
Examine.com has grown up: $700,000 in the past year - ESBoston
http://www.solorwell.com/examine-com-is-grown-up-700000-in-the-past-year/
======
halcyondaze
What prompted dropping all links to supplements purchasable online? Because
you guys are an unbiased source, did you still feel it was wrong to offer an
affiliate link to the product?

I absolutely love Examine.com and have shared it with many friends, but I
seriously questioned that move from both a business and helpfulness
perspective.

1\. From the user's perspective, it's helpful to click right out and get the
product if you want it.

2\. From the business perspective, that's a shit load of Amazon cookies to be
dropping, and you're not compromising your message since you treat all
supplements equally and back it with research.

Thanks for creating an amazing resource!

~~~
SoloX5
It's easier and simpler.

While we linked to only the generic search from Amazon.com, it's easier to
doubt the research when we still profit from the sales.

Examine.com is run as a lifestyle business. If we wanted to maximize revenue,
we could easily 2-3x our revenue in the span of 6 months. Just not our
approach.

~~~
halcyondaze
Gotcha. Makes sense. Time for money tradeoff. Thanks for the answer!

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SoloX5
Hi, I'm Sol.

Any questions, just ask.

~~~
nazgulnarsil
Hey Sol. I was getting into nutrition just slightly before Examine launched,
and was completely incredulous that something like Examine.com didn't already
exist. As you mention in the post, the incentives in this industry are totally
perverse. We're taking an anti-supplement stance with MealSquares partially
due to some of the research you've helped collate and rate (we've done a lot
of our own too of course :). I've happily watched Examine.com grow and I
wanted to say thanks for trying to improve the epistemic standards we have for
nutrition. Keep fighting the good fight. P.S. would you venture an opinion on
Soylent?

~~~
SoloX5
Thanks for the kind words, and good luck. We're thankfully at a stage now
where we're well cashflow positive so we can just focus on what we do best.

> Soylent

Beyond the link that MDS100 posted, I personally think it's a bit
shortsighted. Paring food down into some kind of overly simplistic "consume
this" ignores all the social and psychological aspects of eating (not to
mention the satiety considerations of chewing something versus drinking it).

As a replacement for food, I think it's foolish. As something to help you get
to X macros in a pinch ... well, I'd rather take a protein shake and then mix
whatever I was missing into it (need fats? Nuts. Need carbs? Tons of
additions)

~~~
nazgulnarsil
That's exactly how mealsquares started. My prototype is open source at
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/h2h/soylent_orange_whole_food_open_s...](http://lesswrong.com/lw/h2h/soylent_orange_whole_food_open_source_soylent/)

Speaking of which I've been meaning to update it since I discovered that rice
bran is a better option than marmite.

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sandGorgon
@SoloX5 - big fan here (from /r/fitness)!

I'm wondering why you didnt setup examine.com as a wiki (I read somewhere that
it is a Wordpress site right now).

Each of your landing pages are heavy and (I assume) are constantly being
edited. How do you manage that process ?

It'll be nice to know the plugins,etc. you use for the site - its brilliant
for a quick encyclopedia-ish wordpress setup !

Quick comment - it might be a good idea to go SSL by default on the site. Your
register/login pages are also non-ssl.

~~~
SoloX5
Hihi.

We have a wiki-backend, but the reality is that our subject matter is far too
specialized.

The edits are not as frequent as you'd imagine - one of our guys does the lead
research on our page, emails the editors, and then they all hash it over,
partly via email/asana, and partly with online editing. Then when they are all
happy with it, it goes to the copyeditor to clean up (another fittitor!)

You can also click on the "History" link to see how a page has evolved.

RE: SSL - yes. We are working on rewriting the entire code base from scratch,
so that is one of the things on our massive todo list!

And thanks for the kind words.

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jemacniddle
Hey man no question in mind, just wanted to let you know that examine is a
lifesaver. I recommend it to all of my clients, friends and family. Some are
ignorant to the truth but many listen, thankyou.

~~~
SoloX5
Thanks!

We've tried to be as non-condescending as possible. It's not hard being right,
it's hard to teach/show someone the truth.

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sireat
Also curious how the domain examine.com was acquired, was it something dormant
that you or one of your team already own, or did you actually shell out 4,5 or
6 figures for the said domain?

One example of a successful generic domain is bodybuilding.com which I believe
was bought for $30k a long time ago and then developed instead of sat on.

~~~
SoloX5
We did purchase it.

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extremelyn
I'm curious about how the Examine team came to the price point for the Stack
Guides.

Simply put, $50 is incredibly high for an eBook — particularly when the site
itself hosts a large quantity of that information for free.

~~~
applecore
Actually, $50 is _nothing_ for a quality info-product, and the best people in
the business always "give away" a lot of free, valuable information.

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jug5
Congrats Sol & team.

One thing that really stood out for me was the endorsements. Having perhaps
the most prolific researcher of recent history Adel Moussa (Prof Dr Andro)
vouch for you guys, and on the other hand one of the best prep coaches Matt
Porter on the same page... That's big.

