Thread by @iamjonjackson

💥 The repressed memories of an inadvertent teenage indie hacker 💥

15+ years ago while I was finishing school and then heading to uni, I had a decent ARR from several educational websites I had flung together using a blend of not-so-elegant HTML, CSS and PHP.

Keep reading 👇🏻

As a kid at school, I started writing down revision notes on my computer.

No smartphones back then kids!

Although I did have a PDA at some point! Remember those? 🔥

Anyway, I turned my revision notes into a website...

It took off.

I ended up getting back links from national sites like @bbcbitesize 😲

I was ranking pretty much top for terms like "GCSE revision notes" for years.

I slammed Google AdSense on there as well as Amazon affiliate links for revision guides etc...

To give you an idea of the traffic, here's a screenshot from Google analytics when the site was already in decline.

I can't even remember what kind of daily impressions I hit.

It was a lot.

I was making something like £6-8k per year just from ads when things were going well.

Did I appreciate it at the time? Not really.

What should I have done?

Perhaps I should have doubled down, got it up to a living wage.

Remember I was still with my parents at the time.

Instead, I thought I want to setup a "business".

I want to build websites for people and charge them money.

I want to have a website where I talk about "we" and I call myself the "Managing Director" in my email signature 😝

WHY!!??

I had no real compass back then.

Anyway, after about 10 years of flogging away at freelancing, running a mini agency, employing people, partnering up with people, working on some pretty big client sites, I realised what I think I knew all along.

Not for me.

I want to build stuff that have value.

The educational website(s) were an inadvertent precursor to that.

Tearing myself away from agency life was slow and painful.

Several breakdowns ensued. 😑

But, slowly, I got out.

Got into teaching. Thanks @BucksNewUni

A few years later, I sold a small co-founded startup! 🥳

What happened to my educational websites?

They suffered a slow digital rot.

Gradually died a death from not being maintained.

Also, while I had stepped right back (but not quite left), my agency lazily let one of my main domains expire.

My mind was elsewhere.

Someone else registered it and setup shop with their own site 🙄

I had the .com equivalent domain which I switched over to but most of the value had already rotted away.

I had mentally abandoned the site(s) years before.

And Google had already dumped the site down the rankings

Bye bye ARR! 💷👋🏻

But I'm ok with all this.

Ç'est la vie.

It was great while it lasted and everything I've been through over the last 15+ years has got me to where I am now.

Happier. Healthier.

And I know what I want (mostly) 🤓

I think most of my issues stemmed from trying to do so much stuff in a vacuum.

I had no network.

No supportive Twitter community back then.

No Twitter!

So if you're struggling with finding direction, feel free to reach out.

My DMs are open 😊