A Thought Experiment on Reviving an Old Brand, Adiós Medium.
In 2009 I started a blog on startups called f3fundit.com (friends family fools fund it), which at its height ~ June 2010 saw ~70k+ unique visitors. At the time I was working on it, it was a side project. A buddy from grad school, Will, with whom we used f3fundit to organize Spain’s first global Entrepreneurship competition and propel our Consulting collective, helped here and there. Things started well, and a lot of people were behind us, cheering us on in the things we were doing. We’d run the blog to create a community of entrepreneurs and angels (much like angel.co did a few years later).
For the competition called “Next Top Startup,” we secured prize money in the form of €20k for the winner, and all was going to plan; but when it came time to pony up the sponsorship Euros, our sponsors disappeared. The startups that flew to Spain informed that there was nothing for them. I felt like an asshole and a scam artist, and for me, this was a pretty big blow. I let f3fundit go by the wayside.
Speed up to 2019, and my f3fundit content is repurposed on this Medium, Entrepreneur.com, where an f3fundit post that my intern Mel repurposed was one of the most shared pieces of content on their platform in 2016–2017. They update it annually without my knowledge, and I’m not able to access it anymore, or anything else I wrote there. I tried reaching out to them a few times as well to no avail. 🤷!
Ironically, I wrote the post as a total joke to prove a point on f3fundit to a friend that content with little substance will outperform content that’s relevant in the social sphere ever time.
But I digress. What I’m saying is, I get nothing from this content being all over the place, so I’m removing it from all these platforms and consolidating it on f3fundit.com for all things startup related, and jacegrebs.com for all things related to my brand. Maybe (probably) it should go all into one domain, but I still see a distinction between the two audiences.
The other thing I’m interested in is what happens when you take a 10+-year-old domain name and brand, that used to do ok with web traffic and try to revive it.
Update 1: Dec 12, 2 weeks in.
I began by finding f3fundit’s old and somewhat unfinished or sloppy content, cleaning up the blog UX, going through the motions of implementing some content best practices, cleaning up the copy (only about 20% done at this point), and moving my own writing over from Medium to give it some fresher content. I would have been pretty happy with ~1k monthly visits in December. As of writing this update. I have 4.8k unique visitors and a growing newsletter subscriber count — with zero investment other than some copy-editing. The uptick is largely facilitated by trending on hacker news.
