I made revenue from week 1. Here are my successes and failures after 4 months
4 months ago I released https://django.doctor - it's improves Django code. Plug it into GitHub and it will comment in Pull Requests when it sees you doing things that are against best practice. This prevents bugs, security vulnerabilities, and makes the code overall more maintainable.
Here I will explain some of the lessons I learned over the past 4 months:
Re-using blog posts
I use dev.to: https://dev.to/djangodoctor. I wrote an average of 1 blog post every 2 days. The result was 18,000 reads and over 500 followers. It was a lot of effort but resulted in a good number of readers clicking though to the website. Nice hack I did was treating the content as "components". Recycling the content by maybe grouping them together and re-releasing as new OC, or adding an interesting statistic. Take for example two blog posts:
- "Bugs lurking in your urls.py"
- "40% of Django projects have these URL bugs waiting to happen"
They are the same content released 2 months apart, but augmented with an interesting statistic that I calculated by running Django Doctor codebase audit on 666 codebases. The result was the one with a statistic was read 600 times and the one without was read 100 times. This shows the value of re-using the content you have an a nice clickbaity title.
Hacker news
My blog posts were getting zero traction from hackernews. Not one click. I reached out to them to ask if I was shadow banned, and the answer was effectively "no, but dev.to is banned and you're breaking our guidelines anyway". It turns out dev.to is banned on HN because it has been the source of too many low-quality posts and too much promotional behavior. Fair enough.
I tried a "I made a thing" post on reddit that went down in flames and got hit with a lesser known feature of reddit: if your comments are downvoted enough times in a short enough period of time then there is a cooling off period before you can comment again. Thing is that means if 5 people all post negative comments that needs addressing I have to wait 50 minutes to reply to them all because each of my replies were an opportunity for more downvotes. In the meantime others see the comments and the damage is done. I quickly got disillusioned from the personal attacks calling me incompetent etc and my replies became defensive. Think Woody Harrelson's "Rampart" reddit post. As for why I got the downvotes: in my haste I said something factually incorrect. I called Django a server. It's not a server. In my head my line of though was "by setting a header in the response it's fulfilling a task a server can do". Did I actually think Django is a server? No. Did I say it was? Yes. Oops. But damage done and lesson learned. I ended up deleting the post, but nothing is ever lost so share in the reddit post that still gives me stomach pain when I think about it
No cookie popups
It turns out that you only need users to consent to non-essential cookies in your website. So they do not need to consent to session cookies that keep track of logged in session.
They do need to consent to analytics cookies though. But if you had analytics that does not use cookies? That's why I use fathom. I need no annoying popup asking for cookie consent. Less friction on the user.
Room for improvement
I learned a lot from the first 4 months, and am still learning. I'm very open to suggestions for how to improve the landing page and improve conversion! Have a look: https://django.doctor
This is a cool product idea! And congrats on the success you've had!
I admire your commitment to blogging - that must have been quite a slog.
Thanks! It was rather hard. It got to the point where I ran out of things to write about and I ended up developing features specifically to blog about. Content driven development.