These are relatively old and unsexy technologies, but it’s the same setup as a site I maintained for several years. Reeling from this pain, I wrote Is It Keto using Python 2.7, App Engine Standard, and Cloud Datastore. The magicalness of the tech stack prevented me from understanding how my app worked. My progress slowed to a crawl, however, when I ventured beyond basic examples. At first, this was fun because those technologies do seemingly magical things. Envious of the cool kids with their hip frontend frameworks, I built the site using Angular and Firebase. My project before Is It Keto was a recipe search tool called KetoHub. When they came back to bite me, I paused development to clean things up, but that was seldom necessary and never catastrophic. It pains me to ship code that’s likely to create maintenance headaches later, but for an experimental project, there might not be a “later.” Code sins were forgivable, so I committed many of them. Rarely did the result feel satisfying in the moment, but when I revisited it the next day with fresh eyes, it usually looked fine. At the end of the 90 minutes, I published the changes as long as they were an improvement over the original. For example, when a page looked ugly, I set aside exactly 90 minutes to improve it. To avoid this with Is It Keto, I budgeted fixed-time blocks for design polish. I’ve wasted hours moving buttons five pixels back and forth, wondering which version looks better. Is It Keto expenses What went well □︎ I chose “done” over “perfect” □︎ĭesign is not my strong suit. I wrote almost all the code, but a friend briefly freelanced for me while she had time between projects. The only other cost worth mentioning is development. It got complicated, but I’ll say more about that below. Early on, I wrote every article myself, but I hired writers to help scale the site. My most significant ongoing cost was content. Is It Keto monthly revenue How I lost money □︎ If a food was keto-friendly, the site displayed an affiliate link for the reader to purchase it from Amazon. Every article explained why a food did or did not fit the keto diet. I’ll talk about where I succeeded, how I could have done better, and what I wish I knew from the start. At the end of March, the site’s financial future seemed bleak, so I shelved the project. For my non-business-savvy readers, a -90% return on investment is considered less-than-stellar. For every dollar I spent on the site, I earned back ten cents. There was only one pesky detail standing between me and tremendous profits: money. Every month, visitors increased by 50% to 150%, an exhilarating growth rate that far outpaced any of my previous projects. From November 2018 until March 2019, the site was my full-time focus. Early last year, I launched a nutrition site called Is It Keto.
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