Alexander Belyanin

Founder of tinyfound – documenting how independents found their audience and customers without a serious ad budget.

Tinyfound Monthly Reports

Report for month 3 (September) of tinyfound's work. Results and plans.

Oct 1, 2026

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3 min read

Report for month 3 (September) of tinyfound's work. Results and plans.

This post is more musing than specifics. About what's working (a little), what isn't (almost everything), and what needs to change (that's the question). Plus: a ray of light.

Alexander Belyanin

Search & AI Traffic

From Selling Firewood to 219 Furniture Orders a Year – Mostly Through Etsy

Sep 30, 2026

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4 min read

From Selling Firewood to 219 Furniture Orders a Year – Mostly Through Etsy

A family workshop in a small Lithuanian town started out selling firewood and outdoor furniture sets locally – then found nearly all its international buyers through Etsy, growing from about 150 orders last year to 219 so far this year.

Alexander Belyanin

Skincare & Beauty

The Accidental Entrepreneur – How ScrubzBody Grew From My Kitchen Table

Sep 24, 2026

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3 min read

The Accidental Entrepreneur – How ScrubzBody Grew From My Kitchen Table

Roberta Perry turned a homemade sugar scrub into ScrubzBody, growing it for almost two decades into a business with 2,000 customers and a physical store – built on a weekly email newsletter and free publicity, not paid ads.

Alexander Belyanin

Video Platforms

She Refuses to Use AI in Her Work. She's Still Sold Over 14,000 Illustration Collections.

Sep 24, 2026

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4 min read

She Refuses to Use AI in Her Work. She's Still Sold Over 14,000 Illustration Collections.

Yuliya Derbisheva makes every illustration and font entirely by hand, without AI – a deliberate stance in a market flooded with cheap AI-generated art – and has built her business by refusing to depend on any single platform to sell it.

Alexander Belyanin

Sculpture & Fine Art

How Etsy Became a Bulgarian Glass Artist’s Bridge to International Collectors

Sep 13, 2026

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6 min read

How Etsy Became a Bulgarian Glass Artist’s Bridge to International Collectors

After years running her own engineering firm, Evgeniya "Jeny" Guneva picked up glass art almost by accident – and one marketplace ended up carrying nearly all of her international sales: roughly 820 orders and €160,609 in revenue on her main Etsy shop alone.

Alexander Belyanin

Content & Media Brands

750 Copies of Her Book Sold, and a World Championship Win

Sep 11, 2026

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5 min read

750 Copies of Her Book Sold, and a World Championship Win

Katie built The Girl with the Tree Tattoo by blogging about her own ballroom dance journey – no paid ad ever worked, but word of mouth at competitions and a self-published practice guide brought her 750 book buyers and a World Championship win before she closed the project in 2021.

Alexander Belyanin

Wood & Craft

She Grew Her First Instagram Following One Follow at a Time – Today It Drives 85% of Her Furniture Sales

Sep 10, 2026

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10 min read

She Grew Her First Instagram Following One Follow at a Time – Today It Drives 85% of Her Furniture Sales

Safiye Ceren Akıllı started Ahşap Hikayesi in 2015 painting furniture by hand, without ever touching a woodworking machine – when the pandemic hit five years later, she bought her own machinery, taught herself to run it, and turned the business into a manufacturer that now supplies some of Turkey's largest furniture companies.

Alexander Belyanin

Skincare & Beauty

A Hack Wiped Out All Her Facebook Followers – But Now 1,954 People Are on a List She Actually Owns

Sep 7, 2026

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10 min read

A Hack Wiped Out All Her Facebook Followers – But Now 1,954 People Are on a List She Actually Owns

Meredith Moseley-Bennett rebuilt her audience from zero after a Facebook hack erased years of followers – today, she runs dozens of in-person shows a year and has turned them into an email list of 1,954 subscribers she actually owns.

Alexander Belyanin

Search & AI Traffic

A One-Person Workshop in Estonia Has Sold About €10,000 on Etsy in Eight Years – and He Keeps Going Anyway

Sep 4, 2026

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5 min read

A One-Person Workshop in Estonia Has Sold About €10,000 on Etsy in Eight Years – and He Keeps Going Anyway

Krister Tonsiver turns rare curly birch into one-off objects from a 1924 log building. Etsy search has been his main channel since 2018 – but the numbers have never added up to a living, and that was never quite the point.

Alexander Belyanin

Sculpture & Fine Art

Instagram Reels Boosted His Traffic 70%. Every Real Order Still Comes Through Word of Mouth.

Sep 3, 2026

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3 min read

Instagram Reels Boosted His Traffic 70%. Every Real Order Still Comes Through Word of Mouth.

After a six-year passion project he'd thrown himself into collapsed, G.Todorov mastered the art of not giving up. He rebuilt his business as a solo sculptor and jeweler – and found that no platform sells his work quite like a happy customer telling a friend.

Alexander Belyanin

Video Platforms

The Pandemic Closed Her Market Stall. Overcoming Her Fear of Being on Camera Helped Save and Grow the Business.

Sep 1, 2026

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3 min read

The Pandemic Closed Her Market Stall. Overcoming Her Fear of Being on Camera Helped Save and Grow the Business.

When the pandemic shut down the city market that made up most of her income, Mel Young forced herself to get comfortable on camera – and never went back.

Alexander Belyanin

Ceramics & Pottery

Małgorzata Ruined 15 Sinks Before Getting One Right. Now Sales From Her Own Site Outsell the Marketplaces Where She Started.

Sep 1, 2026

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3 min read

Małgorzata Ruined 15 Sinks Before Getting One Right. Now Sales From Her Own Site Outsell the Marketplaces Where She Started.

Małgorzata knew from day one that ceramic bathroom sinks would be her product – she just didn't know how to make one yet. Seven years later, she's gone from selling one or two sinks a month to full interior collections – sinks, tiles, lamps, dispensers – built entirely by her own hands, without a real advertising budget.

Alexander Belyanin

Search & AI Traffic

Panna Stopped Posting for a Year – And Her Fantasy Art Started Selling to America

Aug 31, 2026

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4 min read

Panna Stopped Posting for a Year – And Her Fantasy Art Started Selling to America

Panna spent two years and 100–150 EUR a month on Facebook and Instagram ads that grew her followers, not her sales. Then a breakup pulled her off social media almost completely – and her fantasy art commissions took off with buyers in the US.

Alexander Belyanin

Search & AI Traffic

No Italian Network for Free Walking Tours Existed. They Built One by Calling Every Operator in the Country.

Aug 31, 2026

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3 min read

No Italian Network for Free Walking Tours Existed. They Built One by Calling Every Operator in the Country.

Giovanni and his co-founders started with one free tour in their hometown of Modena – then realized the real opportunity was the network no one else had built yet, and started calling existing Free Walking Tour operators across Italy to join what became Free Walking Tour Italia.

Alexander Belyanin

Tinyfound Monthly Reports

tinyfound's second month (August) report. Results and plans.

Aug 31, 2026

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4 min read

tinyfound's second month (August) report. Results and plans.

This series covers tinyfound's successes and failures, its growth and promotion. The main themes of August: stories need soul; promoting text content on visual platforms.

Alexander Belyanin

Interior Design

From Fashion to Forever Homes: How I Built Ben the Hoose Interiors

Aug 27, 2026

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11 min read

From Fashion to Forever Homes: How I Built Ben the Hoose Interiors

I haven't really left fashion behind at all. I've simply taken everything I loved about being a designer and found a new canvas for it.

Alexander Belyanin

Content & Media Brands

A Google Algorithm Update Erased Their Traffic. Rebuilding Old Posts Brought It Back to 31,000 Sessions.

Aug 24, 2026

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3 min read

A Google Algorithm Update Erased Their Traffic. Rebuilding Old Posts Brought It Back to 31,000 Sessions.

Top Travel Sights ran almost entirely on search – so when their best-ranking posts vanished from Google overnight, there was no backup channel to fall back on. It took losing their main affiliate program, and rewriting years of old posts from scratch, to get the numbers climbing again.

Alexander Belyanin

Jewelry

For 3 Years There Was Very Little Income. Then €15,000 a Month From Google Search Alone.

Aug 21, 2026

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3 min read

For 3 Years There Was Very Little Income. Then €15,000 a Month From Google Search Alone.

Nicolas tried the same idea twice. In France, reselling Mexican silver jewelry to friends, family, and eBay never took off. In Mexico, three years of pure Google search and zero ad spend built roughly €15,000 a month – and it's still running on the same single channel.

Alexander Belyanin

Freelance & Professional Services

A Website Still Brings In 5-10 Clients a Month – Twenty-One Years Later

Aug 15, 2026

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5 min read

A Website Still Brings In 5-10 Clients a Month – Twenty-One Years Later

Gaynor Paynter built Typewrite Transcription into her main income through her own website and word of mouth – three brochure campaigns, in 2005, 2012, and during Covid, cost her about R3,000 combined and brought in zero clients.

Alexander Belyanin

Cold Outreach & DMs

I Spent $0 on Ads. Four LinkedIn Messages Became My Best Clients.

Aug 13, 2026

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4 min read

I Spent $0 on Ads. Four LinkedIn Messages Became My Best Clients.

Suzanne Kaltbaum built a fine art photography business one relationship at a time – and found that a single well-placed LinkedIn connection with the right interior designer was worth more than a bigger following ever was.

Alexander Belyanin

SaaS & Software Products

One Affiliate Now Brings In Half My Sales

Aug 13, 2026

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7 min read

One Affiliate Now Brings In Half My Sales

Philipp built backl.io, a curated backlink database for SaaS founders, after teaching himself SEO from scratch for his first product – today, roughly half of his sales come from a single affiliate he didn't even recruit.

Alexander Belyanin

Content & Media Brands

How Short-Form Video Took My Instagram From 1,463 to 19,100 Followers in 30 Days

Aug 12, 2026

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6 min read

How Short-Form Video Took My Instagram From 1,463 to 19,100 Followers in 30 Days

Tyler O'Shea built Joker Mag into a sports media brand pulling tens of thousands of monthly readers, mostly through self-taught SEO – then posted short-form videos daily for a month and watched his Instagram jump from 1,463 to 19,100 followers, with a handful of videos driving most of the growth.

Alexander Belyanin

Collabs & Shoutouts

Aug 10, 2026

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5 min read

I deleted 60% of my subscribers on purpose

Jakob grew From Europe with Love to 2,500 subscribers fast with a Refind push – then deleted most of them back out over eight months to keep a list that actually opens. Today it sits around 1,100 engaged readers, growing through classified ads in other newsletters and a self-built map fed by a few euros a day of ads.

Alexander Belyanin

Video Platforms

Ten Years of Persistence and €6 in Ads: How a Latvian Stone Artist Built a Global Audience Through Etsy

Aug 8, 2026

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5 min read

Ten Years of Persistence and €6 in Ads: How a Latvian Stone Artist Built a Global Audience Through Etsy

Ronalds Jaunzems has sold stone-carved mortars, sculptures, and garden decor from his workshop in Latvia to buyers across the US for ten years – spending about €6 on ads the entire time.

Alexander Belyanin

Handmade Fashion & Accessories

I stopped calling it a hobby and started charging for it

Aug 6, 2026

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5 min read

I stopped calling it a hobby and started charging for it

She showed the process on Instagram, not the finished bags. But it was the newsletter that turned a follower into a $575 buyer — and sold out her Wearable WIP launch on day one.

Alexander Belyanin