I built Geekflare from 0 to 6M monthly visitors. Ask me anything.
Hello everyone!
I'm Chandan, founder of Geekflare, a leading business & tech publishing platform. More recently, I'm building Geekflare AI.
I started Geekflare in 2015 and, before the HCU update, we reached 6 million monthly visits. What began as a hobby project grew into a team of 30 full-timers and around 25 freelancers at our peak. The journey has been challenging, fun, and addictive!
I'm here to answer any questions you have about content business and monetization, affiliate marketing, scaling teams or anything around starting or growing an online business.
Thanks,
Chandan
Replies
Product Hunt
Nice! The elephant in the room is: how is this going to change?
Content is obviously moving rapidly towards AI-generation, which is fine if you're a content creator who wants to increase their output and pretty bad if you're a content consumer who is looking for high quality content.
Geekflare
Thanks@andrew_g_stewart I think I should change that now to "Geekflare articles are written by humans for everyone." :)
I agree on AI content quality. It is good for cheap, low-quality content, but when it comes to buying guides, comparisons, detailed breakdown, AI is yet to catch up. Nothing beats writing from experience.
We don't intend to use AI anytime soon on Geekflare.
Product Hunt
@chandankumar
Hah! That isn't the angle I was thinking about at all, but it is very true.
Product Hunt
What is/was your key channel driving traffic and how did that change with the latest Google updates? What was your workflow to identify and create content to drive traffic?
Geekflare
@steveb hello!
Organic/Google was the key traffic channel. It is still Google for us but we can see good percentage for Bing, DuckDuckGo and ChatGPT. The trend has changed for sure.
We follow number of techniques to identify the demands - density of topics coverage in Business Tech, trending topics, unanswered or poorly written forums, outdated content, filling the gaps in covered topics, keyword research tools like Ahrefs (it is less relevant now), question research tools like QuestionDB (our tool), etc.
There is no single platform to do all these so it is pretty much manual research and it's not boring 😀.
Hey Chandan, thanks for sharing your journey — super inspiring! 👏
I’m curious, during the peak growth phase of Geekflare (pre-HCU), what strategies worked best for scaling content and traffic sustainably?
Would love to hear any lessons or mistakes.
Geekflare
Thank you Sania
Quality and new topics are two main things that helped us.
Quality - this was/is the biggest driving factor. We ensure every article goes through editorial team for facts and quality checks. It is not just the English checks, but many things like pricing, facts, stats, images, links, product reputation (for best type of articles), etc.
New topics - initially, we focused on Cybersecurity, web infrastructure and hosting. Instead of fighting to rank higher, we focused on finding new relevant topics and covered that. We expanded coverage on development, DevOps, business software, etc. which helped us acquire new traffic and scale the traffic.
Mistake :) - like many publishing businesses, we got a little tempted to try off-topic (outside of tech and business) which worked for a short time, but it had side effects. I learnt the hard way to stay on track with business goal and audience alignment.
@chandankumar Thank you so much for such a kind and insightful reply!
I truly appreciate the emphasis on quality — especially how your editorial process goes beyond just grammar and dives deep into facts, reputation, and relevance. That level of effort really reflects in your content. And your strategy around exploring new but aligned topics instead of fighting competitive keywords is a smart long-term move.
Also, thanks for sharing the part about going off-topic — it’s a valuable reminder to stay aligned with the audience and mission.
We’ve tried to take a similar focused approach while building PlusDocSign, an AI-powered eSignature tool. It’s designed not just to help users sign documents, but to interact with them using our “Chat with your contract” feature — helping simplify complex content before signing. Just like content, even contracts need to be human-friendly!
Geekflare
@sania_khan10 good stuff