I recently joined Eric Barnes on the Laravel News Creator Series podcast, where I discussed my journey as a developer, the origins of T.LY URL Shortener, and the lessons I’ve learned along the way. It was great to chat about Laravel, building products, and handling the challenges of running a SaaS service.
Category: Blogging
The Rise and Fall of Goo.gl
What will happen when billions of links vanish overnight? That’s exactly what is going to occur when Google’s URL shortener, Goo.gl, shut down after dominating the link-shortening market for nearly a decade. Google first launched their URL Shortener service Goo.gl on December 14th, 2009 right around the time Twitter and Bitly were taking off. There was a need for short links for services like Twitter where character limits were important. Eventually, they launched analytics and an API which was heavily adopted and over time was used to create billions of short links. Ahrefs has recorded over 26 Billion short URL backlinks to the Google URL Shortener over the past 16 years. That doesn’t account for short links shared privately.
“Goo.gl’s API became the default url shortener for developer’s, powering applications and marketing campaigns worldwide. From tracking clicks to enhancing user engagement, the service was used by thousands of applications.”
Build Your SaaS Podcast
I got a chance to be on the Build Your SaaS podcast with Justin Jackson and share my journey building side projects over the past 10+ years. I’ve been following Justin for years; it was awesome chatting with him! We dived into multiple topics around:
- What guardrails did I put in place with a family, full-time job, and building side projects
- What’s the sales funnel of T.LY URL Shortener?
- How family motivates me
- Strategies for building a business with a full-time job and family
- The pressure of going full-time on a side project
- SEO strategy of T.LY
- SaaS pricing: is it ok to be the cheapest?
- What’s it been like being full-time on T.LY?
Staying Focused on Your Goals
Have you ever been trapped in a seemingly never-ending cycle of tasks that lead to more tasks, leaving you spending hours on something completely unrelated to your original goal? If so, you’ve likely fallen into the frustrating trap of “shaving the yak.”
Writer Seth Godin coined the term “shaving the yak” to describe the frustrating experience of getting sidetracked by a series of tasks necessary to complete a larger goal. It stems from the hypothetical scenario in which you plan to wash your car, but you end up needing to shave a yak because you get sidetracked from the original goal. To wash the car, you need to fix the hose and to fix the hose, and you need to go to the store, and so on, until you’re so far removed from the original task that you forget what you were doing in the first place. Read More