This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The basics

‍Would you mind starting just by telling us a little bit about yourself?

Kevin Raposo of KnowTechie: I was born and raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts. That's a city outside of Boston. I play music; I'm a metal drummer. I've been playing music since I was about four years old. I still play drums to this day, playing in heavy metal bands and things like that. I'm still very active in that world when I'm not writing or managing the site. But I’ve pretty much been doing that all my life. My passion growing up was to be a rock star. Unfortunately, rock stars don't make that much money and can't really live off music unless you're playing for one of these super bands. So I found out at a young age and pivoted to other things, like SEO and things like that.

Do you feel like a rock star now, a rock star of the publishing industry?

Kevin Raposo: Sometimes I do, sometimes I don't, but my wife likes to think that I am always a rock star in her eyes, so that helps.

We also think that you are. KnowTechie is pretty good.

Kevin Raposo: I appreciate that. We try. There are a lot of boring tech news websites out there, and we try to cut the mold, go against the grain a little bit. We try our hardest.

A personal journey

Did you study anything related to publishing or writing at all?

Kevin Raposo: No, not at all. It was something that really just fell into my lap. I was working at a startup called SimpliSafe, an alarm system company, and one day they needed someone to learn SEO. I had no idea what it was, but they were like, "Hey, you're in charge of this now, and you have to learn it." I was like, "Oh, boy." And then one day, probably around 15 years ago, they said, "We need someone to talk to journalists." I was like, "I guess I can try that," and I got my start in public relations that way. I figured that the best way to learn was to write and be one of them, try to do what they do. I essentially wrote and found that I had a talent for writing and creating content, and that's how I ended up running a tech news website. I read a lot back then, and I noticed that publications were writing about really boring topics. I was really into gadgets, new startups, things like that. So I figured why not have a voice in that field that speaks the way I do, thinks the way I do, and I figured other people would like that. And so far, they do. I love that.

So, you kind of found a gap that was missing at that moment and then you decided to found KnowTechie, is that right?

Kevin Raposo: That's correct.

How long have you had KnowTechie? How old is it?

Kevin Raposo: It just turned 10 last month. So it's been around for 10 years now. A long time.

Could you please tell us what has been the most difficult or challenging thing that you've encountered with KnowTechie to be where you are today?

Kevin Raposo: If I had a choice back then to pick a different niche, I totally would have because in tech there's just so much going on, so many things happening, and new developments every day. Just being able to stay on top of that is really difficult, especially if you don't have the manpower to cover all those topics. It can get exhausting. And on top of all that, you have to update all of your articles, keep everything current, and that's a lot. While you're still updating articles about the iPhone 14, the iPhone 15 comes out, then you have the iPhone 16. It's a constant revolving door of new things to look out for. That's probably the biggest difficulty: content creation and aligning your content goals to be the best they can be with so much in the pipeline.

It's been crazy, and in the past year, I would say I've never seen anything like it in terms of progression with AI and everything like that. You know, it took a long while for the iPhone 10 to become the iPhone 15, whereas in AI, it moved from an iPhone 3 to an iPhone 16 in like one year. Being able to cover all those developments, it was the first time I've been scared of technology, thinking to myself, "What's gonna happen in five years from now?" And when I think about it, it blows my mind.

It is scary. I mean, we are all at this point where we just want to think that everything is going to turn out right for all of us. But we don't know.

Kevin Raposo: Right. We don't know. At the end of this call, I have an AI that summarizes this whole call and sends me an email of everything that we spoke about. I couldn't even think about that two years ago. By default, it turns it on. I think even Zoom does it now.

Well, now that we're talking about technology, I wanted to ask you, if you could magically reveal your tech stack, how would you make it look?

Kevin Raposo: So, we use WordPress as our publishing software. I do all my hosting on Kinsta, a WordPress-managed hosting company. They're really fast. I've been with them for about seven years now, and they are rock stars when it comes to keeping my site up and going. I used to be with SiteGround previously. I didn't know too much back then about hosting and how you needed more resources when you got a surge of traffic. To their credit, they were great while I had them, but I switched over to Kinsta, and they are rock stars. In terms of other things, we use a bunch of tools. I'm really into no code and automations, so I use things like Zapier. I like this new one called Bardeen, a really cool automation platform. There's also one more I have here that I always forget the name of. It's TaskMagic. It's basically no code, and it automates processes. For example, if a post publishes on KnowTechie, it gets shared automatically to all my social platforms without me lifting a finger. It does all that. It reads my emails to me, answers emails sometimes, schedules appointments for me, and this is all autonomous. I have to set it up before, but it basically does all that. In terms of other things, I use Google Workspace, Google Docs, Google Sheets, Gmail, all that fun stuff.

Recently, I got introduced to AppSumo and lifetime deals. It's a marketplace for SaaS products, and they offer lifetime deals. Instead of paying month-to-month, you just buy it upfront, and you buy them at a really early stage in their development, so you get it for really cheap. It's a big upfront payment at the beginning, but you basically make out like a bandit. I've discovered that I'm addicted to buying these. It's very sad, but my money could go to worse places. It's really cool products, cool little things that I can try out, and sometimes they really benefit me.

Tell me about your monetization strategy and if it has been changing over the decade or how you are monetizing your content right now.

Kevin Raposo: So, in the first three years of running KnowTechie, we didn't make any money. I didn't know how to make money. I didn't really go into it with the idea of making money. It was just more of a platform for me to practice my writing. But then the bills came. Hosting is expensive. So I had to figure out monetization. The first thing I did was get a Google AdSense account and run ads on the website. Then I realized I wasn't really making much money off that, so I discovered affiliate marketing. Working in tech, there are a lot of new products coming out, and if you're writing about them, you can drop a link in there, and if someone buys it, you get a commission. I jumped on that and really liked it. So I did a lot of that in the beginning. Eventually, we moved into sponsored posts and building brand partnerships with other companies. We also went back to display advertising, where we had enough traffic coming in to sustain the website for a while. So a lot of our monetization strategy is that, but affiliate marketing is still huge for us, and building brand partnerships is also big for us.

I think that's something good that the tech industry has. Not every publisher can do affiliate stuff like that.

Kevin Raposo: Yeah, but it's possible. I think a lot of companies can do it. It's about finding that balance where you're not selling out your audience for a quick buck. The products are out there for pretty much every niche. If you're working in business-to-business, the opportunities are even larger because it's more targeted. Where we have to compete with bigger companies like the New York Times, it's harder for us to make affiliate sales versus a business-to-business niche because it's more targeted. But it pays the bills. It could be better, but we're slowly making our way back and trying to get back to normal.

What are the current plans for KnowTechie? How is it going to keep growing? Do you have any plans?

Kevin Raposo: It's one thing I always think about. The goal is to always grow, right? And make money for the site to pay my writers and things like that. I'm always getting approached to sell the site. I have buyers always asking me if I want to sell the site. I always tell them the same thing: I didn't jump into this for money. I wanted to do this for a passion, and I have no problem dying with KnowTechie and not selling it. The goal is to always have something for me to do with the site, always have a passion for tech, write about it. And yeah, that's pretty much it.

Choosing syndication

You've been syndicating your content with Newstex since 2019. I wanted to ask you if you think that partnering with us was a good decision and why you decided to partner with us.

Kevin Raposo: It was definitely a great decision. Working with Newstex opened up our audience to a bigger audience. I remember one month we got so much traffic from you guys that it almost broke my server. It was really cool. I think it got syndicated on Fast Company or something like that. It was a big site, and it really opened us up. Because of that, it gave us legitimacy at a time when we really needed it. It basically monetized our site, it gave us money. But the more valuable thing for us was that it brought us to a whole new audience that we would have never gotten in front of. That was really valuable, and I still value that today. There are some months where it doesn't move the needle, but on the months that it does, it does a really good job.

Kevin Raposo is KnowTechie's founder and executive editor. With over 15 years of blogging experience in the tech industry, he has transformed what was once a passion project into a full-blown tech news publication.

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