Putting my money where my mouth is, I’m starting a paid affiliate website
I’ve made millions of dollars for a range of clientele over the years. From local small to medium businesses, to national law firms, optometrist chains, TV channels, beauty products, insurance underwriters, universities, and onwards to international celebrities, consulting firms, film studio and distribution labels. It’s time I make a personal bet and put my own time, effort and money forward.
It’s time to spend money or take some action in order to do or support something that I’ve been talking about all my career — this time for myself.
What to do, what to do
I’ll have to admit, between my family and work, my time available for personal projects is tiny — very tiny. I can’t do a massive project because it will never get done, and my time available is sparse and sporadic.
It has to be a project I care about, at least a bit, and it has to be a project that I can go weeks without touching and it won’t be too complicated to know where it’s up to — working with major context switching.
Polling ideas
Over the past 20 years, I’ve had a number of ideas, some have made it to production and succeeded and some have been used as a means of learning a new technology. For example, I started mobile development off the back of diving into a personal project using Ionic, Swift, Android, Xamarin, and React Native.
I’ve kept a list of my ideas electronically like a big filing system, including tabs. Sometimes I peruse them, and dabble more information into them. Most of the time they become stale and sometimes outdated.
The good ideas are the ones that are still relevant 10 years later, this article is really showing my age.
So with above in mind:
- The idea has to be small
- I like to learn something new
- I need some sort of personal benefit or interest
- There needs to be some value to others
I like to present to you … drum roll please … a product comparison website. Ba dum dish!
Oh why, oh why?
Not another product comparison website …
When you look at a product comparison website, they’re not quick and easy to use. I want to build something very easy to use, there’s a a bit of an art to simplicity and I’m going to find those sweet spots.
So my idea is a one page website, I’m going to get straight into the raw details, provide very easy filtering, and display the results. Done, that’s it, users click on the link of the product and purchase.
You still haven’t told me the idea!
True, just wanted to explain it before you are let down with the idea. Now that you know why, the set of products I’m going to compare are hard drives on compare-hard-drives.com.
I’m going to create a website that compares hard drives, from price per terabyte, brands, speed, capacity, form factors, and technology. Funny, when I first wrote this idea years ago, I was comparing price per gigabyte.
Whenever I buy a new HDD, I’m not a fan of a particular brand or anything. Evidence by Google shows that there’s no brand that is substantially better than another, all hard drives have a failure rate.
The main decision I make when buying new HDDs, is what is my total budget and what is the best return in size for that money (price per terabyte). So I get out a spreadsheet, note down all the HDDs from online and local suppliers, and work out which drive gives me the cheapest price per terabyte.
Is this going to pay me millions?
No, this isn’t an idea that’s going to pay me millions … far from it. If it covers the hosting bills then I’m satisfied, anything extra is a bonus.
I’m looking beyond making money and going to utilise some Affiliate Marketing products to learn something personally. I’ve done this before for a travel booking website that made the owner $100’s of thousands but I still have a lot to learn in this product space.
Technology
Back to simplicity and learning, I’m going to build the world’s fastest website. This website is going to have a lot of data and it’s going to load lightning fast.
It’s going to be simple HTML, CSS, and vanilla JavaScript. I’m probably going to prototype quickly with React and Gatsby to the HTML static website.
I’ve been using AWS since 2011, I’m very familiar with it’s services. As of late, I’ve used Google Cloud and AWS in parallel. I’ve dipped my feed into Microsoft Azure but not enough to say I’m past a beginner. I’m going to build this on Microsoft Azure.
Summary
So that’s it, I’m going to compare hard drives, creating a simplistic fast static website, on Microsoft Azure. I’m also going to write as much as I can during this particular personal project, I feel like a lot of Engineers wonder about doing something similar and wonder if they will seek some real benefits (normally money).
The writing is where I see value, and between you and I … the motivation to complete the project. I like to learn and I like to write about it.
