Monica Lent — From Travel Blog to Affilimate and Blogging for Devs

Monica Lent is a developer who expanded the revenue and experience she gained from a travel blog into software and education businesses. According to the introduction to her Indie Bites interview published on April 26, 2022, Monica's 2021 business portfolio revenue exceeded $100,000, with the travel blog accounting for nearly half. The portfolio covered multiple businesses centered on Affilimate, the affiliate revenue analytics SaaS; Blogging for Devs, aimed at developers; and the travel blog Not a Nomad.

Building the Foundation for Independence with a Travel Blog

Originally from the United States, Monica led a web development organization at the Berlin-based payments startup SumUp. She worked at the growing company for about five years, but wanted to decide how to spend her time and devote her energy to a business she owned directly. While preparing for German permanent residency, she increased her savings to about €45,000, then left her job in 2019 based on her blog income and focused on developing her own products.

Not a Nomad, her first revenue base, began as a space for documenting the life and travel she experienced after moving to Europe. The name captured the idea of being able to travel while keeping a home base and maintaining a job and daily life in one place. It covered working abroad, expatriate life, European travel, and photography, and its content direction took shape as she organized places she had visited into guides readers could use.

The catalyst for seeing the blog as a business was its visitor numbers. Although she published only 17 posts over the course of a year, she saw that monthly visits exceeded 30,000, confirming that articles she had already written continued to bring in readers. She then learned monetization methods through bloggers' Facebook groups and online business content, and studied search engine optimization to intentionally grow traffic.

Not a Nomad's main revenue sources were affiliate commissions and display ads. Within travel guides, she introduced hotels, tours, and experiences, earning commissions when readers made bookings; in photography equipment posts, she earned revenue from product purchases. Before the pandemic, it reached approximately $5,000 in monthly revenue, and this income gave her the time to develop a new software business.

Into Software That Analyzes Affiliate Revenue

Affilimate also began with a frustration Monica Lent experienced while running a travel blog. Because each affiliate program tracked revenue separately, it was hard to tell which posts and links actually generated bookings or purchases. In 2019, Monica launched the product with partner Gernot and gathered about 70 test users in the travel niche, like herself.

Affilimate was a tool that brought commissions from multiple affiliate networks into one screen and tracked the pages and links that generated revenue. It distinguished where links were placed even within the same post and let users examine click records, heatmaps, and performance before and after revisions to a post. With this data, customers could decide which posts to improve, which products to recommend, and where to place buy buttons. The model was to sell analytics as a subscription to operators making money through affiliate marketing.

Early on, there was trial and error in defining the customer base. It was first tailored to advanced users who managed revenue with complex spreadsheets, then changed to appeal to general bloggers because the product seemed difficult, but this time the burden of education and customer support grew. Monica focused again on advanced users who understood the value of the analytics tool, and also considered targeting larger customers. She admitted that the approach of gathering early users on Facebook and hoping word of mouth would spread was also insufficient as a sustainable customer acquisition plan.

Reaching Her Developer Audience After the Pandemic

The 2020 pandemic shook both businesses at once. Traffic to the travel blog fell to about 10 percent of its previous level in roughly three weeks, and Affilimate's travel-niche customers also asked to pause their subscriptions. Combined across the existing projects, monthly profit fell below $500, forcing her to use savings. Even though she was running different products, the vulnerability was exposed: the demand supporting revenue was tied to a single industry, travel.

At that point, Monica turned to her developer audience. Through technical blogging and conference talks, she had built about 9,000 developer followers on Twitter, and developers around her were already asking Monica how to run a blog. In May 2020, she released Blogging for Devs, which taught them writing and search traffic, as a free email course. Instead of going out to find new travel-niche customers, she offered a needed product to people who already knew her.

The course's goal was to plan, complete, and deliver to readers one post for a developer blog over seven days. Using the email tool ConvertKit, lessons were sent in sequence, and each lesson included an action step to complete immediately and a question designed to prompt replies. The landing page featured a short description, her visitor stats, and a signup form, and within two weeks of launch the course had more than 1,000 subscribers. Replies and completed assignments revealed where people got stuck, and after the course ended she continued the relationship through a newsletter.

From a Free Course to a Paid Community

In July 2020, she accepted the first 100 members from newsletter readers and ran a free closed community. Then, starting in late October, she began accepting paid signups, which led to a public launch in early November. Paid members received feedback on their posts, meetings to review goals together, online events and workshops, and exclusive resources. It was a way for knowledge she had shared with one person by email to accumulate for many people through members' questions and discussions.

The introductory prices offered to the first 250 people were $12 per month, $96 per year, and $180 for a lifetime membership. Revenue in the first week after launch was approximately $5,000, including both subscription payments and lifetime membership sales. The monthly recurring revenue, or MRR, separately disclosed in a November 25, 2020 retrospective was $516. Separating the cash secured through initial sales from the amount that would recur monthly going forward gives an accurate view of the business's scale at the time.

The first week brought 69 new paid members, most of whom were already subscribed to the free newsletter. Monica said she had sent weekly content about writing and search traffic for about six months, and that writing a single newsletter took one day. The paid community launch was a step toward recruiting people who would engage more deeply based on the help they had received so far, and she continued to make bringing the right readers in through the newsletter central to growth.

In a June 22, 2021 Failory interview, Blogging for Devs was described as having about 350 total members, including about 250 paid members. At the time, MRR was over $2,000, and cumulative revenue since launch was more than $25,000. Free newsletter subscribers also surpassed 7,500, establishing a structure that acquired readers by email and converted some of them into paid community members.

The community involved significant operating costs and labor. In the same interview, Monica said monthly revenue was usually $2,000 to $3,000 and expenses were one-quarter to one-third of that. Starting in May 2021, she hired Stefanni Brasil, who had been a member, part-time to handle new member onboarding, organizing materials, and preparing events. Running the SaaS and the community together took well over 40 hours per week, and she checked the community daily even while on vacation.

Setting Different Operating Goals for Each Business

The approach to running multiple businesses also included deliberate experimentation. In October 2020, Monica announced a '12 startups in 12 months' challenge to release one product per month, setting conditions that it lower development complexity, confirm willingness to pay, and provide a way to acquire customers even after launch. She also specified that her existing audience, newsletter, and reusable code were assets to draw on. It was an approach aimed at limiting the time invested in each experiment to find businesses worth continuing to grow.

As travel demand recovered, Not a Nomad grew again. In a Niche Pursuits interview published in June 2022, Monica said revenue generated in the 30 days immediately before the recording had reached approximately $10,000. The breakdown was about $7,500 in affiliate revenue and about $2,500 to $2,700 in ad revenue, and she explained that pending travel booking cancellations would reduce the final amount. This figure is a follow-up result for the travel blog alone, with a different measurement period and scope from the 2021 portfolio annual revenue.

At the time, the travel blog had about 120 articles written based on her own firsthand experience and photography. Monica said she added only about four new posts in 2021, and that she had not written any new posts by the time of the 2022 interview recording. Instead, she focused on tweaking and maintaining the affiliate links and monetization methods in existing articles. Improving content that already drew readers so that bookings and purchases occurred more readily was how she sustained revenue with limited time.

In a 2021 interview, Monica said her bigger ambition was to grow the SaaS rather than make the community huge. Looking at this business structure, what a founder with multiple products needs is to set different operating goals for each business. Distinguishing among businesses to keep developing and expanding, businesses whose member experience must be maintained, and businesses to manage existing content and generate revenue from is what makes it possible to carry the portfolio with one person's time.