How I took a small utility side project to 5k MRR
Hope you are all safe and doing great.
So this side project was started back in 2016 whilst I wanted a few similar tools but couldn't find them online.
I built a few tools in a couple of hours and deployed them online and started seeing some organic traffic in a couple of weeks.
As we were getting backlinks naturally, I decided to add more tools.
The power of tools is you do not need to keep adding updated content, they grow naturally - higher session rate, high engagement, and low bounce rate, and these are the win-win for your website from google's perspective.
We also started offering APIs around our tools so we can also make more money from these paid subscriptions, at this point we have subscribers in 3 digits already and growing.
6 months back we also started a YT channel to convert these ~5-6M pageviews into another way to monetize to diversify it further.
You can find tools here
That's a really cool idea. How much of your rev comes from ads vs from subscriptions?
It's around 60-40 at the moment and then out of 60%, we do have a blog as well we started later on which is 10% of the total.
You mentioned an API but there is no mention of that on your site? How do people find your API?
Nice, thanks for sharing! Team generation is one I google often :) Which tools get used the most?
thanks :) we rank for around 20k keywords in top 10, so pretty much all of them gets traffic.
This is awesome! I'm looking to get into Unity soon. Nice work
Great idea , can you share where do you host your tools web site ?
And what teach stack do you use ?
sure.
we use a digital ocean 8G dedicated server.
we use multiple caching layers to ensure the traffic gets served. it's all on Python/Django and Gunicorn/Nginx as server.
Just 1 server ? No back up ?
And how much it takes from the total profit ?
around ~10%
How long it took ypu to reach 0 to 5k MRR? What percentage of revenue is through ads?
Super simple great idea 👏
Thanks!