Finding gaps in online business succcess stories has been integral to our own success, and Gaps was built to help you find yours.
At 16 years old I (Glen) started my first website focused on DJ’s with a few friends I made online. At the height of MySpace’s popularity, it was creatively called MyDJSpace, hah. The site quickly passed 10,000 users and was even featured in the book Dj’ing for Dummies.
It wasn’t long before we were all dreaming of creating bigger things online, but it was a great starting point for all of us.
At 17 years old I left my friends and family in the UK to move to Cape Town, South Africa, to work for a digital agency offering marketing solutions for brands like Hewlett Packard, Land Rover and Barcadi.
I didn’t know a single person in South Africa and as an introverted teenager, quickly had to grow up.
I decided to start a personal development blog to document everything I was reading and learning about motivation, productivity, health and more.
The blog was called PluginID, with the slogan “Plug in to your identity” — hey, I was a teenager.
It’s no longer online but it looked something like this.
The primary reason that PluginID was successful was because I found a gap in the market when it came to traffic generation. Guest blogging was just becoming a ‘thing’ and I decided to go all-in.
In a single month my writing was featured on over 20 other blogs in the space, and I probably wrote 50+ articles for other websites. Some of which were huge at the time, such as Leo Babauta’s Zen Habits which reaches millions of visitors per month and Problogger from Darren Rowse.
Today guest blogging is more frowned upon and a tactic mostly used by those looking for higher search engine rankings, but when I saw that writing for other people’s blogs was becoming the norm and people actively seeked people to write for them, I capitalised on the opportunity.
The site quickly ranked on the first page of Google for terms like ‘personal development’ and ‘personality development’ (surprisingly the more popular of the two) which constantly brought in new readers.
18 months after launch, our feedburner chicklet (these were a popular way to show your reach) had just passed more than 7,000 subscribers.
Although PluginID was my “baby”, I decided it was time for someone else to take on the blog and it’s next chapter, and sold the site for a mid five-figure fee.
Solving my own problem created a six-figure WordPress plugin
After the sale of PluginID and the success I had ranking it in Google, I re-launched my SEO blog, ViperChill, which later became the SEO resource I now run at Detailed.com.
At the time most people used Aweber for managing their email lists and the options it had in place for designing your opt-in forms was minimal. This was well before people were using content upgrades or pop-ups to gain new leads.
This presented me with my next gap in the market: People needed a better way to collect leads and split-test their opt-in forms for maximum conversions.
I teamed up with one of my best friends and incredible developers, Graeme Boy, to create a plugin we named OptinSkin.
(Another side note: Graeme has had a ton of success in the crypto space in recent years in the US, and built quite a name for himself).
Though we had many hiccups along the way with OptinSkin, it was a product we were both incredibly proud of. As far as I know, we were the first plugin to ever offer split-testing for opt-in forms on a blog.
For three years it was the number one best-selling product on the Clickbank marketplace in the ‘software’ category, and generated a few hundred thousand dollars in that time period.
After a few years of success, OptinSkin was acquired.
Since then, the opt-in space became hugely popular with a ton of well-funded companies in the space. Email marketing providers also upped their game and offer much better forms than they did in the past, but we had a great run.
Since then we’ve primarily succeeded with our SEO agency and extension (350,000+ weekly users)
When I first tried to sell SEO services under the name ‘ViperChill’, I really struggled to land clients.
I spent years writing about the topic of how to rank websites in Google, but could barely get anyone to reach out and actually ask me to help them with growing their business.
That brings us to gap number three.
Along with my business partner Diggy, we realised that creating SEO companies for specific regions (like Singapore) and industries (like Automotive) made the challenge of closing clients 100x easier.
Today around 70% of businesses are pitched SEO services at least once per week so it’s a tough market to crack and stand out in.
However, instead of offering every kind of service to everyone – as I did when I started ViperChill – we were now branding ourselves as “The SEO agency for businesses in Singapore” and angled all promotions as only working with that local area.
Potential clients started thinking “This is the agency for me” rather than “Not another pitch from an SEO guy”.
This change of approach took us from struggling to land every single client to being able to generate 7-figures in a single year.
In more recent years, I doubled-down on a single element of SEO: Audits.
It became something we were known for and we got to provide them for some incredible companies you might be familiar with such as Ahrefs, Freshbooks, Kit (formerly ConvertKit), Kinsta and many more.
I’m only mentioning companies where I specifically asked for permission to do so.
I also doubled down on writing reports at Detailed, and was able to see my work presented on screen at conferences.
That’s the former head of SEO at Microsoft using my information on 16 companies dominating Google (right side of the slide) in a recent presentation.
I promise I have no ego about this. I am absolutely flattered and it still amazes me.
As of 2024, I’m no longer taking on any kind of client work (besides this $40 side project to help cool businesses and always be on top of what’s working).
We’re also building the Detailed SEO Extension which currently has over 350,000 weekly users.
I never ever imagined it would become so popular, and sincerely appreciate everyone who uses it and helps spread the word.
We’re very fortunate to be in the position where to get to pick and choose our next projects, and working on promoting our own projects is what we’re focused on now.
Which brings us to the relaunch of Gaps…
Gaps is something we’ve built a number of times over the last few years
The biggest problem I’ve encountered in my online journey is having too many ideas and spreading my work efforts too thin.
Literally on a daily basis I come up with new website ideas I would love to create and implement myself. However, I quickly learned to say ‘no’ to more projects than yes.
In 2011 I launched Cloud niche, an email list focused on sending those website ideas to my audience at ViperChill.
Here’s how that site looked.
I only sent 8 niche ideas to email subscribers, but received over 1,000 “thank you” email replies in return.
I later re-launched and rebranded the email list as ‘inc ideas’.
Because I was more focused on sharing SEO advice rather than niche ideas, the number of emails I sent were once again fewer than ten.
Each time I’ve shared a business opportunity, the feedback has always been incredible.
However, me sharing these ideas has always been an ‘add-on’ to ViperChill / Detailed, rather than something I really focused on updating on a frequent basis.
Gaps was created to change that, and create a home for these ideas that I can’t stop thinking about.
Some of these reports and predictions have made people millions though as a disclaimer, I can’t verify that legally (it’s just what I’ve been told).
I think there needs to be a place to share a lot more of these ideas, and that’s what Gaps is for.
I’m really excited to be relaunching the site now in 2024.
Thank you for being here. I really appreciate you checking out the site.
– Glen
