I'm Shutting Down Content Goblin - A Post Mortem
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I've been experimenting with building, growing, and monetizing websites for nearly two decades. Over the years, I've experienced many ups and downs. It's really been a rollercoaster ride.
I discuss my experiments in website monetization, including the things that work and, more importantly, the things that don't work.
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I’ve made the difficult decision to shut down my SaaS Content Goblin. It’s no longer financially viable for me to keep running the software.
Content Goblin was my tool to generate image based listicles, recipes, and Pinterest pins for the articles.
Why I created Content Goblin
For about 25 years I’ve been into creating and monetizing websites and content. I’ve run affiliate ad campaigns, built content based websites monetized with ads, and software.
In 2024, I started to dive into Pinterest monetization. Pinterest was growing fast and sending massive amounts of traffic to publisher websites.
The basic model was:
Create a listicle
Pin a bunch of pins to Pinterest
Send traffic to your website
Monetize via display ads
I found was having a hard time keeping up with the posting volume necessary to keep traffic coming to the website regularly. Then I discovered a tool called Pin Generator that helped me schedule the pins in bulk, but I still had to manually create the articles.
So I started making my own scripts to help with the article generation part. Initially it was a fairly simple Jupyter notebook that evolved into a web UI.
I joined a community of Pinterest creators called Maverick Mastermind forum and started sharing my method for creating articles and pins. I gave out a lot of free advice. One of the forum partners, Jesse Cunningham, reached out to me because he thought what I was working on was cool.
I gave him a demo of my tool and his initial reaction was "I could totally sell this to my audience." I had never thought about creating a SaaS tool before this, but I thought I could probably pull it off with my background in tech. I decided to go for it.
The name comes from an article that I believe was posted on TheVerge, but I cannot located it now. The article was about how SEO was ruining the internet. In the article, the author not so lovingly referred to the people ruining the internet as "Content Goblins." I immediately filed a trademark to use the term Content Goblin in software. So Content Goblin was born.
Building the Tool
I initially coded the prototype by hand using ChatGPT as a guide to learn Python/Django. Eventually I started using Cursor to help code the site, but the coding models were still not where they are today, so it still took a lot of manual work.
I had experience in Ruby and PHP, band I was not a fan of JavaScript, so I made the decision to go with Python. I learned enough to make a working application that launched with a barebones AI listicle generator. I eventually added AI Pinterest Pin, recipe, and image generation.
Eventually AI coding models got much better and I was able to add new features quickly. I even hired a developer to help me add some much needed features like a Pinterest scheduler.
I had recently left a very demanding job at a fast growing startup called Moveworks to go to another very demanding job at Meta (who later laid me off). I wasn’t sure if I would be able to support the product given that I was working 10+ hours per day.
Marketing and the Initial High
After meeting Jesse Cunningham, I decided to partner with him to promote Content Goblin to his large YouTube following. I gave Jesse a large chunk of the company to promote the tool. I’ve never done this before, but it seemed like having 100k+ subscribers seeing my tool would be a fair trade for the equity.
I setup a landing page and started collecting emails. Jesse cranked out some videos and I saw a wave of people sign up for the waiting list.
I finalized the MPV and we soft launched the initial version of...