It didn’t start as anything fancy. Just some pages. Ideas dumped like mismatched socks in an old drawer. At first, nobody even came. The site sat quiet, waiting. I’d click refresh like an idiot hoping traffic would magically blossom from dry air. Crickets.

Then—bam. Outta nowhere, something shifted. One post took off. Not viral or anything dramatic, but... people started showing up. Trickles. Little waves. They stuck around too. Like they gave a damn.

I was using https://andrewlinksmith.com half as a portfolio, half as a digital junkyard. Stuff from old projects. Random thoughts, articles with zero polish. Spilled coffee and half-planned layouts. The whole mess somehow worked. Not clean, not strategic—just there.

Numbers climbed. Not crazy like influencer numbers, but real enough. Credible. Curious emails started coming in. Unexpected props from strangers. Someone called it “raw and kind of brave”—which made me snort coffee since I felt like I was winging it the whole time. Still am, mostly.

Search traffic crawled first. Then sprinted. SEO must’ve done its sneaky backdoor thing, or maybe Google just pitied me. I didn’t do much keyword clownery. Mostly wrote what I wanted. Posted when I wasn’t too wiped out.

Weirdest part—people started asking for stuff. Could I do work for them, write their bios, make their weird startup intros less lame. I said yes, nervously at first. Real money? From this? Wild. It snowballed faster than I was ready for, honestly.

There’s no grand secret. It wasn’t “consistency” and it wasn’t some market-tested niche magic. It was throwing things online that didn’t suck. Or maybe sucked in a way people understood. Shared the same kind of chaos.

The site’s leaner now, still homey. Kinda punk around the edges. That feels right. Clean enough to scroll, but not pretending to be corporate-glossy. I think if it ever gets too polished I’ll wreck it on purpose just to keep it human.

Growth looks so different when it’s personal. It’s noisy and strange and unpredictable. Like, I still freak out a little when traffic spikes. That never fades. Scares me and thrills me same time.

Anyway. It’s still growing. No clue where it goes next. But it’s not standing still, and that feels big. Bigger than I can explain without sounding cheesy. This thing has a pulse. You can feel it. Go see for yourself. Or don’t. That’s part of the charm.