
How to Grow Quickly and Never Turn a Profit - mtlynch
https://mtlynch.io/keep-growing-never-profit/
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minoru
You obviously spent way more time analysing all this than I did, so pardon my
naivety, but it seems to me that shelving this project is an over-reaction. If
the site's growth is limited by search engines, well, scale down your
involvement (post less, cut costs), but don't give up on it entirely.

If Amazon doesn't fit, try other partners. We have businesses here that will
do the shopping for you, and deliver everything to the door; and I'm not even
in the USA. Perhaps integrating with those is a better idea than Amazon.
Individual transactions will still be small, of course, but hopefully you'll
get more of them, increasing profits.

Best of luck with your next idea, and consider not giving up on this one
either. It's obviously valuable to people, but it might take a few years to
grow to a level where it makes sense to dedicate more effort to it.

~~~
mtlynch
Thanks for reading!

I agree that it still has room to grow and maybe even produce positive
returns. It's just that if I ask myself whether this has the best chance of
making money of anything else I could be working on, I feel like it's probably
not.

Good point about integrating with food delivery services. I applied to be an
Instacart affiliate a few months ago but they declined my application and then
I forgot about it, but I should revisit that. I suspect they rejected me
because Is It Keto isn't very "browseable" since it requires the user to type
in the food they want, but it would be easy for me to throw together some
"browse by category" pages to show that I've got lots of content.

I haven't shut the door on it entirely. I would love to keep growing it in the
background, so I'm keeping an eye on revenue. If it reaches ~$500/month or so,
I think it gives me room to hire back my writer and continue to grow the site.

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mtlynch
Author here. Happy to answer any questions or hear any feedback about this
post.

