Three years of Swift by Sundell

I very often get asked questions along the lines of “How do you grow an audience?” or “How to make a website get a lot of traffic?”. While I’m sure that there are a number of (more or less morally questionable) techniques that you can employ to accelerate the spread of a project — that’s never something that I’ve been particulary interested in or focused on.

Today marks exactly three years since I started Swift by Sundell, and while I’m incredibly happy with how this project has evolved and grown during those past three years, the incredible journey that this project has taken me on wasn’t something that I ever could have planned (or honestly even imagined).

When I first launched this website on the 5th of May 2017, I did it for a simple reason: I wanted to write about Swift. At that point, I had already been writing on Medium for a few months, and had realized just how much I enjoyed writing a short little post every week — about a technique I had grown fond of, or about a way that I had solved a commonly encountered problem. I really didn’t have any specific goals or plans for the site, other than to see for how long that I would be able to keep writing a new article every week.

Fast-forward three years, to today, the 5th of May 2020 — and I still don’t know for how many weeks that I’ll be able to keep writing, because I never stopped.

So if there’s one thing that I can give as an answer to those questions about growth and success, it’s really just that: don’t stop. If you want to work on something, work on it. If you want to ship an app, write the code for it. Keep doing the very best work that you possibly can, regardless of how many people that are reading, listening, or watching. Because if the work is good, people will eventually show up.

While this website is now read by over a million people each year, and serves around 50,000 page views per day, three years ago, it had an audience of zero — and that’s something that I will never forget.

I didn’t intend for this website to become my full-time job, but I’m really glad that it did. It’s such a pleasure to be able to share my work like this, in a way that anybody can access, anywhere around the world.

So whether this is the first time you ended up on this website, or you’re a regular reader — thank you. Thanks to all of you for reading my articles, for listening to my podcast, and for all of the amazing feedback that this wonderful community has given me over the past three years.

Happy birthday, Swift by Sundell! Let’s do another three years, shall we?