Lessons learned from monetizing a niche makeup search engine

A few years ago I set out to solve a problem I had with finding lipstick by writing some code. It turned out that this was a problem that many other people in the community had and the search engine I deployed gained some initial traction.

I'm mostly a mediocre coder, so I never expected anything big to happen but I saw a tweet challenging people to make $1 on the internet, so I said what the hell, let me give it a go. Fast forward 2 years of growth and monetization strategy is slowly starting to kick in. It's not much by any means, but I'm hoping I can keep the growth up. Here are some of my top lessons:

1. If you're users are searching for solutions to their problem via a search engine, focus on SEO - lots of low-hanging fruits that can be implemented without much expertise just by reading good resources like the Ahrefs blog.
   In 2021, the means of building a tech product or MVP are easily accessible (to anyone living in a country with good internet and access to a credit card to pay a cloud provider for hosting), but it's the problem of distribution: how do you get your product in front of people who might be interested in it, that's the problem, in particular if you are a shoestring budget bootstrapper without access to a marketing budget. Many social media channels are free, but with a very limited organic reach, meaning your hard-crafted Instagram and Facebook posts might only reach a few % of your followers. if you're a small channel , this might be mean 1 or 2 people see your post, maybe none at all and that's a very small ROI for posts that need to be created and planned. Most of my growth came from focusing on learning and implementing low-hanging organic SEO strategies that are available on blogs such as Ahrefs.

2. Competitors are good - they mean there is a market for your product. Seek to differentiate yourself slightly - provide slightly different value to the user than your competitor.

3. Monetization takes time and traction, but once you get a few partners on-board the journey becomes slightly easier.

4. Keep tabs on your "economies of scale". How much are you paying for hosting, how will that change as you scale, how much ROI do you get for each new unit of traffic that your product gets

5. Leverage Reddit communities to engage and interact with your users.

Onwards towards the next challenge! :)