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HUMBLEDOLLAR JUST marked its seventh birthday. I didn’t set out to launch a site that would devour endless hours of my time and derail my plans for something that looked like a normal retirement. But I have no regrets.
The site hasn’t been a huge success. Still, I find running it to be hugely satisfying. It’s the reason I typically crawl out of bed before 5 a.m., and do so happily. Here are five key lessons I’ve learned from my first seven years running HumbleDollar—lessons that I suspect may be useful to others, no matter what their avocation:
1. “Most overnight successes take 10 years.” That was a comment I saw online perhaps five or six years ago, and it’s stayed with me. Just as lottery ticket winners and soaring individual stocks make us think that success can come quickly and with surprising ease, the same can appear true of business ventures.
Yes, some companies do indeed suddenly take off. But as with investing, most businesses succeed by folks trying to do the right thing day after day, even when faced with discouraging short-term results. In the case of HumbleDollar, progress has been especially slow in recent years.
My measure of success isn’t advertising revenue or donations, but rather pageviews. Like most writers, what I care about most is getting read. After explosive increases over the first five years, HumbleDollar’s growth has slowed to a crawl, with 900,000 pageviews in 2017, 1.7 million in 2018, 2.6 million in 2019, 3.6 million in 2020, 4.4 million in 2021, 4.7 million in 2022 and 4.8 million in 2023.
Based on those numbers, I think it’s safe to say the site has probably peaked, and that’s fine. As long as a reasonable number of folks stop by the website each week, and they continue to find it useful, it’ll be my privilege to keep HumbleDollar going.
2. Building your own business is an enormous amount of work. “Entrepreneurs are the only people who will work 80 hours a week to avoid working 40 hours a week,” quipped Shark Tank star Lori Greiner.
I don’t consider myself an entrepreneur. But I’ve always chafed at taking direction from others, as my various bosses would no doubt attest. That’s why I’ve loved building HumbleDollar, nurturing a community that simply didn’t exist before, and I love the fact that I get to call the shots.
That doesn’t mean I’m accountable to nobody. Everybody has a boss and, in my case, it’s you—the readers. If you don’t like what the site is serving up, HumbleDollar would soon shrivel away. Moreover, if folks stopped reading and commenting, the site’s writers—who don’t get paid—would no doubt quickly decide they had better things to do with their time.
3. Don’t assume you know what will succeed. Over the past seven years, I’ve introduced a host of new features and published all manner of articles, sometimes with success, sometimes not.
For instance, the site’s web developer suggested I solicit donations, given that I’d balked at the unseemly blogger game of affiliate marketing, sponsored links and sponsored articles. I was skeptical, but it’s proven to be a success. Similarly, the “Second Look” feature, where we serve up older articles at the bottom of the homepage, has also been surprisingly popular. The best personal-finance articles tend to be timeless, and it seems readers find plenty of value in articles that might be three or four years old.
The Two-Minute Checkup, which was launched in 2022 thanks to the coding skills of HumbleDollar contributor Sanjib Saha, has been used some 47,000 times. That’s not bad. But I must confess, I had dreams that the Checkup would go viral, and that hasn’t happened. Meanwhile, my goal was to turn the Voices section into a repository of reader wisdom, but it’s been slow going. Got financial insights you’d like to share with fellow readers? Try answering a few of the 133 questions.
That brings me to 2023’s biggest change. I like to think I’m attuned to what readers want, but it took me years to embrace the obvious. I’d long known HumbleDollar’s readers were older and keenly interested in retirement issues, and yet it was only last year that I made retirement the site’s explicit focus. I’m still happy to run almost any well-written article that touches on the subject of money. But retirement—preparing for it, generating retirement income, making sure your post-work years are fulfilling—is now the site’s bread and butter.
4. It’s hard to maintain a civil community. Spend time perusing the comments on other websites, and you’ll quickly realize that many folks feel free to say utterly appalling things online—things they’d never say to your face. It’s sad that this is the way humans behave when they have some anonymity and know they won’t be called to account.
HumbleDollar—thank goodness—is different. I’m not sure how we avoided becoming another internet cesspool, but it seems this is one time when the herd mentality is working well. When commenters are too acerbic, others often express their disapproval, either with their down votes or their replies.
Not that everything is hunky-dory. An example: Last year, the site had a commenter who was almost pathologically negative. The final straw: He posted a comment asking whether a writer’s daughter was a drug addict. I deleted that comment and arranged for all of his future comments to go directly to trash.
5. You get locked in and inflexible. Folks often complain about government bureaucracy and about the terrible service from phone companies, cable providers and other large corporations. But I find it easy to understand how these organizations became so unresponsive.
Even HumbleDollar—tiny as it is—is now burdened by its own history. In the early days, I could change the site’s design, the styling of individual articles and how content is categorized with a few hours’ work. But now that the site runs to some 5,000 pages, making major design changes is almost unthinkable.
In my update in early 2022, I mentioned the site’s flagging advertising revenue and donations. Things turned around in late 2023, with donations up 13% from 2022’s level. Many thanks to all those who donated over the past year.
HumbleDollar wouldn’t exist without its large crew of unpaid writers, who not only give of their time, but often also offer intimate financial details along with their money insights. When you write an article—especially an article where you discuss what you do with your own money—you open yourself up to criticism. Make no mistake: HumbleDollar’s many contributors deserve applause for the courage they display.
In running the site, I get editing help from Greg Spears. Without his assistance, there’s no way the site could publish a dozen or so articles each week. I also have a secret weapon. Retired newspaperman Joe Kiefer often sends me emails pointing out spelling errors and grammatical mistakes in the latest articles. I won’t tell you how often I get emails from Joe—because, well, it’s a little embarrassing.
Jonathan Clements is the founder and editor of HumbleDollar. Follow him on X (Twitter) @ClementsMoney and on Facebook, and check out his earlier articles.
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Great work, Jonathan.
Keep it up.
But take your Social Security ASAP😁.
Thanks for your 7 years of providing great content. Congratulations. And on your point of the comment section. You are so right about the negative vibe. As many of your readers do, I read your former employers’ newspaper. The comment section on some of the articles is downright nasty. Consequently, I no longer read them. Continued good health and success in 2024