I’ve been building SquishyFile for a little over a month, so I figured I’d share where it’s at.
I’ve seen quite a few tool sites doing surprisingly well with ads, and I came across a bunch of those cases on X. That got me thinking: why not build one myself and see where it goes, haha.
So I started building a bunch of video tools and put them all into one site.
Right now there are tools for things like compressing videos, converting formats, video to text, upscaling, extracting audio and frames, GIFs, filters, and a bunch of smaller stuff.
I’ve been building it with a lot of help from Claude, and after a little over a month it’s doing around 100 users/day.
The traffic is still pretty interesting though.
Google isn't really sending much traffic yet, which I honestly expected to be the opposite.
Bing is actually sending more traffic than Google right now, and a decent chunk is coming from social, mostly Threads.
So I'm basically still figuring out where the traffic is going to come from.
Some tools get impressions, some get almost nothing. Some keywords look like they should have traffic but don't. And Google seems to be taking its sweet time.
The most fun part so far has actually been getting emails from users.
A few people have emailed me because they ran into bugs, which is already really useful because I obviously can't test every possible video and browser combination myself.
But some people have also emailed me just to suggest things they'd like to see added.
That was honestly pretty cool.
When you're building a site by yourself, you spend a lot of time staring at Analytics and Search Console, so getting an actual email from someone saying “hey, it'd be great if you added this” feels much more encouraging than another 20 users showing up in Analytics.
For now I'm just going to keep adding tools, trying different ways to get traffic, and seeing what happens.
Eventually I'd like to monetize it with ads. That's kind of the whole experiment for me — I've seen other tool sites make it work, so I want to see if I can make one work too.
No idea how far it'll go yet, but it's been pretty fun so far.
I'll post another update when something interesting happens.
Top comments (0)