Good, Cheap and Fast was the most ideologically pure thing that I've ever created.
It was a product review website for “satisficers.” I didn't look for the best products, rather, I used data science to unearth products that were good enough. Then, I published my findings on a site that rejected everything that I hate about the modern Internet. Good, Cheap and Fast had:
Good, Cheap and Fast was committed to privacy. It was one of the first 100 companies to endorse the Contract for the Web. Above: The site’s Blacklight inspection.
No ads;
No cookies;
No pop-ups;
No trackers;
No slideshows;
No data collectors;
No browser notifications; and
No guest posts or sponsored content.
I was completely transparent about how the website made money as well as the methods and limitations of my product selection methodology. Every affiliate link on the site was properly disclosed and wrapped in a "rel sponsored" tag. I took the time to read scientific and medical research as it related to the topics that I covered, and when I found a product that was potentially harmful (like weighted eye masks), I shared my findings with every major publisher who had written positive things about that product. I also found a charitable way to use my data, raising thousands of dollars for good causes at no personal or professional gain.
Then, one day Google decided that Good, Cheap and Fast shouldn't exist anymore. The end came on Dec. 9th, 2020, but let's start at the beginning:
Goodbye, Paycheck
I was miserable when I was a media executive, headshot smile notwithstanding.
Sept. 21, 2018 was my last day as a media executive. I was losing faith in what I did for a living and I felt like I was stuck on an ever-accelerating hamster wheel.
(This was no easy decision to make. I was near poverty before I had climbed the corporate ladder.)
It took a crisis for me to realize how much time I was spending on things that I didn't care about and how little time I was spending on things that I did.
Each year, I'd spend one month on the subway; two months in meetings; four months asleep. I had lost control of my time and I was bitter and resentful toward anyone or anything that felt like a waste of it. Shopping had become one of those resentments.
Finding Inspiration From Unlikely Sources
Buying a product in a retail store was a simplicity that I had taken for granted.
I remember walking into a K-Mart, Bradlees or Odd Job and walking out minutes later with a decent product in hand. Maybe there were four coffee machines for sale. Two of them were too expensive for me, so my decision process was literally "alright...this one, or that one."
Good, Cheap and Fast’s two-sentence blurbs were inspired by the “Best Values” page in Wine Spectator.
Today, there are hundreds of coffee machines for sale, thousands of websites claiming to have found the "best” coffee maker and millions of words written about which one to buy.
I wanted to create a shopping website that felt like a pre-Internet retail store. So, I put my head down and spent three weeks developing my concept, publishing the first version of Good, Cheap and Fast on Oct. 14, 2018.
It was a plain text website that featured above-average products selling for below-average prices. For each product, I included a strike price and a blurb that distilled hundreds (or thousands) of reviews into two sentences.
The site's plain-text design was inspired by Text-Only NPR. The strike price was inspired by Eddy Elfenbein's Crossing Wall Street Buy List. The two sentence blurb was inspired by the Best Values page from Wine Spectator magazine.
Ladies and Gentlemen, We Have Liftoff!
Within a month of being launched, Good, Cheap and Fast had cracked the Top 500K websites worldwide.
Good, Cheap and Fast launched like a rocket ship. I had posted the site on Hacker News and it promptly hit the front page. I also sent the site to Jason Kottke, one of the first and most influential bloggers whom I had remembered from my days at Debonair Magazine. I can't be sure, but I think that Jason's acknowledgement of the site led to a flurry of good press.
I was profiled in Fast Company, PSFK, Trend Hunter, Core 77 and LSN Global. The site was mentioned in Gartner's L2 newsletter and tweeted by executives at Facebook and Google Ventures. Good, Cheap and Fast was even profiled internationally in Esquire ES and Slate FR.
The site had received more than 100,000 visits by year end, however, it failed to hit escape velocity.
Falling Back Down to Earth
Product review websites live and die by search engine traffic, and when Good, Cheap and Fast’s launch coverage faded away, this reality became painfully clear. I’m no stranger to search engines, but the way that Google and Bing treated the site was unlike any fringe case that I’ve ever seen.
Pages on Good, Cheap and Fast would disappear from Google’s results, sometimes reappearing in position #1 months later, or other times, disappearing forever.
I did my due diligence before I registered goodcheapandfast.com. It had no backlink history and it had only existed previously as a parked domain in 2013. There were no obvious skeletons in the domain's closet, yet strange things were afoot, almost from day one.
For example, Bing didn't even index the website's homepage even after Good, Cheap and Fast was linked to from dozens of prominent websites. I contacted bingwb@microsoft.com with my concerns and received this response:
Good day and thank you for your patience while we investigated the issue.
Firstly, I am happy to provide you information that our product review group succeeded in removing the block of the site. After submitting your site to be reviewed the team has decided to lift the block. Please allow up to 2-3 weeks for your site to be crawled indexed and serving again.
I am unable to provide you the specifics of the block as our product review team does not share details of the block.
The mystery didn't end there. Beginning in 2019, pages on the website started dropping in-and-out of Google's results. An article that ranked #1 would disappear entirely, then reappear, then disappear, then reappear. These were like mini strokes. Sometimes the traffic bounced back in full; other times it gradually faded away. I have a hard time describing the frustration and confusion that I felt watching my fate swing like a pendulum. For the first time in my career, I felt truly powerless.
Focusing on What I Could Control
The serenity prayer became my mantra for Good, Cheap and Fast. I couldn’t control how Google treated my site, but I could work hard to make my site the best it could be. So, that’s what I did.
I invested thousands of hours into my product selection methodology. It was time well spent, according to my users.
Notably, I developed new methodologies for identifying unhelpful review behaviors from verified customers. (Tools like Fakespot and ReviewMeta are a great line of defense for detecting suspicious reviews, but relying solely on algorithms can lead to blind spots and false positives.)
My product selections were getting consistently better and I had the data to back it up. Not only were my readers buying more products, they were returning those products less than 1% of the time!
I felt validated when MakeUseOf wrote: “John DeFeo is the hero you didn't know you needed.”
The Cruelest Year
As much as I had tried to diversify Good, Cheap and Fast's revenue and traffic, I wasn’t able to escape the gravitational pull of Amazon and Google. In April 2020, Amazon reduced the affiliate commissions that it paid to online publishers like me. My revenue fell by 41% as a result.
It was a crushing blow that I attempted to mitigate by joining other affiliate programs, but they didn't pan out. The median conversion rate of the 70 other websites that I linked to was a meager 0.8%, which was approximately 1/10 of the conversion rate on Amazon. Then, Google's May 2020 algorithm update cut my traffic by around 70%.
I hadn’t published much between March and April because I was focused on learning about COVID-19 with the goal of keeping my family safe. I assumed that this hiatus may have resulted in this site being on the wrong side of Google's algorithm, so I worked seven days a week on improving the site -- around 1,200 hours in total. I even launched my own awards program.
The Award That Nobody Wanted
I’ve made some marketing blunders in my career, but none were as disastrous as Good, Cheap and Fast’s 2020 Value Awards. To date, I had spent around 2,000 hours researching products and I had discovered that the same companies kept turning up. So, I picked out the cream of the crop, organized them by category, and ordered etched crystal awards for each of the companies.
I spent more than $1,000 on awards that few companies acknowledged. One notable exception was Redragon, a Chinese company that was both humble and gracious.
When it comes to corporate awards, the saying “good, cheap or fast — pick two” is a trusim.
The first award-maker that I worked with was cheap and fast, but the quality of the work was terrible. I fired them.
The second glass-etcher that I worked with was both good and cheap, but they were so slow, that I missed my publish date by three weeks, notwithstanding the time lost working with the first company. Then, it took me another week to photograph and retouch the awards.
By the time I announced the award winners, the 2020 U.S. presidential election was underway. This was the scenario I had hoped to avoid (attention is a finite resource). Nevertheless, I was shocked by the apathy, disdain and cynicism that I encountered.
Some companies never responded to my e-mails and phone calls (or, left me on hold indefinitely). Others refused to accept the award, even though it was to be mailed at my own expense. None of the 26 companies used the marketing artwork and photos that I had prepared.
In fact, some people didn’t believe that the award was real because my retouching was so meticulous!
A Fitting End to 2020
Stranger Than Fiction is one of my favorite movies. It depicts a man who accepts that his fate is beyond his control, but he doesn’t know if his story is a comedy or a tragedy. I understand that.
Google's core update started to roll out around 1:00 pm ET on Thursday, Dec. 3.
Google's December 2020 Core Algorithm Update drove Good, Cheap and Fast’s traffic to new highs, then it fell to zero.
To my delight, Good, Cheap and Fast was an early beneficiary of this update. Its traffic rocketed to all-time highs in the days that followed. The reversal came on Dec. 9th. It was both sharp and sudden, and by Dec. 11th, the site’s Google traffic had fallen to zero. It was a total wipeout after two years of building a business that was my full-time focus and my family's sole source of income.
I’m not too proud to ask for help, especially when my livelihood depends on it, so I swallowed any professional embarrassment and shared my plight with Google spokespersons and online marketing professionals. My friends supported me; some even offered to audit my site free of charge. None were able to find a smoking gun. Meanwhile, strangers wrote to tell me that I got what I deserved.
A Google spokesperson told me in no uncertain terms that there was no recourse. For a month, I waited and hoped, wondering if the site might come back on its own. It didn’t and I pulled the plug.
Good, Cheap and Fast may have been fated to fail. It always seemed to be fighting an invisible force.
Epilogue
Some of the websites that overtook Good, Cheap and Fast have mastheads full of non-existent people, generated via thispersondoesnotexist.com.
Google is not all wise and all knowing. Some of the websites that replaced Good, Cheap and Fast have a masthead full of non-existent people. (The latest SEO trend is to create fake photos, then pretend to be a person of whichever gender/ethnicity that a journalist is seeking comment from.) Others are big name websites that tout “cheap” products that are 3-4 times more expensive than the products that I had discovered. I even found a no-name website ranking on Google’s first page for the phrase “cheap airpod alternatives.” When I clicked the link, it was a dummy domain that redirected three times until it eventually landed on a website with X-rated videos on autoplay.
Nothing bothered me more than seeing those who had plagiarized my content outranking me with my own words. And because I went public with my plight, it attracted even more spammers who smelled blood in the water. A website on the wrong side of Google’s algorithm is like a car that is left abandoned in a bad neighborhood. It gets chopped apart and sold while the owner looks for help.
I felt betrayed by Google. I felt angry that the spammers were winning while I lost it all. I felt frustrated when SEO professionals told me I might recover by increasing the word counts on my pages (after all, that was the exact opposite of what my brand promised). Yet, I felt relieved when I decided to shut the site down. The feeling was both honest and liberating and I have no regrets.
By letting go of Good, Cheap and Fast, I realized my purpose. I was able to reclaim my time again.
The Good, Cheap and Fast homepage as it last looked before I shut the site down in January 2021. Pure until the end.