Secrets to Running a Successful Online Business: An Interview with the Founders of Success-Academie.com

For Gabriel and Maxime, co-founders and CEOs of Success-Academie.com, which teaches web marketing to French speaking entrepreneurs, running a successful online business can be a complicated, albeit rewarding venture requiring problem solving skills, flexibility and reliable service providers. I recently sat down with Gabriel and Maxime to get a better idea of how they run their business and the tips they offer to online marketers interested in expanding their businesses. Excerpts from our conversation are below.

Maxime and Gabriel have earned two awards from Clickfunnels for generating over $20 million online

Thanks for taking the time to speak with me. Can you give me an idea of how you approach running your business?

Gabriel: We are both very proactive people and we approach our business in the same way. We hate creating business plans and focusing on market research. Instead, we launch new projects quickly and optimize along the way. While this might sound counterintuitive, the truth is that we’ve been consistently generating profits for 10 years in multiple domains. A big part of this is maintaining a positive mindset and knowing that while problems are unavoidable, there is a solution for everything.

Can you give me an idea of the challenges you’ve faced?

Maxime: We’ve had countless challenges over the years, mainly centered around maintaining our status as a market leader in our product niche. Meeting these challenges can be complicated, and typically there is limited room for mistakes.

Gabriel: It takes a lot of courage and a positive mindset to not give up when your business takes a hit.

Where does most of the traffic to your websites come from?

Gabriel: When it comes to traffic sources, we like to stick to Facebook, Google, Native Ads, and a few other big advertising networks. We hate complicated processes with long agreements —the faster we can move, the better the chance that we can start generating profits.

The Payment Challenge

Can you briefly discuss the importance of payment providers?

Maxime: Payment providers are critical — without a reliable partner for your online payments, you’re unable to pay advertising costs, freelancers or any of the other many service providers you need to run your business.

Who are your beneficiaries and where are they located?

Gabriel: Our partners are mainly connected to Google and Facebook and based in Dublin.

How many beneficiaries are you paying each month?

Gabriel: Around 20 different partners.

What is your payment volume?

Gabriel: Currently, around 2-3 million euros per month.

Can you discuss some of the problems you’ve faced regarding payments?

Maxime: Our main problems have been with banks, which are very slow and typically involve a lot of bureaucracy. To generate our monthly volume, some of our projects require us to spend a lot of money on ads – much more than we’re permitted to using a classic credit card with spending limit. Whenever we’ve reached our credit limit, the bank would ask us to pay the invoice in order to be able to spend again, a process that can take four working days. This was affecting our business. We need speed.

Gabriel: Try going to a bank to ask them to increase your 500,000 euro limit – most likely they’ll either respond with a big “NO” or they’ll ask you to block off a million euro as a guarantee, which may prevent you from operating your business.

Did you try other payment solutions before using Payoneer?

Maxime: Yes, we tried a lot of banks and ePayments.

What kind of payment solution were you looking for?

Maxime: We were looking for a couple of things, including a debit card without limits a highly available account manager. Normal banks don’t care about your issues on weekends or evenings.

The Solution

How did you hear about Payoneer?

Gabriel: Thanks to a friend who’s been using Payoneer for many years.

Which of Payonner’s payment solutions are you using?

Gabriel: Bank transfers and the prepaid cards.

How did Payoneer help?

Gabriel: Payoneer helped a lot by providing prepaid cards that can be reloaded as needed. Everything on Payoneer is so easy and so fast. This was exactly what we were looking for — a fast, simple and reliable solution.

Maxime: Payoneer also helped by providing amazing customer support. We can message our account manager on weekends, evenings and always get a fast answer. For the first time, we really feel like someone cares about our business as much as we do.

What difficulties did Payoneer solve?

Maxime: The issue with credit card limits, which has been a huge help.

Has Payoneer helped to grow your business?

Gabriel: You can’t imagine how much money Payoneer has saved us. We used to use cards from Dubai’s banks in dirhams (AED), as it’s impossible to get one in EUR or USD. Since we were paying for our ads in USD or EUR, we used to have a conversion fee of around 2% on all ad costs.

Maxime: Payoneer has also helped us save time. Before, making a payment used to take us around five minutes — now we can do it in 30 seconds. Reloading a prepaid card used to take around five days — now it takes 10 seconds.

What is the best thing about using Payoneer?

Gabriel: We’d recommend Payoneer to anybody doing online business. They are reliable and simplify everything. We aren’t worried about our advertising stopping for lack of funds anymore. We can scale as high as we want.

Maxime: Every problem has a solution with Payoneer. Our account manager is always telling us, “guys, I’ll handle this for you no problem”. A few minutes or hours later, our request is always taken care of. Before, we were always worried that a bank transfer would be blocked for some crazy reason. Now, we feel safe to send money anywhere in the world without any issues. Payoneer is also much faster than 99% of the banks when it comes to sending money internationally. A payment to Africa or Asia could take you up to seven days with a normal bank, but two days with Payoneer.

Gabriel: We would like to thank Payoneer for being such a great partner to our business. We will finish this interview by saying that if you are looking for a payment partner fast, reliable and simple, Payoneer is for you. This interview is not sponsored, no one forced us to do it. This is just our honest opinion about this amazing partner.