Fred Schebesta

And can you give us an idea of what the experimentation is around? Is it around sort of link building or keywords?

We run experiments on conversion, we run experiments on how Google sees pages, we run some experiments on where Google wants to see stuff, we run experiments on link building. We’re starting to invest, which we weren’t before, on technology. We look at our competitors and see what they’re doing as well and we run tests and experiments and see why they’re doing that and see what’s the effect of that.

In many circumstances we’d want to run a test and if you make a change and it makes a big effect across your site, for us that’s quite a loss of revenue directly. We make a good decision, it will affect positive, if we make a bad decision it will affect it negative. I guess that is one mistake we have made. We have tripped a couple of penalties before and that’s been an absolute emotional rollercoaster. I’ve actually written this up as the seven stages of dealing with a Google penalty.

Because it’s a pretty difficult umpire to argue with, isn’t it?

Especially when the umpire doesn’t talk back.

Fred, it sounds like you’re having a great time with this business but you are a bit of a serial entrepreneur. Are you already thinking about other businesses? Do you have an exit plan already in mind or is it too early to think about it?

We would entertain talking to people about obviously buying our brand. You’re probably going to see me in here for quite awhile because it combines a lot of my personal skills even better than the previous business I’d say. So the next steps from here would be, we would entertain some media company or some private equity company buying our brand and obviously taking over the sites and I can assure you now that we’re not cheap James, because it’s just a very well oiled machine and I’d rather hold onto it and take the profits.

So our plans would to be launch new brands and go into new niches. So as I said we’ve launched the home loan and the savings account sites. They’re the new niches at present and consolidating those, they’re not quite as lucrative as the credit card space because it’s just a slower market. They take a lot of time for people to make decisions with them, but with the credit card people apply online immediately. And the next step from there would be to open up international. Do the same things we do but launch a dotcom and go to the US or launch a dot.co.uk. We have launched one .co.uk but it’s been very, very competitive, they’re even more competitive than in Australia. Australia’s very, very competitive in the niches that we compete in but the UK and the US there’s a thousand Fred Schebestas running around.

That’s a scary thought.

I wouldn’t want to hang out with those guys.

Thanks, Fred.