Brick Insights

I knew from other LEGO projects that Christmas and Black Friday is the busiest season, and expected a traffic uptick for Brick Insights in December. But I was pleasantly surprised! With 8.2k users and 25.1k page views we did much better than the 5.3k users and 18k page views we had in November. I attribute this to a few things:

• I finished a "recommended or not"-feature and added it to the widgets embedded on other sites. In addition to letting people know at a glance if a set has polarising reviews or not, it has increased the click-through rate quite a bit.

• I improved the on-site SEO. I tweaked the meta description, and adjusted the schema markup (adding each review, not just the aggregate). Google (and Baidu, which was unexpected) picked up on this. Brick Insights is increasingly getting higher positions in the SERP according to Search Console.

Traffic is pretty evenly split between referrals and SEO at this point in time. We'll probably see a drop in January.

Work continues. I'm doing quite a bit behind the scenes: migrating to a new host, finishing a graphql api and improving the data quality.

The past two years have been interesting, and I'm glad to have built this project. It feels good to be near the stage where I can rely on the data enough to experiment with additional income streams. That will be my focus during 2020, starting with the following:

• Predicting which LEGO sets will appreciate/depreciate in value (got a decently functioning model for this) and perhaps dabble in reselling

• Selling access to the API

• Using the API to sell desktop apps and detailed analyses to other LEGO builders and collectors

• All while still keeping the main site free as a testing ground

It was a long road to get here, but it feels I've finally validated the usefulness of the data. I'm glad to have been able to contribute something back to a hobby that has given me a lot of joy over the years.

After some more work I slowly began gathering feedback from LEGO people. The feedback was great - people felt it was useful and gave lots of suggestions for improvements. I built widgets people could embed on their sites, added more reviews, tweaked the system, and iterated on the design. My todo list is long, but its enjoyable work.

Oh, and I made the first affiliate dollars via Amazon. It's not much, and it's not the business model I have in mind for the site, but it's still encouraging.

After a few months of work, mostly getting the infrastructure right (the review importers, database structure and so on) I put the site on the web. I didn't tell anyone except for a post on Indie Hackers: https://www.indiehackers.com/forum/celebrating-a-quiet-beta-launch-c7dd931f76

I had explored the idea enough to get that a) it would be possible for me to build it, and b) it would probably be useful to the community. So, I made a huge commit and pushed it to github as a backup.

I began working on Brick Insights around here somewhere. This date is when my son was born, and I realized I needed a side project I could do when he was asleep. Thus, Brick Insights was born!