20 Lessons from 20 Years: Acquisitions Fast-Track Success
I didn’t set out to build a career in affiliate marketing. Like a lot of people who’ve been around long enough, I ended up here sideways. My first sites weren’t the result of some grand strategy or deep insight into monetization. They were hobbies and experiments without a thought about monetization. The kind of thing thrown together late at night with equal parts optimism and ignorance. They made a bit of money — enough to be interesting, not enough to feel real. At the time, I thought that was success.
Those early projects taught me how to build things from scratch, but they also taught me something more uncomfortable: effort and outcome are not always correlated in the way we want them to be. I spent countless hours tweaking layouts, testing things, and convincing myself that if I just worked harder, the curve would bend in my favor. Sometimes it did, often not. What I didn’t realize then was that I was obsessing over creation when leverage was sitting somewhere else entirely.
The shift in mindset happened when I acquired a site for $350 that wasn’t making much money, but it had traffic. Organic search engine traffic to be exact, the same traffic that had made my early hobby websites successful (even though I didn’t really understand that yet). That tiny acquisition was both a leap of faith and a paradigm switch. Within the first few months I had greatly improved the revenues and even though they were small, the numbers felt unreal. Not because the site was big or perfect, but because the “hard part” had already been done. Traffic, users, and revenue already existed. My job wasn’t to invent demand; it was to understand it and improve upon it using what I had already learned and knew. This was my first experience with scaling. That acquisition did more for my trajectory than all of my original projects combined, and it did it quietly. I was literally a nobody in the industry back then (and I was happy that way).
What surprised me most wasn’t the cash flow itself, but what it enabled. Profits stopped being something to spend or celebrate and became something to redeploy. I bought another site. Then another. Each one was better than the last, not because I’d suddenly become smarter, but because capital compounds when you aim it carefully. It would be more than 20 years later when I’d make that strategy a tagline for Broker.xxx: “Buy More Money with Your Money.” At the time, it wasn’t branding. It was empire building.
Acquisitions taught me focus in a way building never had. When you buy something that already works, you have to work with it in the framework of what it is, rather than what you wish it to be; That’s something I forgot years later when I invested into acquisition of a restaurant and bar and my partner made so many changes it stopped being what it was and failed completely. The numbers either support the price or they don’t, but there are sometimes boundaries. The risks are immediate and visible. That pressure sharpens your thinking. It also strips away ego, because the asset doesn’t care what you believe, it only responds to what you do.
The biggest jump in my career came from leveraging what I had acquired. I was running a larger network of websites and needed a better advertising solution for them. At first, it was purely self-serving. I wanted to save time and energy with record-keeping and deployment of advertising changes. Then came reporting, statistics, and reliability. What emerged from those original needs eventually became JuicyAds. Long before it was a standalone business, it was simply infrastructure for assets I already owned, but without fast-tracking through acquisitions, this platform may never have come into existence at all.
JuicyAds didn’t grow because it was marketed well. It grew because it solved a real problem for properties that were already generating traffic and revenue. Those early websites gave the network credibility, liquidity, and feedback loops that would have been impossible to fake. Only later did I exit those sites and focus entirely on the ad network, but by then the foundation had already been poured. The acquisition mindset hadn’t gone away—it had just changed.
Over the years, I’ve continued to acquire. Competing advertising networks like AdXpansion. Affiliate sites that complemented existing traffic flows. Products and services that filled gaps. Not every deal worked. Some ended up being distractions, while others became expensive lessons. A friend of mine calls these mistakes “tuition” since we’re both college drop-outs. Acquisitions are not shortcuts or “cheating” in the sense people imagine. They concentrate learning and momentum, which is something time alone rarely gives you.
There’s an uncomfortable truth that doesn’t get talked about enough: your time is often the most expensive input you have. Building from zero feels virtuous because it makes it 100% “yours” and inputs are measurable in hours, but hours don’t compound. Capital does. Control does. Distribution does. Acquisitions trade the illusion of purity for the reality of progress, and that trade isn’t for everyone. You give up the romance of the blank page and “the founder”. Sometimes you inherit someone else’s mess. It requires you to accept that improvement beats invention more often than we’d like to admit.
None of this means building is a mistake (it definitely isn’t). It means building isn’t the only lever, and it’s often not the strongest one. I’ve seen founders burn out chasing originality while ignoring assets that were already profitable, simply because those assets didn’t feel like “theirs.” Ownership, I’ve learned, isn’t about authorship. It’s about responsibility. When you buy something, you take responsibility for making it better (or at least not breaking it). That discipline changes how you think about risk and reward.
Running Broker.xxx has given me a front-row seat to this pattern repeating across the industry. Sellers who quietly compounded by acquiring boring but profitable properties. Buyers who thought they were purchasing shortcuts and discovered instead that they were buying clarity. The most successful ones weren’t chasing trends or narratives. They were accumulating control, one asset at a time, and letting the math do what motivation never could.
Looking back, my success didn’t originate from the things I built with my own hands. It came from the things I chose to take stewardship over and improve. Acquisitions didn’t replace ambition; they focused it. They forced me to think longer-term, to respect cash flow, and to understand that growth isn’t always loud. Sometimes it’s just steady, deliberate ownership doing its work.
I didn’t know any of this when I started (and that’s why I’m writing this article for you, so others can learn). I only knew that the numbers felt different once I stopped trying to invent success and started buying it. That lesson has followed me through every phase since. It’s not glamorous, but it’s honest.
