Milk Road Values Quality

A story about how Shaan learned the importance of deserving what you want during the sale of his company Milk Road.

"When we sold the Milk Road, one of the reasons we sold to the guys we did was I really respected these guys. It was not the highest offer, but these were the highest quality people we could sell to. We had a hunch that selling to the highest quality people will result in the best long-term outcome. Even if we lose a dollar today, being in business with these guys might create three more dollars in the future just by being around high quality people.

These guys had built businesses - one had sold his business for about 90-100 million and the other had sold his business for over 200 million. Both had built businesses that were SEO based. I know a lot about marketing and growth, but I know zero about SEO. I'm an absolute beginner.

So during the deal, I sat them down and asked them to teach me about SEO. I wanted to know the real master-level stuff that helped one guy create the number one search result for 'buy gold online' - the business that sold for a few hundred million that he bootstrapped.

His response was surprising. He said when they were the 5th result, he printed out all 5 results and sat down for an hour just looking at them. He had an honest conversation with himself about why someone would click on his page versus the others. He realized they didn't deserve the click - they weren't better pages. So for the next year, every week he printed out all the pages and made his page 10% better until they could objectively say they deserved to be higher ranked.

I was kind of disappointed at first because I came looking for some secret SEO trick, but it was refreshing to learn that even the masters of SEO say you just have to have the best page and deserve that top ranking."