Starting Niche Autopilot Sites – NuTang Creator David Tang Interview

Almost every person online starting a website or a page of any kind does so to make money. Millions of blogs out there try to make it work every year, only to end up failing miserably and shutting down by the next year. There are, however, people who have done it successfully and with a lot of experimentation. Today we are featuring our exclusive interview with David Tang.

David Tang is the creator of NuTang, which started around 2003 and rocketed to a cult status around the time MySpace became the world’s number 1 destination. NuTang to this day still has a cult following, and more than 10,000 members log in to share their love for NuTang and life, among other things, every day. David has also created, optimized and almost perfected the art of creating multiple niche autopilot sites to make money in both the short and the long run. The result? Self-sustainable websites that require hard work only in the beginning few days or weeks, and which afterward provide a life long passive income.

Here is the full interview I conducted with David Tang, presented here in its original unedited form. The bold lines are questions asked by me, and the answers that follow are the responses from David. David shares some of his biggest secrets to let you know how he has built his successfully growing empire of autopilot sites.

The History of Nutang & Autopilot Sites

1. What is your background in? Can you tell us what got you interested in the online world and then websites?

   Sure. I got dial-up at my home back in ’97, and shortly afterwards (I think within the first month), I created my first HTML-based website. I was high school freshman, then. The online world was like a new toy, so I spent a lot of hours playing around, creating web sites. I didn’t know much programming, just basic HTML, so much of it was about design. Drawing has been a hobby of mine since I was little kid. After a couple years, I started picking up PHP and MySQL, which were the tools I needed to greatly expand the breadth of the sites I could create. I’ve since created a plethora of sites, from social networks to search engines to video sharing communities.

   My background is in engineering and business. I attended Cornell University, where I studied electrical engineering with a concentration on processor design and signal processing. I held a few technical internships, but quickly realized it wasn’t something I wanted a career in. After undergrad, I stayed to earn a master’s in management, so I could transition into business. After I left Cornell, I joined a global management consulting firm, where I worked for 4 years. Currently, I still work as a consultant for a business strategy consultancy, but only on a part-time basis.

2. You are the creator of the famous NuTang community site, which now has kind of a cult following. What made you create NuTang?

   I saw the potential in social networking, which, at that point, mostly anchored around weblogging communities (e.g. Xanga, LiveJournal, DeadJournal). For those unfamiliar with NuTang, it is a blogging and social networking community with a very strong focus on the community aspect. From the start, we had a strong sense of community, with games, contests, and forums. We also have our own virtual currency, which members can earn by participating in the social events; and then use to purchase enhancements to their pages.

   I created NuTang, because I wanted to manage my own social networking community. It became a tremendous learning experience. I learned the majority of what I know today about web development and online business from working on NuTang.

3. NuTang is still around, even with MySpace almost getting confused at every turn and Facebook riding on the top at the moment. What are your future plans for NuTang?
   

   NuTang is still around and has a very strong cult following.

   Yes, NuTang is still around, though, to be frank, I haven’t updated the source code in a number of years. Many members have been active on the community for well over 5 years, and have since taken proactive leadership and moderator roles. Because of this, the community is able to continue on auto-pilot. Members continue to run contests and create other community-building activities. In fact, the community is now invite-only. People without invites can request membership, which is, again, a process moderated by the existing members.

   For the near term, I plan to let NuTang continue operating in the status quo. Down the road, when I find the time and money, I do plan to hire a web developer to continue building out the web site. As you may have guessed, the product development roadmap will be driven NuTang’s members. It’s good practice to listen to your customers. In the case of NuTang, its customers (i.e. members) are not just listened tot, they pretty much run the show. This not only keeps members happy, but saves me work. Win win.

4. How many other sites do you own? What kind of sites do you prefer starting or running?

   Right now, I have about 15 sites that are active. I no longer work on sites that require a lot of investment in time and effort, such as NuTang. Instead, the last several sites I have launched all have taken less than 1 day’s of work to launch. They also follow a model I refer to as autoscale, autopilot, and value-add. A site following this model will grow organically (i.e. autoscale), makes money with minimal to zero ongoing maintenance (i.e. autopilot), and offers a tangible benefit or convenience to its users (i.e. value-add).

   Oftentimes, I create a generic turnkey script that I leverage to launch a series of niche sites. I have done this with niche business directories (e.g. Yelp clones), niche social bookmarking sites (e.g. Digg clones), and niche social video sites (e.g. YouTube clones).

5. You recently released a digital book called “Pick Your Niche” on your new site “The Man Who Sold The Web” – can you tell us a bit about both?
   

   Launching Autopilot Sites - focus of The Man Who Sold The Web by David Tang

   Why, Bes, that would be my pleasure. “Pick Your Niche” is a step-by-step guide on creating niche business directories. A niche business directory is a site like YellowPages.com or Yelp, but focused on a specific business category (e.g. florists). It is also an example of an autoscale, autopilot site that adds value. In my guide, I go over the full lifecycle of launching one of these sites, from picking the niche to monetizing the directory, and include access to a suite of tools to help accelerate this process.

   I created “The Man Who Sold the Web” to help people who are just starting the web game create autoscale, autopilot sites. The site includes both guides and a blog related to this concept. Back in 1997, when I created my first site, which was a Foo Fighters fan site, the Internet was very undeveloped. There were limited resources available–no PHP, no WordPress, no Google, no blogs, no JQuery. Creating a site that can autoscale and operate on autopilot would be very difficult. These days, things are different. Someone who is creating his first site can easily create one following this model. He just needs the proper direction and tools.

   In fact, in the coming month (or months), I plan to release some turnkey autoscale, autopilot websites to The Man Who Sold the Web. These turnkey sites will be out-of-the-box, like WordPress. Just install the script and you will have your own autoscale, autopilot site.

   Bes’s note to you, the reader: Keep reading to also get a 60% OFF coupon to use on Dave’s brand new book “Pick Your Niche“, available only to RA Project readers!

6. What are some of the big mistakes you have made and how did they affect you, your sites or site performance overall?

   The biggest specific mistake I’ve made was to sell subdomains off of NuTang. This was at a time when NuTang had close to a million indexed pages and selling sitewide footer links was the big thing. Someone reached out to me asking to buy 5 subdomains at a fairly high price, and, being naive and greedy, I rented him those subdomains. He used those subdomains for spamming purposes, creating countless pages. Since NuTang was well-indexed, he leveraged the synergies with the parent domain to get his subdomain pages indexed easily. In a month or so, NuTang was de-indexed from Google. I had to contact Google, explain my situation, and Google was nice enough to re-instate my site.

   On a higher level, a big mistake I would make in the past is focus too little on business strategy (e.g. marketing, monetization). I would spend most of my time on product and community development, launching features on a constant basis. These days, I put a much stronger emphasis on how the site can quickly and easily make money and have a very clear idea of the business model from the start. Working on business strategy is much more difficult than working on content, because results aren’t immediate and it requires many failed attempts before any wins. I’ve tested countless business models, marketing strategies, and sales strategies that were seemingly brilliant and bulletproof on paper, but when it came to actual execution, failed miserably. I also spend the majority of my time on SEO.

7. What do you think is the biggest mistake people make when trying to create new websites, and what would you recommend they do instead or what would you recommend they do to fix such mistakes later on? [what should they avoid]

   A big mistake I see beginners make is rely too much on the viral nature of their marketing efforts or sites’ content. Many people believe viral or word-of-mouth marketing is an easy phenomenon to architect, when, in reality, it is insanely difficult. Of all the web pages you come across in a day, how many, if any, do you share with others? As a result, people come up with a few “clever” marketing ideas, which they implement at the site’s launch. When those marketing efforts don’t pick up, people sink into the demoralizing waiting game (e.g. refreshing Google Analytics, refreshing AWeber).

   I recommend that people focus 80% of their time on marketing, and of that, mostly on SEO. For me, that has been the most effective and low-cost way to drive quality traffic in the shortest amount of time.

   Another mistake many people make is they spend too much time perfecting their site before launching. This mistake is related to the previous, in that people expect a huge influx of traffic immediately upon launch. Therefore, they want their site to be in the best possible state to prepare for the initial visitors. My advice is to launch the site immediately after you have the core functionality built in. This way, you can continue to refine the site as Google begins to recognize and index your site. Furthermore, depending on the nature of your site, you may receive feedback from users that causes you to change the direction of your site. It’s best to get this feedback early, so you don’t waste any effort working on features or content of little impact. For all my most recent sites, I’ve spent no more than 1 full day of work before launch. Tim Ferriss, author of the Four Hour Work Week, even recommends essentially 0 effort on the site prior to launch. His idea is to test the idea first and not build the site until you have market evidence that the idea is sound. To test the market, he suggests creating a landing page describing your idea with an email opt-in. Feed your site with a small Google AdWords campaign and use email sign ups to measure whether people are interested in what you plan to offer.

8. What kind of niche areas would you recommend and not recommend? What would you recommend beginners do to find good niche areas?
   

   Found a niche? Dave tells with you what to do next

   In creating a niche site, I always go for one that requires minimal upkeep. This means the site’s content either feeds off another site that is always up-to-date (e.g. by using an API) or feeds off your users who are constantly adding new stuff. In deciding on the functional nature of the site, I start with what’s popular at the moment and then create niche versions of it. For instance, a few years back, I released a number of niche YouTube clones, e.g. funny videos site, music videos site, stock videos site. I was able to constantly and automatically add new videos to these sites using the Google Videos API.

   When Digg emerged, I created a number of niche Digg clones. Most recently, I’ve been creating a number of niche Yelp clones, i.e. niche business directories.

   In deciding on the subject matter of the niche, there are a number of sanity tests beginners can run to validate the quality of the niche topic. Here are a few ways:

   1. Use the Google Adwords Keyword Tool to validate people are searching for your niche topic.
   2. Search for your niche on Google. If you see Google Adword ads, this validates that there are online advertisers interested in this topic.
   3. Browse Flippa for sites related to your niche. This validates that you can make money from your niche.

   A niche topic very hot right now is mobile games.

9. Many people would consider some of the techniques and lessons you offer on your site to be against what is usually recommended, like the craigslist email scraper. Can you tell us a bit about why you chose such techniques and how they are working out for you?

   Sure. A key theme behind my articles and guides is automation. Taking the Craigslist Email Scraper as an example, it is a great tool to automate the task of extracting thousands of targeted leads from Craigslist [ Craigslist Scraper ]. Craigslist is a great resource to find targeted leads, because people post under specific sections within specific geographies and are looking for people to contact them. However, clicking through each listing is a tedious, manual process. Automation of this process is a natural, logical, and intelligent progression.

   Of course, the Craigslist Email Scraper is just one example–and specifically, an example of gathering leads from an external site. I also use automation to create sites with large footprints. For instance, my most recent site is a jobs search engine. The site is architected to have a jobs page for every zip code in the US. There are about 40,000 zip codes in the US. I.e., immediately, upon the site’s launch, I have a 40,000 page web site. Using simple SEO techniques, I was able to index my site within a few hours and have over 1,000 pages indexed within a few days. If I were to create a site of similar scale manually, it would take me months, if not years, which, of course, would most likely eliminate the economics of this site.

   Automation techniques like the ones I describe on my site are not usually recommended by other sites. The primary reason is because these techniques require specialized tools and a certain level of experience. Most “make-money” blogs are authored by people with little development expertise. Their recommendations are based on processes that are powered by hard, manual work NOT because they don’t believe in automation, but because they don’t know how to automate their processes.

10. Do you worry about copyright and related things? What if someone copied NuTang up to the letter or copied The Man Who Sold The Web or some of your scripts?
    

    Slow month at NuTang compared to its heyday

    No, I’ve never been really worried about someone stealing my script, content, or ideas. I think the script and content development, for the most part, is the easy part. The hard part is the business end–the marketing and sales. I find, particularly with online business, it’s usually the 2nd or 3rd entrant who becomes the most successful player, because the new entrant is able to learn from the first mover’s mistakes and therefore create a better, more successful business.

    With The Man Who Sold the Web, I am hoping to create a brand and following for myself. The site is focused on creating autoscale, autopilot sites that add value, which is a very specific and differentiated niche. If I can establish a strong user base, then I have even less to worry about in terms of theft.

11. How much money have you been making so far through various things?

    Not enough!

12. What does the future hold for The Man Who Sold The Web?

    I hope to release a number of turnkey sites on The Man Who Sold the Web. Right now, I have a number of guides, tools, and articles (on the blog) related to topic of autoscale and autopilot. In the coming month or months, I plan to launch some out-of-the-box sites that fit the model of autoscale, autopilot, and value-add. All people need to do is install the script (similar to how one would install WordPress) and they will have a niche site that scales automatically and operates with minimal upkeep.

13. What advice would you give anyone who wants to make money online doing any of the things that you have already tried or done?

    One of the first things I learned from my day job (as a management consultant) is to leverage. We try to “leverage” everything–old project deliverables, other people’s expertise, existing research, etc. The advice I would give someone who wants to make money online is to leverage at all stages. In the conception/ideation stage, read any materials you can get a hold of. There are tons of blogs, articles, forum threads available on almost every topic. Learn from other people’s mistakes, understand business models others have succeeded or failed in, and leverage other people’s collective experiences. In the development stage, leverage content that has already been created. Tap into a major site’s API if you can. Find a database that’s already populated, so you don’t need to start from scratch. Find a turnkey solution. Finally, when you are running your site, leverage tools that other people have developed. Whether this is scraping Craigslist for targeted emails or monitoring your SERPs on Google, you can find a solid tool to perform this task for you, saving you countless hours. The more you leverage, the more time you save, and time is, without a doubt, your most precious resource.

14. If someone wants to get a hold of you to ask question, what is the best place to communicate with you?

    The best way to contact me is through my latest project, TheManWhoSoldtheWeb.com. Join my newsletter, because I make all my contact info available to subscribers.

Thanks for the interview Dave, and thanks for sharing the different tips and methods you yourself use on your sites.

It’s been a pleasure, Bes! I hope to ask you for an interview once I build a modest following on The Man Who Sold the Web.

Which Niche Will You Focus On?

The best thing about this interview is learning the fact that focusing on any niche website can be as daunting as starting any vaguely focused website. While Dave did not disclose how much he makes in question # 11 above, I can at least let you know that he makes way more than enough to continue on with the idea of having existing autopilot sites and starting even newer ones focusing on different niches. If you look at autopilot sites in the same manner as looking at something like Google News or Yelp, you will realize how beneficial, monetarily and brand wise, any well done autopilot site can be for you in both the short and the long run.

As a special offer, all RA Project readers can get the “Pick Your Niche” digital book at 60% OFF, available only to RA Project readers on the RA Project website. Simply use this link “Pick Your Niche” to see what it contains before you make your decision.

What kind of a website are you planning to start? What kind of websites do you already have? What do you think of the idea of autopilot sites compared to manually driven sites? Which niche areas do you think have potential, and which niche areas do you think are not worth any effort?

If you have any questions to ask of Dave, share it in your comments below. Dave has agreed to answer any questions you have here. Be sure to not let this opportunity pass by!