Lessons from Selling My First Business

This week, the ink dried on me selling my first business. This is one of many ventures I've started and the only one that provided a successful financial outcome. Though the business and products themselves don't necessarily apply to the multifamily industry, my hope is that the lessons learned from this venture apply and can help you as a marketing professional. Some quick facts about the business.

Exiting Simple Sheets

Simple Sheets is a website that sells digital products - namely spreadsheet templates and courses. My role was building out our library of Excel and Google Sheets templates, optimizing conversion rates, partnering with affiliates, building out email funnels, and growing the organic footprint through SEO and our YouTube channel. Here are the numbers I'm most proud of.

1. Grew Simple Sheets from 0 -> 1,000,000 organic clicks in a year (2023)

2. Grew YouTube channel from 0 to
   

   • 2020 - 4,960 views, +81 subscribers

   • 2021 - 103,882 views, +1,430 subscribers

   • 2022 - 415, 654 views, +3,010 subscribers

   • 2023 - 1,407,372 views, +9,974 subscribers

   • 2024 - 1,641,293 views, +13,085 subscribers

   • All-time excluding 2025 - 3.6M views, 29K subscribers

3. Built out library, product pages, and video tutorials for 125+ templates Excel & Google Sheets. I am not an Excel developer by any means, but luckily worked with an amazing man named Kareem who actually built the templates.

4. Grew our affiliate traffic from 0 -> 463,000 views all time. Generated 37K opt-ins, and 848 conversions.

Lesson #1 - Go Organic

There was a time where if you knew how run paid ads, namely Meta, you were printing cash. And Simple Sheets was at some point. However, so had another business I was part of. Then came the clash between Meta and Apple which resulted in worse tracking and retargeting. This change fundamentally shifted the landscape and ultimately reduced ROI for most advertisers. Having seen this first hand, I knew that for this to be a business, it couldn't be dependent on a single channel. So, I decided to build product pages for every template that included images of the template, a video tutorial, and a written overview. Over time, our website started to massively develop topical authority. Because we had such a vast library, we ranked for high-intent keywords that drove actual revenue. Once we turned off paid ads, nearly all of our revenue was organic and we started seeing nearly all revenue from Google Search and YouTube.

Simple Sheets was my job for the first year or so. It was a pivotal time for me to be on the ground floor of building out the website and content. Since that first year, it's been extremely passive due to the process and people we've had executing on developing the templates, making and producing the videos, and writing blog content (which my business partners did a good job of doing).

Organic content is the gift that keeps on giving. In this case, it kept the business afloat when paid ads became a channel that no longer worked for us. Yes, it takes significantly longer to grow your organic footprint but organic is like a crock pot and paid ads are like a microwave. If you need growth fast, spend the money. But make your life easier by investing at least 20% of your time in long-term strategies that will be the gift that keeps on giving.

In the multifamily industry, that means investing in things like your corporate website/ILS, SEO, social, and YouTube.

Lesson #2 - Diversify Your Growth Channels

Building off the first point, it's essential to diversify your growth channels in this digital age. You never know when there is going to be a tectonic shift in the way people and platforms evolve. Just over the course of the business we navigated Paid Ads reducing in effectiveness and now the hurdle is Google Search reducing the organic traffic we received as well as the need for templates (since AI can be helpful with formulas and the like).

However, you don't want to diversify too early. Nearly every growth channel has some form of compounding so you want to build up one or two before branching out. In many cases, you can use your strength in one channel to benefit another...

Lesson #3 - Piggyback on Your Best Growth Channels

Our blog content started to take off. As many people would either read the article/tip and bounce, we realized video was a powerful way to answer people's questions. So we made videos for our top-performing blog posts and embedded them. This generated views for our YouTube channel, additional subscribers, and even helped us monetize it. Through our strong SEO, we snowballed that into growing our YouTube channel.

Lesson #4 - It's the People

Two people worked with me through the entirety of Simple Sheets - my friend Kareem and Joe. Both were extremely diligent, quick-learners and flexible. They made my life much easier and helped me continue to invest in our content while I had other jobs and couldn't do as much. Truly if you want to grow anything having consistency is key and working with really smart people is worth its weight in gold. I think I learned a lot about the people I want to work with through this experience and it's helped shape that muscle at my day job.

Lesson #5 - Know When to Sell

This business probably could have sold 2-3x what I sold it for. That's a hard pill to swallow. There came a point where my work was stalled. Creatively, I no longer had the juice nor the people to help fulfill my vision of what Simple Sheets could be. Once it became clear that there wasn't a path to growth, I should have gotten out of the business.

Bottom Line

Simple Sheets is the business I am most proud of. Yes, it was the most successful, but it also heavily had my footprints and validated my business prowess to myself. After RentHoop, an app that received a bunch of press and users but no revenue nor investors, I thought that maybe I was just someone who got lucky. This business helped confirm that business is a passion of mine because I'm good at it and I need to take more swings. That's part of what has inspired me to build out the Multifamily Marketing Course. I want to share these lessons with an industry that is quickly modernizing and becoming more important