FiFi Finance has seen a good steady growth over the past 7 months that we’ve started this financial portal. Focusing on SEO mostly and some social, we’ve grown to around 600 daily visitors from 4 continents and are a team of 8 persons working on this.
Starting FiFi German
Spring this year Robin and I were both finally convinced to set up that one great, amazing website that we are destined to build. We’ve been building websites for more than a decade. Some of these have become great, such as a huge underground resource about dumpster diving. We also made some good money with websites about living without money (!), but we had lost motivation for these down the way. And we wanted something more encompassing. So it’s only appropriate that we’ve now integrated one of these websites into FiFi, more specifically to kick start FiFi in German.
FiFi Swahili
I love it when plans work out. We now have FiFi Swahili, probably the first finance website in Swahili. We’ll slowly keep growing this, without any expectations to make money in the short and mid-term, but in the long run I see huge potential with this.
WordPress in Swahili
We have sponsored Jacksiro to update the translation of WordPress into Swahili. Until recently the most recent WordPress version for which Swahili translations were available was 3.x, which made it practically impossible to set up a WordPress site in Swahili. Now this situation has changed. Thanks to Jacksiro translating most of the WordPress interface in Swahili you can now easily set up a WordPress site in Swahili.
I hope that this can inspire more people at blog in Swahili, and send some link love to the project that’s making it possible to have an entire WordPress site in Swahili. If you happen to use wp-cli you can install Swahili with wp language core install sw.
Tech
We <3 markdown. We don't like bloat. Jetpack is bloat. And the other markdown plugin we found had some other issues. So I did some work on updating the Jetpack Markdown standalone plugin. For now you can find it at GitHub but in due time we'll put this up at wordpress.org.
I've had some support from Achu in Ethiopia. And we're about to on-board a Ukrainian developer to improve on our theme.
Growth, team and blog
- FiFi came to life in March, had a slow start due to a WordPress plugin adding tons of data in the WordPress options table, then finally started growing nicely over the Summer. Now we have 600+ visitors daily, 1000/day is within reach before the end of the year.
- We're also roughly cashflow positive. We have some cash reserve from our former projects and have no desire and no need for investors. This makes us very flexible and independent.
We now have quite an extensive, varied group of people working on FiFi, from 4 continents.
If you read this and are part of the team, it'll be great if you want to write a blog post about working on FiFi, your daily life, or about African languages, WordPress, or whatever else you think is cool.
Also if you're not part of the team, if you like what we're doing, you're welcome to write a post for our blog and I'll be happy to hear from you.
I'm personally totally psyched about what we are building here.
