Gennaro Cuofano - How To Reverse Engineer Business Models

Today we are talking with Gennaro Cuofano, who not only has an awesome accent but runs an amazing site called FourWeekMBA.com. Ever since we hung up with our guest, we have completely nerded out on his site, as he does super deep research on every brand in the world. He basically looks at businesses and reverse engineers them by digging into their financial statements, how they get their traffic using various SEO tools, and then writes up these detailed blog posts about their entire business model.  He dives into where their revenue comes from, where he sees them headed, and basically everything you could want to know about these businesses. The cool thing is it's very objective as he consumes content like crazy. 

Gennaro checks out a slew of business models, everything from affiliate marketing, freemium and subscription models, just to name a few. Imagine how many new concepts you’ll be able to come up with, or perhaps your customers have been asking for a specific model, but maybe you don’t know how to build it. We’ve recently been talking about the affiliate model and when we started digging around on Gennaros’ site we realized there is a lot more affiliate business than you realize, some being multi-billion-dollar companies. After you’ve listened be sure to check out our shows with Nate Broughton and David Sinick for even more content, research, and keyword strategies. 

“If you think about business today, Google, Facebook, and Amazon, those are actually the gatekeepers of distribution. You are going through those gatekeepers to earn your customers, so you better understand how they work. ” - Gennaro Cuofano 

Some Topics We Discussed Include:

• How to reverse engineer other business models and why you would want to
• Listen to us nerd out about the Booking.com site, and how it’s broken down from an advertising and revenue standpoint
• How you can actually do this analysis for yourself
• Ways to learn about business if they do not have public accessible financial data
• How content is best consumed to help you learn and organize your understanding of various topics
• The difference between learning vs. internalizing
• Behind the scenes of Gennaro’s methodology 
• How to reverse engineer other business models and why you would want to
• And much, much more!

Contact Gennaro Cuofano:

• On LinkedIn
• FourWeekMBA.com/what-is-a-business-model - Check out this link to get the Gennaro’s main guide of the different kinds of business models

References and Links Mentioned:

• SEMRush 
• Ahrefs
• Crunchbase
• Business Analysis: How to Analyze Any Business
• That Will Never Work by Mark Randolph
• Gut Feelings by Gerd Gigerenzer 
• The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb 
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• Today’s show is co-sponsored by Easy Webinar and Casey Zeman.  He has put together a 20% off deal for our listeners. Be sure to check them out as they have live webinars, hybrid webinars, automated webinars, and social media functionality, everything you need for webinars in a single platform. 
• Text the word “COMP” to 38470 to get the notes from this episode! They are free, but be quick, because, after a couple of weeks, they’ll go away (or go to HustleandFlowchart.com/comp) if you are on desktop
• The Ultimate SEO and Content Marketing Playbook - David Sinick
• How To Get Millions Of Visitors With SEO - Nate Broughton