Welcome to the new blog
If you are new here, I am shrey, a software developer and creator of multiple products online.
I have been running iHateReading for the past 4 years, and we have crossed 10k users signed up and are operating at 1k monthly active users.
I am glad that readers are revisiting the website; the churn rate has been low for the past few months, and people are subscribing to our newsletter more than ever.
This year, in 2026, in the first 6 months, I've improved the landing page and added other ƒeatures on the website as explained below
- Explore github trending repositories directly on the web home page
- New 300+ SaaS directories page (our 2026 most visited page)
Nothing new has been done apart from consistent writing on the platform.
iHateReading is FREE to read, not forced to log in, and no compulsory subscription to read.
Each blog is handcrafted with zero AI involvement. I've been doing this for the past 5 years, which makes it easy for me to craft a 500-word article in 10-20 minutes.
Building iHateReading
I've never covered details about how I am running this platform, how I am earning, etc
iHateReading is built entirely using Nextjs and Firebase, and the detailed tech-stack is:
- Nextjs
- React
- Tailwind
- Lucide
- Firebase
- Redux
- Tiptap editor
- Vercel
- Server functions
- Resend
The deployment is on Vercel, and the database is Firebase. We do use the paid version of Firebase with the Pay-as-you-go feature, and the reason is that I've made iHateReading 5 years ago and migrating to a new database is not easy when you have 10k total users.
Promoting the website
Most of the time, I've got the same question to address: How to market my website, how to get visitors and users or traffic?
First and foremost, it's not easy, and it won't happen on day-1
You need 3-6 months in total to grab a good user base.
Marketing on multiple other platforms, such as X, LinkedIn, TikTok, IG, Youtube, Medium, Devto, Hashnode, Dailydev, Cold Emailing, Reddit, all these platforms are needed to promote the website.
One can say pay attention to one. Yes, if YouTube, then prefer YouTube, if good on LinkedIn, then prefer LinkedIn and so on. Choice is yours, but choose one platform and become very good at it to gain an audience.
My mistake 4 years ago was choosing multiple platforms at the same time and promoting my content on multiple platforms. The strategy was good, but too much promotion was creating chaos in my work schedule and making it difficult to manage. I prefer choosing one platform and becoming good at it.
But you might have to prompt or distribute the backlinks, hyperlink of your blog to the other trusted high-ranking domains, such as X, YouTube, LinkedIn, Hackerrank, or Devto, this increase the trust, and an AI agent like Chatgpt can recommend your website very well.
I was contacted by one of the people whose SAAS business is to bring your blog content platform or website on chatgpt recommendations, his SAAS idea was to help people promote their website on chatgpt and AI agent suggestions/recommendations, increasing the trust, domain rating and traffic.
Another good solution is to submit the website to Google Search Console with sitemaps and have the page indexed, preferably by buying the .com domain or other trusted domains; do not go beyond fancy, untrusted domains, otherwise your emails will be spammed in the inbox.
Make a list of distribution channels for your website content, for me it's Medium, Hackernoon, Hashnode, Devto and LinkedIn. Do not spam similar content across platforms; leverage each platform's audience, understand what they want, and only promote that type of content.
Admin Panel
I've been writing for years and have used multiple writing tools and CMS, but it was never easy to write content and push to the database and then render on the website with all SEO tags and an updated sitemap.
I've learned this admin panel and its benefits in my previous company, and using a similar technique, I have an admin panel for our iHateReading to write blogs, edit blogs, manage users, create email newsletters on a Tiptap notion-like editor, send emails to our subscribers directly from the admin panel, store blogs directly into the database, etc
All these features are handled within the admin panel; it's more like iHateReading CMS.
I am a big fan of the Admin panel, and we have built the most advanced Admin Panel, which we reuse across all of our existing products and future SAAS products.
Check Admin Panel, just to provide an overview of the admin panel
Earning sources
Initially, iHateReading's target was to reach to the exact audiences and then increase the subscriber base. As a platform, iHateReading wasn't a pain killer its a vitamin so we can't depend on users to come and subscribe.
The first target was to bring more subscribers, and for that, in 2023, I started crafting bi-weekly email updates on programming, tech and AI.
Within the first 8 months, we have crossed 1k subscribers because of the traffic, but nobody told you how to reach to that point.
It took me almost 1 to 2 years, with consistent writing of almost 500 blogs, to promote the website to 1k active monthly visitors.
Promoting the website has a compounding effect, and it works slowly, but certainly it does work.
Once the subscriber base was increasing, I was confident enough to show something to our early sponsor. Cold emailing for sponsors is easy-peasy money, but it's not easy to get those sponsors.
We got our first sponsor for iHateReading in January 2025, Anima AI. The company reached out to me to create blog content and promote the content on iHateReading via newsletter, cold emailing and through the blog on the website.
iHateReading has provided 300+ monthly visitors with 0.6% of conversion ratio for Anima, and these were their words, not mine. 300 users were not bad for any small startup, and so many solo indie developers needed that many visitors.
Other ways to provide sponsorship are the website banner position, navbar sponsors, footer and other placements on the website, job posting, email marketing via cold emailing to all subscribers, all these are the ways to earn.
One easy way is to contact the companies or SAAS founders, asking them to provide a banner, blog and one/2/3 cold email package promoting their website/tool/product.
The package works every time.
Instead of selling one sponsored blog, I prefer providing one blog for one month, 2/3 cold emailing marketing to our subscribers, and one banner or footer placement for advertisement and promoting a number at the end of the month, such as 1k visitors in total for the next 30-40 days.
Check our Advertisement page for a better understanding
If you can't find the client for sponsorship, here as few ways to do so
- Find manually on LinkedIn and contact each of them, DM
- Find each on X or Reddit and DM them promoting your website
- Use third-party client finding solutions, such as Apollo for lead generation and other AI LinkedIn or X lead generation tools
- Social media tweets, posts asking for sponsors and replying to all comments sections
- Posting a small YouTube short for the same
Manually reaching out to them works well, since you only need 2-3 sponsors each month, and manually doing it will save time and increase the conversion or success rate.
That would be enough for today, see you in the next one
Cheers
Shrey
iHateReading
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