How Much Can I Make? — Real Jobs. Real Stories. Career Insights

Digital Entrepreneur: How to Build a Profitable Online Business

• Mirav Ozeri - Career Insights Journalist • Season 2 • Episode 71

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Digital Entrepreneur

Discover practical job ideas and career insights in digital entrepreneurship.

What if you could learn a practical web skill over a single weekend, build a simple website for a local business, and turn it into steady monthly income?

In this episode, we sit down with Matt Raad to break down a realistic path from beginner to profitable digital entrepreneurship. We talk about building websites for local businesses, creating income-producing digital assets, and growing a service-based online business from home—without e-commerce headaches, technical overload, or large upfront investment.

You’ll hear real-world case studies, including:
• A couple who left burnout careers and earned $160,000 in their first year
• A FIFO worker making $5,000+ on off weeks by offering AI automation services
• A stay-at-home mom with limited English who turned free starter websites into a family business over time

If you’re searching for a side hustle, a work-from-home business, or a practical way to make money online using web skills, this episode is a must-listen.

Connect with Matt Raad 

website: https://www.ebusinessinstitute.com.au/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matt-raad/?originalSubdomain=au

Podcast: https://www.digitalinvestors.com/



How Much Can I Make? Is nominated for 2026 Women in Podcasting Award!

Want us to cover a specific job? Shoot us an email!

Visit howmuchcanimake.info

Music credit: Kate Pierson & Monica Nation

Teasing A Low-Risk Digital Side Hustle

Matt Raad - Guest

But it's a low cost, low risk way of getting into a side hustle. You know, we're seeing them do anywhere from$30,000 to around$70,000 as a side income, as a side hustle per year.

Framing The Promise And Guest Intro

Mirav Ozeri - Host

Hi, welcome back to How Much Can I Make? The podcast about jobs, money, and opportunities. And that's what we're going to talk about today. What if you could start an online business from home with no capital, no technical skills, without quitting your job and still make very good money? Sounds like a dream? Well, there is a way to do it, apparently. Matt Radd, who was here last week talking about digital real estate, is back again on the show and I'm so excited about it. He's gonna tell us about a different way to build digital assets that does not involve e-commerce, which could be a nightmare, and will generate money monthly. It sounds like a dream, I know. But there are many people who are actually doing it. And Matt is here to tell us all about it. All right, Matt. I'm excited to see you again on the show.

Matt Raad - Guest

Likewise.

Why Foundational Web Skills Matter

Mirav Ozeri - Host

And today we're gonna talk about digital agencies for beginners, you said. Yep. For beginners. So tell me a little bit about that.

Matt Raad - Guest

Where do I start, Miravi? This is really exciting. This is a really exciting strategy. So for your listeners, maybe they heard me on the last podcast interview that you did with me, which was awesome by the way. Thank you so much. My background is buying and selling businesses, and we teach people how to do that with online businesses. But what we've also found over the years, and we've always taught this for about a decade now, to get really good digital skills, because one of the things I think I mentioned in your in the interview with you, one of the you were asking me, well, what do you need to do to be able to work online from home?

Mirav Ozeri - Host

And I never asked you why is it important to learn to build a website?

Learning By Building For Local Businesses

Matt Raad - Guest

Because you need the foundational digital skills. They are just because it teaches you how online businesses work, it gives you a really good understanding of no one wants to hear the technical side, but you do need a bit of tech experience. And luckily it's a lot of drag and drop and drag and things like that. But there is a technical element to working online, and it's really helpful to be able to understand that so that when you're building your business and you come to outsource with outsources, you know what they're doing on your websites. What I wanted to talk about today is what we've seen because it's such a practical skill teaching people how to build, like I believe it's a very fundamental skill. If you want to work online, also wrapped into that is understand how they work, how do they get traffic? I'm doing a funnel thing here. So where does traffic come from? How do you build the site? What do you need to do ongoing? And then what we do is once we're comfortable with the practical side of that, then you outsource all that anyway. There's lots of outsourcing, go to upwork.com to help you do that. But in that journey, over we've been teaching this now for 15 years, what we noticed is the people, we've all always said to people, look, one of the quickest ways to learn in a very practical way how to build a website, but also earn while you're learning, is build why not build a simple little website for your local trading? So your local electrician or a or a plumber or a or even a dentist or a white collar, like an accountant, something like that. Because there's a massive opportunity. Google puts a lot of effort, even in this day and age of AI, into what we call local sites. So local sites are very specifically their websites that rank in a very specific geographic area, pretty much your local town.

Mirav Ozeri - Host

Okay.

Matt Raad - Guest

And you would have seen them if you're looking up for, you know, plumber near me or something. Right, exactly.

Mirav Ozeri - Host

Yeah, yeah.

Matt Raad - Guest

That's the sort of site. So what we've observed over the years for people that want to get out of corporate, probably the quickest way to learn and earn an income, and if you like it and you're good at it, basically what it can lead to is literally replacing your income. We've seen people do it within one year, replace their incomes.

Mirav Ozeri - Host

Wow. So, but let's back up a second. How long does it take for somebody to learn how to build a website?

What Makes A Website Convert

Matt Raad - Guest

You can learn how to build a website in a weekend. So I know it sounds yeah, it's pretty easy to learn, but you need, but like it's not a get rich quick thing. Okay. You need rec. So where about, so you don't really know what you're doing even once you've built a basic website. Then you need to refine it and understand. This is the part I was saying, no matter what strategy you do with an online business, it's not just good enough to build a website, lots of people can build websites, but you need to understand how they convert and how they work. Like what's the primary goal of that website? Is it to get a someone to ring a phone number? Is it to get people to fill out like an email form for more information? Or is it to get people to buy something on the website? So that's the fun part of what we do. It's kind of learning, basically, it's learning very basic digital marketing. And again, I want to reiterate for your listeners, if you want to learn the quickest way I think to learn how to do this and actually earn some money as well so that you can see this is a viable business, is literally just you know build a basic website for a local business owner. We recommend you do it for free at first, that way there's no obligation on you or them. So this is a really, really cost-effective way to get into a little digital business just to see if you like it. If you don't like it, walk away from it. Don't do it. But for a lot of our members, once they get into it, they build a few free sites, then they might charge like a minimum fee like$500 to build a website. This is all stuff that you can do in the evening, part-time, and then you can step it up and start to charge a thousand to two thousand to three thousand dollars for a website build. So you can imagine you get three business owners. Well, there's almost ten thousand dollars just for building three simple websites.

Mirav Ozeri - Host

Not that I want to burst the bubble, but I have a question. I know that AI can today can build a website, you could tell the AI what to do.

Matt Raad - Guest

That's what we teach.

Mirav Ozeri - Host

So you teach them how to use AI to build a website. Yep. Oh, that's it.

Building site with AI

Matt Raad - Guest

So Liz and I, Liz Liz is my wife. We just built a website uh just the other day purely with AI, and we had it up and running within about an hour. The AI built websites, they're not perfect. Right. You've still got to understand how to tweak them up. And then what we will do, that website that we've bought, it's for a business, it generates leads and gets a phone ringing. What we will do now, we've built the basic foundations of the website within about an hour. And now we'll, if we work on it once a week over the next, say, three months, is a part-time side hustle thing for us. Um, we just rent out the leads. So if someone rings it, we get paid$40 every time they ring that phone number. That's another strategy. I'm jumping ahead a little bit. Yeah. But basically, we will just build that site out, like we'll tweak it up. But they ring an hour or two.

Mirav Ozeri - Host

Somebody rings the website to do what? To get what?

Matt Raad - Guest

For a plumber. And we sell the lead to the plumber.

Mirav Ozeri - Host

Oh, wow, that's an idea.

Gaining expirience

Matt Raad - Guest

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we just rent the website out. Essentially, we're renting out the website. Wow, what a the strategy is very, very simple, but you need to learn the foundations. That's what we're all about. You've got to understand the basics of this. And and again, I want to reiterate the easiest way to learn is literally just build a basic website and build it for free for the next tradesperson that comes to your house. Just say, hey, do you have a website? And that's how that's how we we get people doing it. And then you just build it. It's like anything in life, it's just steps, reps, reps, reps. You just go the next one, the next one. Once you've built five, you've got a fair bit of experience and you can probably start charging, and then you can go on from there. Once you know what you're doing, you can find tradespeople or local business people like accountants and things that have websites that are poorly performing and you can fix them up for them. It's pretty easy once you know what you're doing. We have Miraf, we have total beginners. When I say total beginners, people that have never done this before. Within a year. Yeah, we're within a year literally quitting their job. So our best result ever is Derek and Courtney. Derek was working in, had a senior sales role in the alcohol industry here in Australia. He was burnt out. Um, they just had two little kids, and his wife, Courtney, was working in a very senior role for a charity in a senior management role. She decided to keep her job. Derek took a six-month sabbatical, like he does stress leave, and never went back. And in that first year, he generated$160,000.

Mirav Ozeri - Host

Whoa, how?

From Beginner To Replacing Income

Matt Raad - Guest

He was a machine. He just went out and sold websites. So he learned, so what Courtney did, it's on our podcast. You can see that these two are unusual. They're go-getters, they're very, very driven, and they were totally burnt out. So what happened was he would go out during the day every single day. So I coached him through this. I taught him how to build basic websites, and Courtney did it as well. She would come home from work and then feed the kids, and then they'd both sit there on their laptops at the kitchen table when the kids go to bed and they'd build these websites. And then during the day, Derek would just go out and network and sell websites to local business owners. You think about it, you've only got to sell three a month, that's 10 grand a month. Yeah. But he went bigger than that, and they got some big clients. Once they got better and better, so this didn't happen straight away. This was towards the very end of their year, they'd hit$160,000. And now they're hitting in their second year, they're doing$50,000 months.

Mirav Ozeri - Host

Whoa.

Constant income stream

Matt Raad - Guest

So that's within just two years from never building a website in his entire life. And the thing was, at the end of year one, it went so well. Courtney quit her job as well, and now she works with Derek full-time, and they're building this digital agency together. And yeah, they're really successful with it. Very because he's a sales machine, so he knows how to sell. Everyone thinks it's all on the technical side, like like you said, anyone can build a website with AI. It's actually that's not the secret source. The secret source is getting out there and talking to business owners. If you can do that, you've got a zero cost business. It costs them nothing to set this up, except for the coaching with us. That was it.

Mirav Ozeri - Host

But once he sells the website is out of the picture completely, or does he make it no, no, no, not at all.

FIFO Schedule To $5K Months With AI

Matt Raad - Guest

That's the beautiful part because then you do recurring revenues. That's where you earn monthly incomes because you can do add-on services like updates. They do what's called ongoing SEO. So now in their second year, now that they're good at this, they can start charging anywhere from a thousand to two thousand dollars a month per client, and that's why their income's gone up dramatically. Oh, and it's just so no, you don't let the client go. But at the minimum, you can charge$50 to$200 a month just for maintenance for updating the website. That doesn't sound a lot, but you do the numbers if you have 10 clients at 200 bucks. It's a good, this is a good so we have a lot of clients do this as a side hustle. Most of our clients are earning six figures plus, and they've got the, as you know, golden handcuffs. They don't want, they've got a mortgage, they don't want to walk away from that. So they most of our clients do this in the evening. You know, we're seeing them do anywhere from$30,000 to around$70,000 as a side income, as a side hustle per year. We've got one client uh here in Australia, uh, we've got the mining industry is really big. So we have a lot of FIFA. Do you have it in America? It's called fly-in-fly out workers.

Mirav Ozeri - Host

We have traveling workers.

Matt Raad - Guest

Yeah, well, maybe that's what it so here in Australia it's a really big thing because they're really highly paid. So what they'll do is they fly to a remote mine site in the desert in Australia, they work on it for seven days, and then they come back home and they've got seven days off. So it's seven days on, seven days off. Well, sometimes it's one, uh two weeks on, two weeks off. And so it's perfect for this sort of a business. And last year we had this a young guy, he's called Josh, he's got three kids. His commute is to the entire other side of Australia, which is Western Australia. He's got a seven-hour commute, right? He's paid lots and lots of money. He's got a he runs 20 guys, he's a fitter and turner, like you know, keeps all the machinery going. But in the on the side, guess what his side hustle is, is what we're talking about. And he's become an AI expert. So he uses AI now. He's working with tradies and everything. So when he flies back to the Gold Coast, he goes out and talks to tradespeople and business owners and he builds them websites. He's now making$5,000 a month plus on his two weeks off. And it's going bigger. He said if he keeps at it and he's got two or three big clients, like these are big businesses now. He's getting really good at he's become really good at AI automations, and he just everyone, all these businesses want AI automation. So he does that as his side hustle. And he goes, Matt, I it's on it's on the podcast. He said, I think next year I'll be able to quit my high-paying job. He won't have to do the FIFO thing. It's earning him that much money. So and his wife is thinking about joining him as well. Again, she's working full-time. He's just he's young, he's got a lot of energy. So basically, he works full-time. So he does FIFO, and when he gets back, he works on this full because it's worth it. It's setting him up for a future. But also, he doesn't want to do FIFO work. You get really highly paid, but you're away from your family, and you know, it's all that so a lot of we have quite a few here in Australia. Like I said, it's a big thing. We have quite a few clients who are FIFO, fly in, fly out, and they all want to transition out. Like they they Mirav, they literally have the golden handcuffs. Like they're in their early 20s and they're earning hundreds of thousands of dollars working one week on, one week off.

Mirav Ozeri - Host

Right, but when you build a site for a professional, do you need to really know about their business or is it more or less generic?

Matt Raad - Guest

It's not generic, that's part of the skill of sales. What we get people to do is you don't just build a basic site, you actually go and talk to them, like Derek did. He went around every single day meeting people face to face. You chat to them and you find out we have a business assessment checklist, and you just find out off them what are the main things that you sell or or the services that you offer, and you actually talk to them face to face and figure out what are the main things that you do and what are the main sort of clients that you want. Okay, that's how we're gonna build the business. We'll focus the business so that it highlights your strong points, definitely not generic.

Mirav Ozeri - Host

That brings me to the question because you also teach uh basically your school for everything digital, but you also teach it digital marketing. But you also teach uh digital marketing.

Discovery, Positioning, And Non-Generic Sites

Matt Raad - Guest

Yes, I I would say so because most people that come to us are total beginners, they don't understand what digital marketing is or how the online space works, or even for that matter, really how businesses work. A lot of our clients don't come from a business background. So, what we've got to do is teach everyone the basics of not only how a website works, but why the good ones work so well. And essentially that is digital marketing. We just don't use the term digital marketing. A lot of web developers don't do this, they won't talk to the owners properly and they won't find out exactly what they want. Say there's an accountant or or it might be a lawyer and they specialize in commercial law. So we need to build the website around that. So the digital marketing, we would go and spend time with them or their 2IC or whatever, or but ideally the owner, say, all right, what sort of leads do you want? We don't want to be getting divorced lawyer leads, or we don't want to be getting DUI leads, and we don't want to be getting general lawyer leads, we just want commercial law. So then we've got to start putting our marketing hats on, talk to the owner and go, show me what the competition's doing, what are the sort of leads, what's working out there now, and what sort of content do we need on here? And most importantly, how can we display your authority or trustworthiness? There are they're also SEO signals, search engine optimization signals. So everything feeds, everything just fits together. Once you understand the whole picture, and this is why we don't want beginners going out there and charging you know money straight up front for building a site, because I don't really know what they're doing. But once you understand the whole picture, you'll realize, okay, for this lawyer site, it's not as simple as just slapping up a basic website, and then part of the marketing mix might be where on the internet do we present these guys? Because we've got AI now. So do we integrate their LinkedIn profile, which you would do with a lawyer, obviously? What other social media channels might be useful for this business? And we can integrate that as well. And then we think about ongoing. What ongoing content do we need to get out there? And this is the fun part. Once you understand, if you like this sort of thing, it's really good fun, it's really easy work.

Mirav Ozeri - Host

What kind of character traits or skills somebody needs in order to be successful in that?

Teaching Digital Marketing Without Jargon

Soft Skills, Empathy, And Sales

Jing’s $30K Start And Family Pivot

Matt Raad - Guest

I mean, first off, I was just gonna say it can be anyone. You just got to get in, have a go and see if you like it. Okay, because it's very it's really good for your brain, it's it's a bit of a puzzle thing, but it's generally the skills that we find are people who are empathetic. The best skills, like if you want the best skills, people that are willing to listen and talk to the business owner and find out what they need, and then you've got to have the skill sets to put that together on a website. You can outsource that the technical side once you know the basics of it. But really, the best skill sets are empathy, listening to people, and getting out there and talking to people. Believe it or not, as much as this is a digital business, the best skills are personal skills, and that can be taught. That is something you know. I I think it boils down to ideally, if you're good at sales, like Derek, I he's probably one of our most successful clients in a very short amount of time to earn 160 grand in 12 months. That is mind-blowing, like, really, in terms of as a total beginner. But I think part of Derek's success was he is very good personally with people, he's very tenacious, he follows up with people, he's really good at door knocking, going and chatting to business owners. Really, essentially, he's really good at sales, right? And that is a very, very powerful skill set to have in this day and age. If there's any young people listening to this, I would highly recommend no matter what you are doing in life, learn to sell or in that career, learn sales. It is the ultimate skill in this day and age of AI. It goes hand in hand with everything we do online. I think that's one of the reasons Liz and I were so successful online very quickly. You know, I was talking on your last podcast about buying content sites or online websites that generate money off ads and things. Even with those, you need sales skills. See, online websites, no matter what they are, they essentially work like face-to-face sales. They're designed to draw in attention, help solve a problem, and present a solution for someone. And that's what we do face-to-face. The best salespeople are doing that when you think about it. They're really the best salespeople are trustworthy and they present a really good solution once they've figured out what the problem is, what someone really wants. And so I think they're the best skills you can have in this day and age. Isn't it funny? It comes back to soft skills. I I know you know someone listening to this right now is probably thinking, well, I don't have those skills, Matt. I work as a a manager in health or whatever in a hospital. Well, I'd like to say most of our clients don't have any of those skills at all. And that's the beauty of this strategy. If you want to get into your own sideline business or side hustle, I think this is the perfect strategy. It's probably the best one we've ever seen, where you can gently learn these skills very safely, earn a little bit of money while you're doing it, and just gently build up not only the technical skill sets, but the sales skill sets. We literally have on our podcast, you'll see story after story of total beginners who've never been able to sell. I'll give you a really good example. The most extreme example I can think of is Jing. So she's here in Australia. She is Chinese background, so English isn't her first language, and she's got quite a strong accent, right? Her husband's at work as an accountant, and she's a stay at home mum raising three kids. Pretty full on role. They'd moved to Brisbane. Brisbane, Australia. She knows no one in the community. She has no business experience whatsoever. She can't even speak the language particularly clearly, right? She's a young mum. What does she do? And she, for some reason, she wanted to do our course and she decided, I'm going to have a go at this. And go Jing. She's tenacious. And she literally got out there, joined, so she dropped the kids off at school, and then one of her other ones was still with her full time. And she'd go to these business networking things, like we said, and she was so shy, she had no idea how to sell at all. She just talked to people and said, Look, I can build a website. And she just started building them for free for people in her little local area. She was also in a local. She was very active in her church group as well on the weekends. And so just full-on networked and talked to people, didn't know how to sell, doesn't even speak the language, really. Like she does. She's good at English, but she's not confident in sales, though. She's never done that sort of a thing. And in her first year, she made$30,000. Now, to your listeners, maybe you're thinking that's not a lot of money. That's not a lot of money compared to what her husband earns. Point is, in her second year, the income went right up, and her husband was able to quit his job as an accountant and join her in her little business that she started as a side hustle without with no sales skills whatsoever. And now they both work together in this digital agency. They sold up where they live, and they now live in one of the most beautiful parts of Australia called Noosa. Just Google Noosa, it's the iconic place to live in Australia. It's stunning. And they've moved there with their kids and they have a lifestyle business. So that's where it can lead to. So it doesn't happen overnight. Her journey's taken her about three or four years to get to the point where they're earning a significant income from this now. But my point is, in her first year, she knew nothing about sales. You know, English is not her first language, and yet she still managed to make 30 grand on the side whilst raising three kids. Any parents amazing.

Mirav Ozeri - Host

This is really amazing.

Matt Raad - Guest

Three kids under five, uh, under eight, under eight, three kids under eight.

Mirav Ozeri - Host

Like you said, you're in Australia. Do you teach people in a physical room or is it online? Is it an online? No, it's all online. All online.

Matt Raad - Guest

So we have a lot of American clients as well. It works particularly well in America because you have so many businesses. Because people say, Oh, wouldn't there be saturation? You know, everyone's building websites for local businesses. Here in Australia, there's two million businesses. I think in America, 15 million a year started or something. America's massive.

Mirav Ozeri - Host

Massive, yes.

Global Reach And Rural Opportunity

Matt Raad - Guest

Mind-blowing numbers. We have people in rural America doing this, and we have a lot of people in rural Australia doing it. It's a really good way to make money in rural areas because rural people want to speak face to face with people. They're sick of family digital agencies from foreign countries contacting them. This is all about community. If community now is a huge thing in society, we're noticing it. A lot of our clients mentioned we get people to go out and network within their community, and people say it's it's wonderful. I've met so many nice people. Now I'm part of the community. So it's a really good way to establish yourself if you move into a new area or a new community.

Mirav Ozeri - Host

It's a great thing.

Matt Raad - Guest

One young girl we've got here in rural Australia, she's in quite a remote part of Australia. She's 19. She didn't know what to do in life. So she'd enrolled at uni. University these days is very expensive, and it was actually her parents who enrolled her in our course because in Australia, your average degree is anywhere from 20,000 plus. She had two part-time jobs in her country town as well. She had to support herself because her parents don't have a lot of money. She built a website for a real estate agent in a nearby big regional area, and she got paid twelve thousand dollars for that.

Mirav Ozeri - Host

But how much does the digital education cost her?

Matt Raad - Guest

So, and then we've got a much higher end coaching course as well, which she's now on because she's making enough money. She quit uni because it was costing her family too much, and she's making anywhere from five grand to ten grand a month, building websites in a this is a remote rural area, and then she's found business in a big regional town next uh about an hour's drive away. And she meets people on Zoom now, and she gets all the leads through social media, would you believe?

Mirav Ozeri - Host

I hear a lot about that.

Matt Raad - Guest

She just DMs people, but sit and she says, Hey, I build websites, she's building them for real estate agents, farmers, big industrial, you know, welders and things like that, electricians, plumbers, and local accountants. She's just out there networking. But can you imagine at the age of 19, she now has a full-time business doing this? She's in her, I think this is her second year, and she's making a full-time income.

Mirav Ozeri - Host

That is not a kind of business that you could sell. You can keep it and make a lot of money for many, many years.

Sell it as an asset

Matt Raad - Guest

No, no, no, no. You can, you can, I was just about to say, you can sell that as an asset. Absolutely. Oh, really? Once you get to 30 grand a month, you're looking at a seven-figure asset. Oh, yeah. Whoa, whoa, whoa.

Mirav Ozeri - Host

Tell me about it.

Matt Raad - Guest

Digital agencies are worth a lot of money. Buyers, especially in America, buyers are paying cash for digital agencies. If they've got recurring income, they're worth a lot of money. So you've only got to get them to around 30 grand a month, but that's recurring and it's profit. It's got to be profit. We've got clients doing that within about two years, and they're worth seven figures. Because most businesses sell on a three times multiple. So 30 grand a month is around$300,000 a year plus a bit more. But$300,000 profit, that's a million dollar asset. You'll sell that for a million bucks.

Mirav Ozeri - Host

But when you say repeat income, that is for main maintaining the websites that they are building.

Matt Raad - Guest

And SEO.

Mirav Ozeri - Host

How often do you have to upgrade the SEO? Constantly or once a week? Yeah, it's constantly.

Building A Sellable Seven-Figure Agency

Matt Raad - Guest

It's once yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's an on that's what you do, but it's all automated. Like, well, it's it's outsourced. You outsource it. So a lot of our clients are really successful at that. Like the coaches at work for us, a lot of them have agencies themselves, and they are charging anywhere from$2,000 to about$5,000 a month per client. So this this turns into a six-figure and seven-figure business over time. This isn't get rich. This they've been doing this for you know five years plus. Right. But they're making six figures a month.

Mirav Ozeri - Host

That's a fantastic income.

Matt Raad - Guest

Yeah, but that that's over time. But the the you know what the amazing thing is, this doesn't cost anything to build. It's just the thing.

Mirav Ozeri - Host

That's the geniusy thing about it.

Matt Raad - Guest

But you've got to build it up. It's not a get rich quick thing. This takes years to build this up, but you're not out of pocket anything. You're not going into debt for these businesses, unlike all the businesses that Liz and I used to do 20 years ago or 30 years ago. So that's why in this day and age, if I was to start over completely in business, I would only do a digital agency and I'd offer AI automations because there's this there is no downside. So look at Alyssa, she hasn't had to spend a single cent except for the knowledge to get the knowledge. Okay, you've got to invest in knowledge. You've got to spend money to make money. But compared to a traditional business, she has had to spend hardly anything. Other than that, it's just your own hustle, your own grip.

Mirav Ozeri - Host

I want to ask you about your business, your business, because I saw that uh you organize events. Yes. Live events and online events, right?

Matt Raad - Guest

Yeah, yeah, for 15 years now. Right. We used to run big events here in Australia.

Mirav Ozeri - Host

What do you do in the live event?

Matt Raad - Guest

Just explain to the listeners what is we coach people, we we show live websites that we're building or that our clients are building. So, like at our last live event, we had all these people up on stage and we interview them and we show people like what have they done on certain websites. We teach strategy, all all everything that we're talking about here. And all our live events now, we do them all online. We run a lot online event at least once a week, sometimes twice a week, sometimes three times a week. So online we get anywhere from a hundred to a thousand people.

Mirav Ozeri - Host

Wow, that's great. And where can people find you if they want to join these live shows?

How to find live events

Matt Raad - Guest

ebusinessinstitute.com.au.

Mirav Ozeri - Host

I will also put it in the show notes.

Matt Raad - Guest

We'd love to have people on. Check out our free masterclass if they want to get a taste of what we do. There's a you you'll see there's buttons everywhere for free masterclass, or just listen to our podcast and get an idea of what we do. I think there's a lot of info there on you and get a whole idea of the strategies because a lot of our clients do all sorts of different strategies. We just teach the foundations, we're like the catalyst and get people out there doing it.

Mirav Ozeri - Host

How do you see the future of e-teaching? Ooh, e-teaching. Yeah, where do you think you'll go in the next five years?

Events, Community, And Masterclasses

Matt Raad - Guest

Yeah, it's a really good question. We're asking ourselves that right now. Obviously, it's very heavily AI driven. I think what's going to work is it'll fragment out because obviously information's about to become free because of AI. So I think what's super important going forward, no matter what business you're in, is a really good question, particularly with e-teaching, but any business that's online now, it's all about community and that real they will people want real people, like they want real experience because you know you can get information pretty easily through Chat GPT, but can you get the real experience? Like, how did Derek actually do it? Yeah, okay, I can go to GPT and chat GPT and ask, but I want Matt to explain to me step by step. I want to hear the real story off Derek himself or off Matt himself or off my wife Liz or Alyssa or any of our clients. And I want to do it in a community as well. I want to know this is real, it's not AI generated. Like, is this for real? You know, people don't believe these sorts of numbers that we throw around. That's why we do it publicly on our podcast. And I think going back to your question, with everything now, particularly with e-teaching, will revolve people saying you can create courses with AI and stuff. You can care about that too. Definitely can, but uh, but I think if you want to go next level to answer your question, it'll come down to real people turning up at live events that are online, but learning in a community. I think community is huge now. I think that's why social media now is is actually really, really handy, um, particularly like private Facebook groups, private YouTube channels, or private webinars. Like we run lots of private webinars all the time on a bespoke platform, but you can do it on Zoom. We used to do it on Zoom five or six years ago. Now we've gone to another platform. Those private communities add a lot of value to people's lives, and I think that's the way forward for e-learning. It's kind of the hybrid between traditional university and being online virtually. So, you know, like when our kids go to uni, they they say it sucks now. Other students don't turn up, everything now is done online anyway. That's why we're so proud of what we created. When people come to ours, okay, it's online, it's not an in-person event, but there's chat going on, it's the same people, people help each other, little groups form up, they all help each other. I think that's the way of the future.

Mirav Ozeri - Host

Sounds good to me. Going back to communities. I'm happy to hear that. That's good. All right, Matt, thank you so much. I'm so appreciative that you came back to the show. That was so interesting. That is amazing digital side hustle.

Matt Raad - Guest

It's a great side hustle. I think it's a very low-risk way compared to buying a traditional business, but it's a low-cost, low-risk way of getting into a side hustle. So if you're listening and you're interested in something like that, check it out.

Mirav Ozeri - Host

All right.

Matt Raad - Guest

Great to see you again. And let me know when it goes live.

Mirav Ozeri - Host

Yeah.

Matt Raad - Guest

Awesome.

Mirav Ozeri - Host

Okay, bye-bye. That's it for today. If your brain is buzzing right now and you already have a mental picture of the website for your plumber, good for you. Big thanks to Matt Rad for telling us about new opportunities in the digital world, in the online world. And if you like this episode and you like the show, please follow us, leave a review, that always helps. And until next week, stay curious.

Head Shot

Mirav Ozeri

Host