The most exciting $10 I've ever made.

Six months after we both left the startup where we met, my former boss suggested we take up a side project together. No, he didn't want to raise money from top VCs and change the world with another hyper-growth unicorn. He wasn't even looking for a way out of his new day job. It might just be cool, he thought, to leverage our digital marketing skills and collaborate on something that might eventually generate a bit of passive income.

I agreed it sounded like a fun way to keep in touch, so we began to brainstorm.

With backgrounds in early-stage fintech startups, we knew there were SEO opportunities in the SMB 401(k) space. So rather uncreatively, we decided to spin up a content site for B2B fintech product reviews. I purchased the domain name finvsfin.com -- short for "fintech vs fintech" -- for $9.99 per year and launched a simple wordpress site. I hired a designer on fiverr for $30 to create a logo, and asked my ex-boss / current-partner to get busy writing reviews. We went live in just a few weeks.

After publishing four or five articles, we realized that B2B fintech companies don't generally offer affiliate programs. We could try to monetize by manually brokering cost-per-lead deals with local financial advisors, but that sounded like more effort than it was worth given such minimal traffic. Expanding into B2C fintech products was a natural next step, but we noticed SEO for the most popular investment and payment apps was prohibitively competitive.

We toyed with starting from scratch and picking a new niche, or just scrapping the project altogether. Ultimately we chose to rebrand. From a content perspective, our focus had been on helping consumers find products that improve financial health. Now we would cover wellness in general, not merely of the financial variety. Removing this arbitrary restriction freed us to review a much more diverse set of products and unlock a lot more traffic.

As it turned out, the decision to cover more than just fintech (despite our domain name, logo, and initial vision) is what kept the project alive. Lack of traction kills motivation, so I believe it was only a matter of time before we would have ditched the project had we not found a way to grow traffic in a repeatable way.

As we had hoped, the flood of direct-to-consumer wellness products on the market continues to present a large opportunity. Consumers are curious how new products stack up -- both to other new offerings and the traditional brands they grew up with. So we began to write articles on an extremely diverse set of products including subscriptions to hair loss treatments, personalized vitamins, organic tampons, fresh dog food, and a whole lot more.

It's been fun to see our articles rank and attract visitors. But I'll tell you one thing: nothing compares to seeing our first $10 in commission. I immediately texted my partner in ALL CAPS to let him know. Ultimately it provided the fuel we needed to keep going. If you break down our total earnings at that moment into an hourly wage, it surely would be fractions of a penny. But man was I proud! We had validated a model, and it felt like we were on to something.

Over the next couple of months with a lot of dedicated effort, we watched our traffic build further, and the affiliate commissions followed almost linearly.

We've continued to publish quality comparison content at an aggressive pace and have since grown affiliate commissions to around $600/month. Our next major milestone is $1k, although I don't think it will be nearly as exciting as our first $10 :)

If you're looking to start an affiliate site of your own from 0 to your first $10 in commission and beyond, don't hesitate to reach out,