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How I Reliably Generate $150/mo From a Data-Management Tool

Tell us about yourself and what you're working on.

My name is Adam Diehm and I am a web developer, SEO expert, and entrepreneur. I own multiple businesses as well as a number of web projects.

My project Delim.co is used by SEO experts, developers, and many other people who are looking to convert data to/from columns and comma-delimited lists.

How'd you get started with Delim.co?

I initially built the product for myself, because I had many clients emailing me spreadsheets of data and wanting reporting from their web applications. I was working as a dev at my agency at the time, and I developed the main functionality myself, with help on layout and feature-additions coming from my staff as well.

I figured others could use something with my tool's functionality, too, so I put it online at Delim.co. My initial goal was that it might make a few bucks and get a couple hundred users. However, today we are a factor of 10 better than my initial expectations in both usage and revenue.

How long did it take you to build it?

There were about 20 hours invested in the initial release, and there've been at least 50 hours of ongoing development — adding advanced features and tweaking various things.

How have you grow your user base and revenue over time?

I started the project in the middle of 2014, and we began making money from day one via Google AdSense.

New users find us every day via SEO, as we are the top ranking tool for most related web searches. We get around 80% of our overall usage each day from returning users. So as new users find the product, our overall usage grows. We consistently see 10% increase in usage month over month.

I also get significant feedback and shares/mentions on Twitter, which are always nice to see.

Sessions Graph

If you had to start over, what would you do differently?

Nothing. The project really is what I thought it would be. It's a useful tool that's popular due to its simplicity and ability to handle its single purpose.

I am planning to launch a wide-screen design tweak, and will do a full re-design in 2017.

Where can we go to learn more?

You can find me on Twitter (@atdiehm) Twitter and Facebook. I like to consult on user acquisition and monetization for online businesses/startups, as well as do MVP work for the same. I share pictures of great beer on Instagram as well.

You can also leave a comment below, and I'll try to get back to you!

  1. 1

    Hello Adam! When you first published your site, how long did it take to start to rank on Google and Bing? How long did it take before your SEO work started paying off? Thank you!

  2. 1

    Hey Adam! I just wanted to ask about the initial steps in monetizing a free tool like this? I'm a complete newbie and I'm doing research on these kinds of success stories to give myself some inspiration, but I don't know too much about monetizing tools like these.

    1. 1

      Isiah,

      At this level, it's hard to go wrong with Google Adsense. Until you're doing maybe 100k pageviews a month or more, it'll be the best return for the time you need to put into it, which is about zero.

      Depending on your audience, you may want to supplement with some CPA deals such as Amazon affiliates, or some more stable CPM deals from a number of companies, Amazon recently becoming one of them, and something I'm considering specifically for delim as well.

      Eventually if your tool/site is doing well enough, sponsors may approach you for flat-rate spots. At that point you should have enough data on what your page real estate is worth, for negotiating.

  3. 1

    Hi Adam, thanks for sharing your story. I'm thinking about building a similar web app for modifying numerical or date values in CSV or Excel inputs. As a first timer, I'm not really sure with which technology to go. I'm leaning towards Django, but it might be a bit of an overkill for the purpose and simply creating an MVP. You mentioned your initial release took 20 hours. Care to share which stack you used?

    1. 1

      TheNaturalist,

      Oddly enough, there is no "stack". When approaching this project I wanted to use something that would have been new to me at the time. Throughout my time in owning/running an agency, we were always so focused on productivity and our clients' ROI that most projects we did for work were using standard LAMP stacks we were all the most efficient in. Fun/internal/personal projects provided opportunity to put new languages/tools into practical use.

      This project was done 100% client-side using a bit of Angular. Technically I thought we'd need more Angular than it ended up being, so it's mostly a vanilla JS app, but it was still fun.

      I agree your project sounds like a poor fit for Django. Even if you wanted to keep some of it serverside, I'd look into some of the JS technologies out there, node/angular/react/etc. for such a project.

  4. 1

    Really amazed by the SEO work you have done. Even if I search for your competitor such as "comma quote online" , Delim.co shows up. Can you share some tips on SEO for such one page websites?

    1. 1

      Pravin, I take a very non-tricky approach to SEO. Focus first, and foremost, on making it the best tool for your users. Their shares and social mentions go a long way. Simply by making this a tool people enjoy using, I have received links from countless unsolicited blog posts, and even a youtube video someone did on how to use the site!

      With niche tools like this, directories and aggregators are great places to acquire links.

      Aside from that, use appropriate on-page content in meta fields, headings, etc. that are not full of marketing or buzzwordy content.

      Research using Google Insights to see what people search for and incorporate those phrases in your content, but make sure you do it in a way where it does not appear forced.