Thread by @jspeiser

How I turned a crappy blog into $250k/yr cash machine while in college

How my simple interest led to not only a real payday but eventually a $200M business

It’s 1999 (yes I’m dating myself), and I’m right smack in the middle of the dot-com boom.

time for a🧵

In my spare time between classes I started a blog (MacProvider) about Apple computers (this is when they were still the underdog).

My goal was to just share my thoughts, on tech, rumored new products, and other fun musings. It wasn’t money motivated, at the time.

After a few months, the blog starts ranking for Apple keywords on all the major search engines, MSN, alltheweb, overture, askjeeves, etc. (Google didn’t exist yet!)

In addition, I was sharing the links in a lot of Apple fan-boy forums.

Soon, a few local tech companies started asking if they could sponsor the blog for $50/m.

That was pretty eye-opening - the content was worth something. Cool!

From there, the sponsors kept growing, but the niche was still rather small, and it never amounted to more than a few hundred $s a month.

The unlock moment was when I joined a few affiliate programs (online retailers share a % of sales you drive them).

MacMall, OfficeMax, Staples, etc. Now I was able to insert referral links for all the products I spoke about, and earn a commission for each one I sold.

This pushed my earnings up by another few hundred a month, still nothing crazy (yet)...

Then the DVD format hit - it became a huge seller. Everyone wanted DVDs.

So, I pivoted, and launched a new blog called DVDprovider (super original I know)

I repeated the same formula, except instead of writing long articles about the latest tech I just listed all the places to get DVDs cheap, w/coupons. At the time there were a ton of retailers all competing, and each offered large commissions to send them customers.

This lasted for about a year until I met my future biz partner Alex Z in a freebie/coupon forum.

His advice would alter my path pretty significantly.

He was also running a coupon/freebie site, except it was a general aggregator, including discounts on everything not just DVDs.

He suggested I change my focus from DVDprovider to Dealprovider.

Commissions skyrocketed. After hiring a fraternity brother to build a database so I wasn’t updating it all by hand, I was able to onboard 100’s of retailers, and 1000’s of coupon codes.

Now that I had the content, I needed a way to get the word out there. SEO was great, but it was slow.

Over the next 6 months, between exams, and classes, I consistently trolled mother’s forums, groups, coupon clipper sites, and just about every soccer mom niche on the web.

This drove a substantial amount of direct traffic which lasted for years.

Revenue surged to $250k+/year, and with no expenses, or employees, it was 100% profit.

At 21 years old, I was getting 6 figure checks from Linkshare, Commission Junction and Shareasale (all affiliate networks). My friends couldn’t understand why I was spending so much time on the computer, my grades dropped, but I didn’t care. I caught the bug, and loved it.

I’d spend countless hours tinkering with the site, researching coupons, evangelizing the brand, building new features, improving the UX, it was the best learning experience for which I could have ever asked.

This blog, as silly as it was, built my entire foundation and path.

It even led me to a $200M business shortly thereafter…but that’s for another thread.