and churned a fair bit of cash on google lab words and facebook marketing and recognised for us cost per click doesn't work we need organic traffic so I went into a what I call a deep dark abyss of content writing and generation and Jonas was there with me and Ren and Chris were focusing very much on the technology platform it was in this deep dark abyss for 12 months and what it enabled us to do is really up level what's called your domain authority which is a square out of 100 each website has a domain authority and the higher domain authority the more powerful your website is and typically the more traffic you're going to get google and facebook have a domain authority of a hundred right they're the leading ones the top cycling websites in the world would have a domain authority between 40 and 60 bikechaser had a domain authority of around about 12 when we before we started to really focus on this and now we have a domain authority which is over 30 so we had massive increase quality content as well meant that we were you know organically ranking on some great search terms that process in addition to the traffic and our domain authority also enabled us to get some good local exposure we started a podcast with Lee Hollywood Turner which was really popular we did a whole bunch of things like that which enabled us to infiltrate you know certain smaller pockets of the community very much focused on the the Victorian cycling community and our brand awareness increased as well okay so we sort of came out of that abyss maybe three four more maybe six weeks ago and we've now turned back we've recognized we need to turn back to client acquisition going after bike shops and when I was originally going after bike shops when I first went full time no one knew bikechaser we had hardly any traffic it was really a dud but now it's actually through this hard work and this grind it's actually become quite a powerful product something that bike shops are now getting really good value out of I know that personally I speak to them every day more bike shops means more products so we had a lot of a lot of traffic going to our website now like tens of thousands of unique visits every single month and they're looking for they click on our content and they click through to the marketplace and they're looking for a product now if there's no product there for them they'll click out of the website and Google does not like that okay it's really bad for your rankings and it's bad for our website so we need to facilitate the needs of our users by having more product exposure particularly nationally right so we were just because we were driving so much organic traffic about 50 to you know 60 of our traffic was coming outside of Victoria so they were clicking through the marketplace nothing there so that's why back to acquisition and now we've really made some massive inroads something huge happened recently which has seen us pretty much double in size maybe even more in the space of a few weeks we've also had some transitions in terms of directorship in the business and this has all happened in the last you know short period of time so that's kind of the cliffhanger i'll leave you with if you like this type of content you want to hear me talk to you more about bike chaser what's happening in the business i mean i can talk about so much stuff i know so much now about marketplaces i know so much about seo i know facebook marketing i know how to do video like this so much stuff i've learned and that's really you know when i reflect right now even though we haven't made much money or any money out of bike chaser right now i love what i've learnt i love the industry i love knowing that we can support the local bike shop because i think the local bike shop is the place to go to support your bike riding journey and we now have a platform and i know how to now have a means through video to be able to share messages and hopefully educate you know particularly first second and third time buyers so i love that part of what bike chaser has given me personally and i'm more than happy in fact i love to share this journey you know i can talk to you about okay the cliffhanger what actually has happened in the last number of weeks which has seen our business accelerate in the next video and then moving forward like things that happen within the business you're going to be engaged because i've brought you up to speed and i can bring you along on the journey if you're up for it so i'm going to leave it there let me know thumbs up thumbs down comments below and thank you so much for listening and i'll catch you in the next video