New comment by mtlynch in "My First Year as a Solo Developer"

Thanks for reading!

>Admittedly I haven't followed your blog, so you may mention this somewhere on there. You seem to fall into the common developer trap of building a bunch of stuff without gauging demand and then trying to monetize it afterwards.

I've definitely been guilty of that. I wrote a blog post about how I did this without realizing it a few months ago:

https://mtlynch.io/shipping-too-late/

These are good questions! I'll try to answer each:

>Like, are there people out there clamoring for a one-stop location where they can check if food is keto?

Honestly, I think there are.

I initially got the idea while I was trying to find an audience for KetoHub, but I'd constantly see people post in keto Facebook groups, "Is X keto?" and they'd just get a lot of unsourced, contradictory information.

I have the problem myself if I forget whether a food is keto. Dark chocolate is an easy one but like "is thousand island dressing keto?" currently doesn't have a good result. The best you'll find are forum posts and people disagreeing with each other.

>Is your site less friction than just Googling "Is dark chocolate keto?" then reading the little blurb answer Google generates?

Google generates a little blurb, but it has to pull that information from somewhere. I'm hoping for Is It Keto to be the source that Google uses for most foods (it currently is if you Google "is propel keto" or "is pure via stevia keto").

Maybe some people are satisfied with the blurb, but about 1/3 of my traffic is currently SEO, so I feel like I can continue growing it.

>Can the bulk of your value proposition be copied easily by anyone with access to WordPress?

They could, but they'd have to spend a lot of time building up a corpus of food data. And they'd have to catch up to my (admittedly small) lead in search rankings. Unless you're talking about someone just plagiarizing all my content?

>IMO you are going after areas that are too saturated/competitive. Those sorts of fields are great for marketers that know how to navigate, differentiate, and promote them, but they are not so good for developers that mostly specialize in building complicated things.

I think that's true. I've been trying to think about smaller niches I could focus on. Like keto resources for other languages (seems to be fewer players) or keto + some other diet, like vegan keto, kosher keto, etc.

>Not trying to be harsh, just trying to help.

Not harsh at all. Thank you for the feedback!

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