How I Made It: Erez Speiser, “The Machining Doctor”

Since I was a child, I was always into science and technology. So, after I finished my army service, I went to study mechanical engineering. After that, I started looking for a job and one of the places where I was interviewed was Iscar.

My big hobby outside of working in the industry is the outdoors — I do a lot of hiking. So in 2018 I had this crazy idea: I decided that I would build a website about hiking in Israel for tourists. I had a lot of knowledge and passion about hiking in the country and I wanted people to have those resources in English. So I started the website as a hobby.

The site started to pick up traffic and generate some income. But like most people, I didn't see the Covid pandemic coming. Obviously this crashed the hiking website traffic because nobody was traveling abroad. It was there online, but it was dead.

So, during lockdowns while the hiking website was dead — and also out of boredom and frustration — I said, OK, I know how to build websites, and I know a lot about machining. What website would be useful for people in the machining industry?

When my employer started having people back, I continued to work on the machining website in the evenings and weekends as much as I could. I had already invested a lot into it, plus I was really shocked at how fast the traffic was coming, almost right away.

A lot of traffic was to the calculators on the site — speeds and feeds, converting between hardness units, converting between inch and metric units, stuff like that. The second topic that was picking up fast was related to screw threads. I think it's typical when you build a website like this, you can never anticipate exactly what will be strong.

That's the thing: You cannot open a supermarket and only sell food that people buy 90% of the time, because if you don't have the things they buy 10% of the time, very soon they go to the next market. That trend doesn't reverse.

So about three years after I started the website, I left my regular job. I thought for a long time about whether I really wanted to do that because, basically, I'm not very adventurous by nature. In nature, I sat in a big company and had a very solid job.

I think your 50s is a really good age to do something like this. You're still young enough that you have the energy, but you have a lot of experience. You hopefully have some savings and not a lot of financial obligations anymore. The price of failure is small. The revenue I get from the two websites is significantly less than what I made as an employee. But it's growing and I strongly believe in the potential. You have to take risks.