Adam managed the affiliate program for BigCommerce (an ecommerce SaaS platform) as an employee, and watched the bloggers and influencers he recruited into that program earn significant money from their own content. That observation is what made him curious about running a content site himself.

“I began to see BigCommerce affiliates making big money from their blog content and it piqued my curiosity.”

The first handful of blog visitors arrived organically in the earliest weeks after the January 2019 launch. Adam does not specify the exact discovery mechanism for these very first visitors (search vs. referral vs. something else) beyond noting it as a milestone he remembers.

“Getting my first few visitors back in January 2019.”

The very first revenue event was a $3 affiliate commission Adam earned when a reader clicked through and bought via an affiliate link on the new blog, some time in the first two months. This is the commission Adam received, not a price a customer paid him directly. Adam does not name the specific affiliate program or describe the exact click path, and it is not clear whether the buyer was a repeat reader or a first-time visitor.

“Making my first affiliate sale of $3.”