Not making any money. Imo it's as simple as that. First project I built for 6 months without even launching, like what a complete idiot. Second I kept thinking oh I'll add monetization later. Others as well not thinking about money first and validating my product with a Paywall. Validation can ONLY happen when people PAY imo.
I want to start doing paid advertisements and maybe try to rank for more competitive keywords with google ads. I'm very new to ads though so I don't know if I'll have much success
I have 200 followers on twitter and get barely any like/comments on my posts so X is not my main distribution. Reddit gets decent views but I don't think I get many PAID users from it anyways.
I think honestly 80% of my users come from my domain name giving me a huge SEO boost. I knew people who need my product would search "AEO Check" or "AEO Checker" hence I named my domain aeochecker.ai, a week after I published my site i was already ranking top 5 in this keyword (also because it was very low competition)
IME the competitiveness of results is probably a much bigger factor, considering exact-match domains are a very old SEO trick and Google doesn't reward them (it penalizes them, actually). "AEO" is a brand new concept so congrats on finding a new wave! Double down on SEO if that's working for you. It's hard enough finding 1 channel that works. The fact that you hit $500 MRR on the open web is actually pretty impressive, and you can likely scale significantly if you're aggressive about growth. Good luck!
Oh didn't know about that, perhaps you're right the keyword was just very low competition. Thanks for the advice, will hard focus on growth now trying to find other channels!
My advice was actually the opposite. It's harder to take a new channel from 0-1 than it is to take an existing channel from 1-2. so in my experience it's better to double down on what's working. only branch out to new channels when you have the resources, or you've maxed out your existing channels. FWIW I don't think your channel is just SEO, it's also content marketing like this HN post. Keep it up!
Thanks! I do really wonder though if content marketing like this post, or other posts on reddit actually bring any Paid users, which is what I'm trying to focus on. Because I see my viewership skyrocket when i do posts on reddit yet I get the same amount of Paid users in these days as the days I did 0 posts for like 2 weeks straight...
Honestly I think 80% of my users were because of my domain name. I knew people who need my product will search "AEO Check" or "AEO Checker" so I called my domain aeochecker.ai + the fact that this keyword is very low competition
I often see news debating which ai model is best or find myself switching between different models when one doesn't quite get the answer. For example, sometimes o1 isn't getting it so I go try with deepseek and it gets it, or vice-versa.
I even started copying outputs from one model to another, pasting and asking "What do you think of this response and thinking, could it help us solve the issue?"
That got me thinking: rather than focusing on finding the single "best" model, why not leverage multiple top models simultaneously and synthesize their combined insights?
I've been testing this approach with common "challenges" such as the how many "r" or "l" letters are in a word, or the generate falling balls in a rotating hexagon, as well as more difficult problems. The combined responses have consistently been excellent.
