I run a small Product Hunt alternative called Tiny Startups.

I've been running it as a newsletter for a few years and have grown it to around ~20k subscribers but I decided to go ahead with a soft pivot and build it into a "launch platform" in April to try and compete with the big boys like Product Hunt.

I made $4.9k in revenue in April - my first month as a launch platform.

In May revenue jumped from $4.9k to $5.6k -- most of this is from promoted submissions, even though a very high majority of submissions (~98%) are free submissions.

Costs me ~$200/month to run the site + newsletter, the rest is profit.

May saw over 12k unique visitors visit the tinystartups.com website.

I'm mainly just promoting this via my newsletter (~20k subs) and X. Word of mouth does the rest.

Looking to grow this project to a stable ~$10k/month but not sure how it'll get there yet.

I don't know if this is inspirational or helpful for anyone, just thought I'd put it out there and hope for the best.