And what is your safe number at the time? And how did you make that first few thousand work for your lifestyle?

Yeah, I think mine was about three to five thousand, somewhere in that range.

I don't remember exactly.

But because this was already a couple of years after I read the four-hour workweek, so it was kind of like... you know, not as looking at it every day like it was when I first bought it.

But yeah, it was something in there and I had that and more and from that one site.

So I was in a fortunate position where I didn't, you know, need to rush anything with Backlinko.

And I'm glad I didn't because I tried, I actually did, like I said, I did rush in the beginning, create a product that I thought people would want and then realize this is hard because I'm getting feedback and I don't have time to put that work into it and also build the audience at the same time.

are

Did it work right out of the gate, or was there a formula that you realized worked after you had a particular well-received publication of data?

It took a while to get going.

A lot of mistakes, a lot of posts that weren't great or the topic wasn't a good choice.

What really helped us, what was sort of the smash hit, were these very specific stats that people look for.

So what I discovered through this process was this stats page idea is nothing new.

Like people write, you know, the biggest stats around the fitness industry or LinkedIn stats or whatever, and those are fine, but usually journalists aren't looking for LinkedIn stats or TikTok stats.

Some of them are, and that's fine, but most of them are looking for something very specific like how many users does TikTok have or how many people use LinkedIn every day, like daily active users, or how many posts are on LinkedIn every day.

[laughs]