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: Side Project
Bitly Showing Ads on Page Redirects
A few weeks ago, Bitly announced they would start showing ads and interstitial pages on free redirects in February. In my opinion, this will cause a lot of frustration for the billions of Bitly short links. This preview page will include ads and a brief summary of the target URL. Users who wish to bypass this ad experience have two options: upgrade to a paid Bitly plan or switch to a different URL shortener that does not force ads. Are you planning to switch or upgrade? Read More
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?