Matt Giovanisci started Swim University in 2006 and has grown it to over $600,000 per year while working from home. The site is focused on pool care and uses courses, affiliate links and white label product sales to generate income.

A key insight that Matt had during his journey was that a video course would sell better than his original ebook. His customers viewed the book as too expensive at $50 and at $29 it was selling a bit better. But when he combined the book with a video course it started to really take off.

One of his best converting pages was a one time offer for half off the course (sale price of $50) on his thank you page with a 24 hour expiry. Matt went from 70% of revenue from Amazon affiliate sales and 30% from digital products to 70% from digital product sales and 30% from Amazon.

But then Matt thought it made a lot more sense to sell his own product where he could make a 50% margin compared to a 3% affiliate fee on Amazon. He now uses Shopify for his ecommerce needs and set up Deliverr to do all of the fulfillment. Deliverr is a 3PL, or third party logistics company that takes care of all of the storing and delivering of the physical goods.

Today, during peak season they are getting 600-700 subscribers from facebook and google ads (on which they spend around $50/day) and an offer on their website to sign up for a cheat sheet on cleaning pools. Around 3% of subscribers sign up for a course, which is a pretty standard conversion rate for online content. Subscribers get a seven day email blast of helpful tips and then an evergreen newsletter.

Check out the smart passive income podcast with Matt here.

Interesting point

Matt views the website as a textbook like resource which is updated every year. He doesn’t view it as a magazine where there is constant updates as there’s limited information about pool care. This is a key insight which makes this niche more manageable than others which require you to be on the content treadmill.

Could you create a competitor?

Given the length of time Swim University has been up it would be hard to rank higher. But as Matt mentioned in the podcast they don’t do as much social as they could. There may be an opportunity for someone to create info vids on TikTok and try and gain a following. But it would be hard to beat the expert at his own game!