How I Grew My UX blog To 750,000 Readers, And Sold UX Audits To 100+ Companies

Peter Ramsey

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Published: August 26th, 2023

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Peter Ramsey

Founder, Built for Mars

Founders

Employees

Built for Mars

builtformars.com

from Brighton

started December 2019

Founders

Employees

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platform

Vue

CraftCMS

Vercel

Figma

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GoDaddy

Cloudways

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Instagram

Twitter

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FreeAgent

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Google Suite tool-icon

Slack

Asana

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Notion

analytics

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MixPanel

design

Figma

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Unsplash

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I’m Peter, I live in a beautiful part of southern England, I’m a dad of 2, and I’m obsessed with user experience.

I run Built for Mars, which is primarily a UX blog read by 600,000 people a year (and growing about 10% MOM), that is monetized by selling UX audits directly to businesses (clients include Notion, Klarna, Stripe, Intuit, and Elgato).

The content is a (very effective) growth engine for my consulting.

What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?

After selling my FinTech company in 2018, in a 7-figure exit, I wanted to take a short break. It’d been a grueling 6 years, and so I bought and renovated a house. During this time, companies were asking to hire me as a consultant, which I did, and hated.

I quickly realized that I hated most parts of running a business, but loved building products. It was the skill I’d refined over the previous decade and something I was pretty good at.

So I started publishing free reports (I call them case studies) about popular companies. For example:

Exposing the growth engine of Threads.
The dark patterns behind Domino’s app.
How Ticketmaster gets away with terrible UX, because of its monopoly.

The aha! moment for me, was literally when I wrote the first article. I sent it to a good friend, and his response was along the lines of “Woah, that’s pretty cool, I’d never noticed that before”.

The magic was in showing people why the products that they’re 'already familiar with', suck. It’s addictive in a way because it’s like being shown behind the curtain.

Pretty much right away I was getting requests for UX audits, and I slowly increased my price to where I am today, which is charging a few thousand dollars per day.

Take us through the process of building the first version of your product.

I’d always been okay at basic web design, but never good enough to aeliver something awesome.

The first version of the site was built on WordPress, with only the .co.uk domain, and crashed all the time. Slowly, as I became more confident in the direction of the site, the content, and the business, I invested in a developer to help me.

The audits were all created on Apple Keynote—and still are actually.

Although I was fortunate enough to be launching this after a successful 7-figure exit, I still was super frugal with spending, especially on dev time.

After a year or so, I bought the domain builtformars.com for $3,000, which was by far my largest expense at the time. Since then, it’s been a gradual process of hiring an accountant, ramping up dev time, and increasing software and tools (like Sentry, and Vercel).

Don’t chase investment, instead try to find your first 5 paying customers, using some way to hustle and get by.

Describe the process of launching the business.

Launching was the easy bit for me because I had no expectations of who would read it, and how many people that’d be for.

Because I monetized the consulting, and the content was lead gen, I ras focused on bringing in work, rather than going viral. Each article takes me about 6 or 7 days to write, end to end—they’re super intense pieces of work. Way beyond what I think most people would spend on one post.

When deciding what to write, it’s almost always based on what I think will be the most interesting analysis. I.e., rather than what will generate the most clicks, or rank the best in SEO. It’s probably holding my traffic back, but I think it contributes more to the quality.

So, a great article could get 100 views, but as long as one of those people wanted to pay me, it’d have an enormous ROI. That’s been my methodology ever since, I lust focus on making the best content possible.

The hardest part is keeping the quality consistent. Not just turning up to write articles, but ahallenging myself to pick apart the best products in the world. When I sit down looking at say, Airbnb, it’s daunting to think “How will I find interesting flaws here”.

But I trust my gut, keep digging, and almost always find interesting UX challenges, trade-offs, or issues. That’s the addictive (and easy) part. The hard bit is pushing through the first 6 hours when nothing good is flowing.

Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?

Because the monetized part of the business is single-project audits (companies approach me via the site, and ask me to analyze their product or service), I don’t need to retain customers in the same way. Many customers return for multiple audits, but they’re not on a retainer.

That being said, I do need to retain readers, because my customers are usually people who’ve read my work for many months. I consider a reader to be the first step of the funnel.

So, I need to consistently put out high-quality work, at a frequency that keeps me in their mind (for when a project arises that I could be a part of), but not so frequently that I have no time to do paid work.

I settled on one article per month because that works out being about 1/3rd of my time. The other 2/3rd I spend on paid work (private UX audits). Which feels crazy, right? To dedicate 1/3rd of my time to publishing free work, and turning down paid work to do it.

How are you doing today and what does the future look like?

Over the last 4 years, I’ve been fully booked about 90% of the time. I do occasionally get empty slots, such as around Christmas, or if there’s not enough time to do a full audit in-between two other jobs.

My future is undecided, to be candid. The content side of the work is growing well, and people seem to keep coming back to read more. Yet, my monetized business doesn’t scale in the same way.

I could hire, but the quality would likely either dip or just be less consistent between the people that conduct the audit. I’ve been raising my prices, but I can’t raise my prices at 10/15% month-on-month. That’d be wild.

So right now I’m exploring what a paid content model could look like. Would it damage my pipeline? Can I scale the audits?

Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?

I thought that after successfully selling one company, I’d be able to jump straight into another idea and hit the ground running. People would be throwing cheques at me—but that wasn’t the case.

Instead of grinding and hustling for seed money, I found myself with interested VCs and investors, but no idea worthy of a lifelong pursuit.

Built for Mars isn’t an investable company, because there’s no clear way to scale it. By selling myself (my time), I’m capped by my onput. It’s fine because I love what I do. If I stop enjoying it, then I’ll do something else.

So my advice would be this: don’t sell or quit a company you believe in, thinking that you’ll be able to transition into a new one right away. Great ideas are hard to come by.

What platform/tools do you use for your business?

My favorite tool right now is Asana (for managing dev tickets / longer-term plans). I fell out of love with it for a few years but came back and it’s won me over.

Aside from that, I find most tools are overloaded with features I don’t need, and with pricing tiers that punish me for trying to utilize them properly.

I don’t try new tools often enough, as I find the switching costs too high (cognitive, not monetary).

If you spend long enough on Twitter, you can convince yourself that you need to try new X and Y tools, to unlock productivity. But the cost of learning X and Y end up being greater than the benefit of switching.

What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?

Without a doubt, Thinking Fast and Slow.

It’s a book that every founder should read, if nothing else to teach you about how you make decisions. So much of what we all do is automatic, full of biases, and seemingly illogical.

A lot of the research has been uploaded onto my site here, as it feeds directly into product design and UX.

Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?

Cash can help numb a symptom, but it rarely solves a problem.

A bad business model, or a crappy product, won’t be magically improved with money. If you had $500k invested in you today, you would be able to solve 5 problems that are on your mind right now, but you’d have one massive new problem: an investor.

The bootstrap methodology isn’t for suckers and losers who can’t raise money, it’s a great model for testing products, without having investors breathing down your neck.

At my first company, I had 700 investors (multiple rounds of crowdfunding, and angel investments)—it was a lot. Every time I made a decision, I thought about my investors, many of which were just regular people giving me £500.

Don’t chase investment, instead try to find your first 5 paying customers, using some way to hustle and get by. I.e., non-code tools like Bubble.

Where can we go to learn more?

You can read all of my work on Built for Mars
You can learn more about my UX audits
And you can follow me on Twitter

If you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!