All Language Resources

I’d been interested in online business for a while before ALR. Tried a poker content site called Breakthrough Poker that went nowhere. Tried other small things. They were all too technically hard to build and I didn’t have the skills.

Then I found a subreddit called “Just Start” — an affiliate marketing community with a pretty clear process: keyword research, SEO, publish content targeting monetizable search terms. I was in Beijing studying Chinese and using a lot of apps, so I could see the opportunity. Google searches for Chinese learning resources had very few results. Sometimes my content wasn’t even better than competitors — there just weren’t many competitors.

The plan was always to monetize — it was a business from day one.

Early growth

I posted some early articles on Reddit with affiliate links (they eventually got removed) and made affiliate commissions sooner than expected. Started outsourcing to freelancers pretty quickly because teaching kept me busy. The bottleneck was clear: I needed a lot of content, but articles took a long time — sometimes 20+ hours on a single one.

Found writers through language learning forums and built up a team. At peak, six regular contributors writing across 20+ languages.

The systems

The part I was proudest of was the process design.

I built a cross-editing system where writers reviewed each other’s work. Everyone had to know the broader competitive landscape, which naturally improved content quality.

I never told my writers which products had affiliate deals. They recommended whatever they thought was best, and I monetized after the fact. We did our best to keep reviews honest — recommending free tools and unaffiliated products when they were genuinely better. If we’re being totally honest, some amount of bias probably slipped through, but minimizing it was a priority.

The dynamic ad system matched affiliate offers to the specific language and topic on each page. Someone reading about Japanese apps saw Japanese-relevant offers. Most affiliate sites just blast the same ads everywhere.

At peak, the operation was a content pipeline in ClickUp, email funnels in ConvertKit segmented by language, SEO monitoring through Ahrefs, and affiliate relationships with dozens of course creators. We also built curated free courses from existing online resources (structured into course format across multiple languages) and had a small YouTube channel.

The most promising thing came toward the end: a user review system. Companies would provide free access to their product, readers would test it and give honest feedback. Everyone won — companies got reviews and real user data, readers got free access to premium materials, and we got better content with less bias at lower cost. We tested it with one review and it worked really well. Probably the best content we produced. That was the direction going forward.

Selling

Once I realized what the business was worth as a lump sum, the math was hard to argue with. $350K was revenue, not profit. How many years of grinding to match the sale price? The business felt vulnerable: largely dependent on Google, the affiliate model felt like a questionable long-term bet, and I could see AI disrupting language learning and content businesses down the road. Kelly was pregnant with our daughter. It just really made sense.

I listed through Empire Flippers. Rosetta Stone was interested but couldn’t do a bidding war because of the buy-it-now structure. A technical issue took the site offline for about 12-24 hours during the process, which was terrifying because the entire business was SEO-dependent. It worked out fine, but the whole sale felt like it took forever.

It closed for approximately $960,000.

What I took from it

I would definitely manage people differently. I was too much trying to be a friend, not enough holding people accountable when underperformance happened. That was a weak area.

Process-building is what I’m actually good at. The content pipeline, the cross-editing system, the dynamic ads — that’s the work I find most natural and most interesting.

I wouldn’t start ALR today. The SEO-driven affiliate review model is probably awful to be in right now. AI-generated content has flooded everything, Google keeps changing the rules, and user trust in review sites has cratered.

The timing was close to perfect. Online language learning got a massive boost from COVID, and the landscape has changed dramatically since then. Waiting another year or two would have meant selling for significantly less.