On a mission to become 1% the size of the Financial Times by sharing original startup revenue insights.
Today we're launching our Changelog to help you get a sense of what we're working on and why.
Changelogs are typically reserved for SaaS businesses (though we have one for our SEO course as well) but for a media brand like ours, I think there's a lot of benefits to having one.
First of all, we have a number of things we've released (and far more in progress) that I don't want people to miss if they don't follow me on social media.
While I want Gaps to be about your story rather than our own, I hope it helps us build some kind of trust by being a lot more personal here — something we can't really do on our industry reports.
The final reason I wanted to create this page is that it's the kind of thing I like to read on other websites I visit. If I care about a brand, I like to see what they're doing behind the scenes.
We have a version of 'Behind the Scenes' content on our sister site, Detailed.com, and I definitely think there's a portion of our readers who appreciated those insights. In time, I hope you'll feel the same about our updates here.
Is it time to start your own?
P.S. I have to admit, I'm also really curious how many people click the little green v.09 button that took you here. Just between us, the version number simply represents how many updates there are here.
The income reports page was initially quite tough to style when we launched Gaps because we only had a single income report to share.
Now that we have a few under our belt (and some incredible feedback) we've made some subtle, simple updates to the page.
What you currently see on Gaps is just a tiny percentage of what we're planning to build out. We have lots of tools and content angles on the way.
The next tool we're launching is for doing market research via Google's search results. It's pretty cool. We would love your feedback on X or LinkedIn (links go to the actual posts).
Our new Public page is starting to become a big hit.
Since launching we've added Reddit and Upwork to the list, and updated all search traffic charts as promised.
Just for fun, we created the 'SEO ETF' to see if investing in public companies reliant on search traffic would be worth your time.
It turns out (thanks to a lot of help from Carvana) it's actually outpacing the S&P 500. You can see the actual posts about this on X and LinkedIn (links go to the actual posts).
A simple promise we made when we created our new Public tool was to keep it updated. We're showing you we'll do just that with a new 'Changelog' section on the page.
It's a simple addition, of course, but something we felt was worthwhile.
Something we realised that might not be particularly clear when you visit any of our industry reports is that startup revenues / funding rounds increase as you scroll down them.
The idea is that you see the most relatable businesses first, then we go all thew ay into the biggest digital goliaths in each space. We've made a small design tweak on desktop to highlight this on each report.
Today I'm very happy to share something I've wanted to build for a very long time: Public.
Public helps you track the revenue and search traffic of companies on the stock market, where changes in Google rankings have known to help or hurt them over time.
Writing this final paragraph a few weeks after the page was launched, it easily became one of the most successful content angles I've ever launched. You can see the reaction to it on X and LinkedIn.
Well, it's official. Gaps is back.
If you would like to know the history of this website, which existed in numerous forms over the years (we actually used to be called 'cloud niche') then I would love for you to check out our story page.
There is probably at least a year of work ahead before we get our main content angles and features shared with the world, but I can't wait for the journey. Thank you for being here. I would love to have you subscribe to the newsletter if you've made it this far.
Because I like reading this kind of thing on other websites.
After a decade of writing about SEO on our sister site, Detailed.com, I (Glen Allsopp) constantly saw how much search, social media and ad algorithms impacted businesses generating revenue online. I created Gaps to document the online businesses and startup ideas which continue to thrive.
As a bonus, I'm also solving a frustration when I try to find the revenue numbers of a company, only to see Google reward numbers I knew are completely wrong. I think we can do a better job than public companies (like ZoomInfo) simply by caring about having more accurate figures.
We've been building startups for over a decade now, and predicted a lot of what's coming next.
We even built a startup with a $100 budget - making money within 28 days - and separately generated six figures from a $40 service.
Really though, we just want to be judged by the content we're sharing. Don't trust anything until you see if the insights are useful for your situation.
We report, but we're not journalists. We're building companies online and live the same challenges as you do.
To become 1% of the size of the Financial Times (which generated £500M+ in 2024) by giving away 95% of what we make, and charging for 5%.
The only way we have a chance of competing with Goliaths in this space is if we deliver insights and ideas you can't find elsewhere. If you've read our monthly income reports, I think you'll see how much work goes into them.
We need to make sure people love our work, which means making sure anyone building online businesses gets value from what we're sharing each week.
The list of tools we want to build and data we want to give away is long and we are loving the process of that right now.
We're not against investment (we report on funded startups after all), but we're 100% self-funded from online projects at this moment in time.
We've generally been on the acquisition side and haven't sought out funding for Gaps in any form.
Funding would speed up what we're trying to do, but isn't required. We're in this for the long-term.
Please send us an email to [email protected] with your recommendation. Bonus points if you subscribe to our newsletter (this link scrolls down the page about 200 pixels, hah) and reply to the first email you get instead. Thank you!