The journey begins: why I built a BI news site
After 20 years working with data and Power BI, I decided to build business-intelligence.info. This is the story of the first two weeks — including the first Google results.
I've been working with data for twenty years now. Started with Excel macros and VBA, moved through Access databases to Power BI and cloud platforms. And all that time, I noticed something: if you work in BI, you have to piece together your news from dozens of English-language blogs, vendor sites and LinkedIn posts. An independent place where it all comes together? It didn't exist.
So I thought: why not build it myself?
The first week
What started as "let's see if this works" quickly became an obsession. Set up a VPS, registered a domain name, and got to work. No WordPress — I wanted to understand how everything works, from scraper to frontend.
And it went fast. Maybe too fast. Every time something worked, I thought: "but what if I also add..." A scraper that reads RSS feeds became a fully categorized news platform. A simple homepage became a site with a knowledge base, personalization, and a newsletter. Before I knew it, I had 680+ articles from 40 sources, 13 in-depth knowledge base pages, and a Lighthouse score of 100.
It felt a bit like opening a box of Lego and not being able to stop.
What I didn't expect
The best part of this project isn't the result — it's what you learn along the way. A few things that surprised me:
- SEO is fascinating. Structured data, hreflang tags, Core Web Vitals — it's an entire discipline. And it works: after five days, the knowledge base page about Storytelling with data was already at position 2.5 in Google.
- Content quality varies enormously. From brilliant analyses to barely disguised advertorials. As an aggregator, you learn to filter quickly.
- AI is a game changer. Summaries, translations, categorization — AI makes it possible for a one-person operation to build something that would otherwise require an editorial team. But the choices remain human.
The first numbers
After one week, the first Google Search Console report came in. Modest, but the trend is there:
- From 0 to 112 impressions per day in five days
- The search term "business intelligence newsletter" reached position 3
- Even before the German translation went live, the site was already appearing in search results in Germany and Switzerland — purely on English content
That last point was the trigger to translate all 13 knowledge base pages into German yesterday evening. The DACH market is huge, and it also lacks an independent BI news source. I'm curious what that will do.
What's next?
Expand the knowledge base, connect more sources, build a stats dashboard. But honestly: the most fun part is simply building it. Learning something new every day, improving things, and watching it grow.
If you work with data and you're missing something in the current BI landscape — let me know. This site is ultimately for you.