ScamRaven (Update #4)
Is this the last one?
Long time no see. It’s been over 5 months since my last update.
A couple of reasons for that:
My main focus since the end of November has been building Neshys, which is now live.
The ScamRaven project doesn’t exactly match my expectations.
But let’s dive in, and I’ll expand on that.
The Numbers
The traffic is stable. It correlates somewhat with the number of reports I created.
But I haven’t reported that many websites either. If I pushed toward 1,000 reports, the traffic would definitely be higher.
Last time I created a report was on 2026-01-12.
While I started generating reports automatically, I don’t really like how useful they are, and I don’t want to push more of them into the world. They don’t differ that much from what ChatGPT could generate.
Also, individual reports still only bring in a few visits per month, with the majority of pages not getting a single visit at all.
Funny enough, I seem to rank for “raven scam”.
And the traffic is probably coming from people searching either for ravens (the birds) “scamming,” or for a company called “Raven” scamming people.
First Emails from “Outside the World”
The fact that I received a couple of emails shows that real people visit the reports too, not just bots.
The first case was someone asking me to re-categorize their business as legitimate.
I was expecting this at some point. After checking more closely, I decided to mark it as legitimate, since it was “only” suspicious, and the owner contacting me was verification on its own (I haven’t seen a real phisher do that).
Another person reached out just recently. Sadly, this was someone who fell victim to a website that I had reviewed and categorized as Suspicious.
I’ve seen competitors (or at least similar websites) charge hourly rates for calls where they help such people.
I find it a bit unethical to monetize people who are already dealing with financial losses and are desperately trying to grab onto any straw.
In this case, there isn’t much advice I can give besides contacting the bank and freezing the credit card.
That’s also one of the reasons why I wouldn’t be too happy running this kind of review website as a “business.” My expertise can be used in better ways.
The Next Project That Stole My Focus
It is Neshys.
We are already live and moving toward our first paying customers.
I started this together with BFF Insider. I’m covering the technical side, while he focuses mostly on business development and sales.
Neshys helps PR agencies and freelancers pitch journalists without living in spreadsheets. Contacts, pitches, follow-ups, and coverage - all in one place.
It’s a small market, but a real one: most agencies still manage media outreach through Excel and Outlook.
It took me a good 5 months of evenings and weekends to build a stable solution. Development is still ongoing, but we already have a production-level system that people are actively testing.
Is It Done Already?
Not quite.
I’m not shutting the Scam Raven down because it literally costs me almost nothing to keep it running. The only real cost is the yearly domain renewal.
But at the same time, I don’t see a reason to invest heavily in creating new reports.
The only obvious monetization path would be ads, and even that would still bring in peanuts.
Abandoning a project sucks, and part of it feels like failure, but the “hustling” journey is never linear.
I’m not giving up on side projects - I’m just switching to another idea where I see bigger potential and where my skills can be put to better use.
ScamRaven now feels like a project that could easily be vibe-coded.
Neshys, on the other hand, is heavy lifting. It requires skill, patience, and many iterations, so naturally I feel more passionate about work that challenges me.
The content on Substack will probably change a bit as well. I now have a significant amount of experience working with AI coding, and I think I can share some valuable lessons that I learned the hard way.
If there’s interest in how I built the technical side of Neshys, let me know - I’d be more than happy to share it.