3 builders who never spoke to each other

Publish the resource the category lacks

Build the thing your future buyers need in order to do the activity at all, the guide, the ranking, the answer you had to compile yourself over a week, and it becomes a destination rather than an advert. Search first, because someone has often already automated the part you were going to do by hand.

The method

1. 01

   Make something so useful to your customers' activity that it grows the market your product sits in, rather than advertising into a market that is too small.

2. 02

   When a platform starts growing, build the site that tracks and ranks its top users, because that ranking becomes a destination in its own right.

3. 03

   Start from a real question you could not answer with a search: if you have to spend a week compiling the answer yourself, that gap is the product.

4. 04

   Search for the resource you are about to build before you build it, because someone has usually already automated the part you were going to do by hand.

5. 05

   Publish your best unworked ideas anyway, because the number of readers who finish one is close to zero.

What it returned

• 1900

  In 1900 there were fewer than 300 cars in the whole of France, so the Michelin brothers published a guide for new motorists - maps, tyre-changing instructions, good restaurants - and printed 35,000 free copies.

• 2009

  Tim Chen's sister asked him which credit card had lower foreign transaction fees. Everything he found in Google was promotional, and even as a finance professional it took him a week to build a comparison spreadsheet, which then got forwarded well beyond his friends. NerdWallet started in 2009 on $800 and reported $379.6M of revenue in 2021, averaging 19 million monthly visitors in Q3 2022 with SimilarWeb attributing about 85% to search.

• Graphtreon charts every Patreon earner's income growth and dips and pulls traffic Glen Allsopp called surprising. He lists the same pattern elsewhere: Reddit List for subreddit growth, Top Authors and Top Pub for Medium, and Social Blade for Twitch streamers.

• Glen Allsopp spent days manually copying Patreon earners into an HTML table, then found Graphtreon, which had live automated data covering more pages than he had found by clicking around.

Sources

• 54 of the Biggest Earners on Patreon (And What They're Selling) - Detailed.comGlen Allsopp · detailed.com · There’s Always an Opportunity to ‘Datafy’ New Websites · 2023-01-04
• 51 Profitable SEO Niches to Dominate with Low Competition - Detailed.comGlen Allsopp · detailed.com · Sorry I Just Killed All of These Niches By Blogging About Them · 2016-08-25
• 20 Successful Blogs And Their Latest 2024 Revenue Numbers - Detailed.comTim Chen · detailed.com · NerdWallet : $379.6M in 2021 Revenue · 2022-01-23
• “Michelin Guide” MarketingHarry Dry · Marketing Examples · “Michelin Guide” Marketing · undated