29 blog posts, traffic stats, and tweaks: update #11

Last time I wrote a lot about my focus, planning, and roadmap for what September holds. It's too early to talk about October, but I already know I'm walking into a few dumpster fires this month, between four podcast channels, the language learning app, and getting BETA users onto my flagship SaaS.

This time I wanted to slow down and look at whether my current pace, my work, my iterations, and my usual stupidity made any sense.

29 blog posts in August for this blog

I paused for a second when I saw that number. For whatever bizarre reason, I wrote 29 blog posts in August, and it felt effortless. I went back and read a few of them, and realized what I have is a collection of field notes.

A lot of ranting, some deeper thinking about the Spacemail outage, and my most popular piece, which turned out to be Warmwind OS.

And the truth is, I did write a blog post every single day. I really enjoy it. It's my personal journal, and it's coming together nicely.

What makes writing this easy is that I genuinely don't give a fuck about SEO titles, engineered hooks, or polishing my posts so it looks like I only ever made good decisions.

When I decided to become a content creator and blogger, I had no idea how it would go. But looking at what I document now, how openly I admit stupidity or mistakes, I can see a clearer path forming without even trying hard for it.

That's a lot of writing for one month, and that's not even counting everything else I published.

Traffic stats

Obviously I wanted to check how the numbers looked for the month. My focus was on three sites:

• this blog

• the flagship SaaS MVP app

• the twelve-dollar site I vibe-coded in an afternoon

Mostly I'm logging this for future reference, so don't expect anything supersonic here. I also didn't get Analytics installed early enough, so I'm not sure it covers all of August.

And I'm not entirely sure what's being tracked correctly either, because the numbers in Analytics don't match Google Search Console, and I genuinely have no idea anymore how tracking is supposed to line up. I've been out of this game for years, so take the discrepancies as a given.

This blog

82 new users. Most of that traffic went to my two posts about Warmwind OS, which honestly surprised me. I would have bet on the Spacemail outage post beating it.

You can see the spike below: a clear jump in clicks during the outage, 197 tracked in GSC.

I asked Gemini why the discrepancy between Analytics and Search Console exists, and I'm adding its answer below for reference.

All in all, I'm happy with how it's tracking, especially with zero SEO effort and zero intent to attract visitors. I hope it keeps going.

Flagship SaaS MVP

This one's trickier, and basically the opposite problem. GSC shows 6 clicks. Analytics shows 186 active users.

The red flag for me is how low the average time on page is right now. My best guess is two things are happening at once: the domain two.so is easy to mistype, especially when someone forgets the space at the end of a sentence, and I suspect most people landing on it right now aren't landing on the right content.

I'm hoping this improves over the next two months. I only recently started blogging for it, ten posts published so far, and it'll take time before traffic catches up with the right audience.

I'm actively working the BETA invites, the waitlist, and the blog together, so the numbers should start lining up eventually. Nothing to panic about, just useful data to have on record.

The $12 stupid website

This one's a bit special. I built it on August 17th, the domain was registered on August 16th, and the full story of how that happened lives in a separate post, which you can read HERE.

GSC is basically empty for it, which makes sense since it's not relying on SEO or impressions at all. What moved it was me commenting four times in a Reddit thread.

Four comments drove over 900 active users. I didn't even mention the site directly; I just said something like: I built something so stupid, here it is.

People are apparently very curious about what's behind door number one, and I still don't know how the fuck four comments pulled in almost a thousand people.

I know this traffic is temporary. I'll figure out what to do with the site soon. If I ever get too burned out on building serious things or writing, this is my playground, and I might expand it so organic traffic has time to catch up on its own.

Either way, this is the dumbest thing I've built so far, and it has the most traffic to show for it, off four comments and a nineteen-year-old domain that was sitting idle until I claimed it. I will never let this go.

Tweaks

When I started working on the BETA invite for the flagship SaaS, I didn't know what to do yet. My original plan was cold email and outreach to niche bloggers and writers, but the more I sat with it, the more daunting it felt.

I built the page, wrote an announcement for it, and then just left it hidden and unlisted. Then today, after looking at the traffic numbers, I made a tweak to the homepage.

Instead of pushing people to sign up directly, I changed the framing to invite people onto a waitlist for BETA users, with lifetime access as the reward.

I should be capitalizing on the traffic that's already landing. And here's the strange part: three hours before I sat down to write this post, I finally got Resend set up properly, alongside that homepage change.

The result so far is one visitor joining the waitlist. That's the benchmark going forward.

This went live on September 2nd. I'll be watching how it tracks and how many people sign up. I'm not in a rush to make money off any of this. Right now I just need BETA users before I keep fucking around with the Mac app I'm building in Xcode.

Final note

Looking back, August was a good month. Lots of changes, a fair amount of frustration, and some praise I didn't expect, including from a company I'd been on a waitlist for, whose product apparently got a real bump from one of my blog posts about them.

I'm heading into September feeling genuinely encouraged. I stayed focused on two things that mattered, took a few detours along the way, and documented almost all of it, day in and day out.

That's the part I want to keep doing. Not because it's building toward something specific yet, just because it's the only way I've found to actually see what I'm doing while I'm doing it.