The shaving website was doing what an online business is supposed to do. It had found readers, recommended products and collected commissions. In August 2014, aPennyShaved earned nearly $4,000 in a month, according to Spencer Haws’ account. Then the machinery underneath that income broke. The website’s owners had bought into a shortcut: private blog networks, built to supply links and help pages climb Google’s rankings.
- Niche Pursuits publishes practical business guides, experiments and founder interviews.
- Its archive includes the decisions that spoiled otherwise profitable projects.
- Readers get free material; sponsors and affiliate commissions help pay for it.
- Copy the research habits. Check the date before copying a tactic.
The shaving site that cut too close
Haws had coached Perrin Carrell through the project in public. The site made more than $22,000 in Amazon revenue during 2014. But a Google penalty associated with the network links wrecked its rankings. Attempts to repair the damage produced no recovery in the period Haws described. The project was closed.
“At the end of the day, we shot ourselves in the foot with our own link building strategies.”
Spencer Haws / Niche Site Project 2
That admission explains the appeal of Niche Pursuits better than an income headline does. A business experiment becomes more useful when its author leaves the bad decision visible. You can inspect the sequence. You can ask which part you would have believed, and which warning you would have missed.
A diary finds its customers
Niche Pursuits began in 2011 as Haws’ account of building online businesses. He had spent years learning to make websites pay before leaving his banking job on March 11 that year. The early discovery was modest: less competitive searches were easier to reach than crowded ones. A narrow subject could support a small business.
Today, the company packages that curiosity into articles, reviews, a newsletter, a podcast and a premium community. Its readers include bloggers, affiliate marketers, agency operators, ecommerce sellers and people testing a side hustle. They want help with a stubborn problem: choosing where to spend their next hour and their next dollar.
In a market crowded with business advice, its distinctive material is the running experiment: a niche selected, a site built, an expense recorded, an outcome revisited. Its project archive stretches from websites to Amazon selling and software. The expertise comes from operating businesses and questioning other operators, rather than presenting one universal recipe.
Cheap had a sequel
One of the founder’s separate ventures supplies a particularly useful bill. Haws wanted faster keyword research, so he hired a developer to build Long Tail Pro. The first version cost less than $4,000. Within weeks, it stopped working as outside data sources changed. Maintenance, initially treated as an afterthought, became the job.
Then came the ownership problem. The developer refused to hand over the source code, demanding $15,000. Haws had not explicitly secured it in the original agreement. Instead of buying that code, he commissioned a replacement that cost more than $15,000. Early sales had convinced him there was demand worth pursuing.
Historical founder venture. The code demand was an alternative to rebuilding, not an additional payment.
The lesson is specific enough to use: budget for maintenance and spell out source-code ownership before commissioning software. Long Tail Pro was later sold; it belongs in this story as operating experience, not as a current Niche Pursuits product.
The niche he chose to abandon
A different experiment stopped before launch. Haws thought senior living looked attractive because the audience was growing. He became attached to the idea before doing serious keyword research. Then he inspected comparable websites and saw traffic losses following Google’s “Medic” update. Existing doubts became a decision to walk away.
He also disclosed buying a misspelled domain. It is a small, funny detail with a practical point: enthusiasm can outrun even the spelling check. Readers can borrow his corrective process. Look for businesses resembling the one you intend to build. Examine what they rank for, what they sell and whether their traffic is holding up. A growing population alone does not establish a reachable market.
The founder takes the guest chair
By December 2021, Haws was appearing on his own podcast as a guest. Jared Bauman was asking the questions. Haws explained that spreading himself across software, websites and other ventures had limited the attention he could give Niche Pursuits. The publication was already performing well enough to deserve more focus.
Delegating hosting and written content gave the business more room than his personal output allowed. That is a useful distinction for a reader building a company around expertise: being the origin of the work does not require being its only producer. Bauman remains identified as host on the podcast archive.
Advice is free. Attention has a price.
The commercial model has two audiences. Entrepreneurs consume the material; businesses pay to reach them. The published advertising page lists podcast placements at $500 per episode, featured newsletter sponsorships at $750 per email and newsletter footer ads at $200. Those are advertised rates, not evidence of actual sales or company revenue.
Affiliate links create another income stream. Niche Pursuits discloses that purchases through its links may earn commissions. Premium community membership adds a paid offering alongside the free publishing. For readers, the useful habit is to consider a recommendation’s evidence and commercial incentive together. For advertisers, the attraction is relevance: people already trying to improve an online business.
Copy the questions
The current interview archive reaches beyond affiliate websites. Recent coverage includes Jason Zigelbaum’s solo software business and Besmir Bregasi’s work on AI search visibility. In May 2026, Carrie Forrest discussed rebuilding after losing roughly 80% of her traffic. These are guest businesses, not Niche Pursuits’ own results.
The reader’s best next step is small. Pick one model, read a project from beginning to end and list its costs, dependencies and assumptions. Test those assumptions before scaling. Old ranking tricks may fail under new search conditions; sponsorship needs an audience first; software needs continuing care. Niche Pursuits earns its place when it helps you ask those questions before the expensive part begins.