Hi, I'm Shane Melaugh

Here are a few things about me:

• I quit university because I couldn't face doing something I wasn't passionate about any longer. I decided to stop forcing it and left to create my own business.
• In 2010, I created my first online course. It sold over 2,000 copies, bringing in 6 figures in revenue.
• I co-founded SwissMadeMarketing (creators of SECockpit) with Sam Hänni. We took the product from zero to the 7-figure revenue mark in 15 months.
• I started Thrive Themes together with Paul McCarthy. This company produces conversion focused WordPress tools such as Thrive Architect, Thrive Leads and Thrive Quiz Builder and we've reached more than 40,000 customers with these products.
• I created many smaller software businesses around WordPress plugins such as Hybrid Connect, Viral Quiz Builder, WP Sharely and others. I also sold many other courses, had an ecommerce business and have dabbled in countless businesses and business models over the years.

Around this time, I started learning how to build computers. I couldn’t believe how much money you could save by building your own computer from scratch instead of buying one off the shelf. It seemed that suppliers were taking a decent margin so I decided to undercut them by starting my own computer building business.

I wasn't deeply passionate about computer hardware - I mainly pursued this as a business idea because I was desperate for some income.

This time, I got one thing right: I knew how to make a good product. Consumers could get a better PC at a lower price by coming through me – so why wouldn’t they? Simple answer – they didn’t know about me, and I sucked at marketing.

I started listing computers on ebay and local directories. This helped me finally get customers, but I quickly encountered a bottleneck in this new business venture: me! It was hugely time consuming to build computers and the profit margins turned out to be low. I was slaving away for very little reward. Time for another transition.

Water Cooling for Profit?

I found a niche in the hardware components market of water cooling. Most people have never even heard of liquid cooled computers, but you'd be surprised at how active this micro-niche is!

I started reviewing and publishing articles of watercooling components in an online magazine and on niche forums. I didn't realize at the time, but this was my first experience of content marketing.

I noticed that nobody was creating useful, thorough reviews for water cooling components. The reviews at the time were lazy, at best. A few crummy pictures of a waterblock or other component and some performance numbers based on incredibly unreliable testing procedures was the norm.

I saw this as an opportunity and started to devise the most comprehensive tests that I could come up with. I didn’t get many review samples sent, so I bought as many samples as I could, out of my own pocket. My test setup took up all the space in my tiny office room and the procedures were extremely time consuming, but the end result was the most useful review data in the industry. I even set up a miniature photo “studio” on one end of my desk, to capture higher quality pictures of the components for the reviews.

Within 6 months, I went from being the “newbie” guy asking the questions to a go-to expert on water cooling devices. People sought me out and asked me for advice. This was the first time that I had ever had a group of people in a given niche that were paying attention to me – I had been doing my best marketing yet, and I didn’t even realize that I was doing it.

Opportunities & Regrets

Once I made a bit of a name for myself in the PC water cooling niche, a company approached me to become a reseller of their water cooling equipment. It was an e-commerce store and I would be the Swiss arm of the company being the only reseller in the country. This sounded great to me, so I eagerly signed up.

Little did I know that this was to be one of my worst decisions to date. The problem wasn’t that the business wasn’t good – it was! The e-commerce store took plenty of orders and the turnover was getting towards mid six figures per year. There was a hungry crowd of buyers chomping at the bit.

The problem was that I had NO CONTROL over the business – every decision I tried to make got stuck in the “chain of command” and never came to fruition. End result: I was sitting on a business that was generating massive revenue, but not enough profit for me to even live on. I knew there were a dozen things I could do to increase profits and I couldn’t do ANY of them. I ended up feeling like I was nothing more than the fall guy – responding to customer complaints and queries, taking blame for things that weren’t my fault and that I couldn’t change. This was not what I signed up for.

This venture proved to me that I could make something happen, but it also made one thing very clear: I needed to do this on my own.

My Jump to Online Marketing

I figured that I had managed to rapidly learn the ins and outs of a niche and become a recognized expert. But I utterly lacked the business and marketing skills to start and run my own business.

So, I figured I would do what I'd done in the PC hardware market, but this time applied to online marketing. I would dive in head first and learn everything I could about entrepreneurship and online marketing, so I'd finally have my ticket to freedom.

I started my first attempt at building a website – holy crap that thing was ugly. After the first few months of intensive learning, I started zeroing in on one topic: search engine optimization. I built a few niche sites and managed to get them ranked for various keywords. Soon after, these sites started bringing in some money. It wasn’t much, but at least it kept me going. It was a proof of concept.

My Own Information Products

To capture names and email addresses I built a free product on how to set up a WordPress blog. This was my first exposure to digital product creation and it was well received. I then decided to launch another free product about keyword research, mainly because almost all the available information on the subject was terrible. The guide was not a viral wonder or anything, but it was received extremely well by those who used it (and, in a way, it was the most successful product I ever made).

Things were looking up. I had scaled my niche sites up so that they were earning me a good income and decided to launch a product in the online marketing space. This product was Backlink Battleplan – it took me 6 weeks to create the product and orchestrate my first ever product launch. The launch itself wasn’t huge, but made me more money than I’d gotten all at once, ever before. The product also kept selling and growing in popularity. By the time I took it off the market almost two years later, it had brought in more than $100,000.

The SECockpit Partnership

My plan had worked out: through my experience with online marketing, my websites, my free and premium products, I'd become an expert in the online marketing niche. I'd started making a bit of a name for myself.

Shortly after the launch of Backlink Battleplan, Sam Hänni contacted me asking for some advice for a product that he had been working on called SECockpit. I took a look – and I liked it. So much so that I offered to become the marketing arm of the company.

Sam accepted – and within 15 months we turned it into a 7-figure business. This was the most profitable and most rapidly growing venture I’d ever been a part of, at the time.

Launching Thrive Themes

At this point, I started to feel somewhat competent. I had learnt from my early blunders and built up a few product based businesses successfully.

One of the most frustrating parts of building those businesses was working on the websites. I used WordPress for all my sites and it was endlessly frustrating, trying to create good sales pages and marketing funnels in WordPress. Thus, the idea for my next project was born: Thrive Themes.

With Thrive Themes, I aimed to provide all the missing marketing features to WordPress. I knew I couldn't do this on my own, so I partnered up once again. This time with Paul McCarthy, an entrepreneur with experience as a software developer and business analyst.

The launch of Thrive Themes was a huge success... and it was also one of the hardest times in my life.

This good fortune has allowed me to focus more outward and more towards things that aren't just about me.

Thrive Themes is one such example: the company has been growing rapidly and not only do we reach far more people with it than ever before, but we're also using the business as a platform for our team members to learn and grow their own skills. The goal is not just to create a successful company, but to create a company that creates successful people.