How You Can Help Support Our Family

Tiny Shiny Home Family

Many of you have asked how you can help support our family, so we thought it would be helpful to have a centralized place to share. Here’s our story:

Back in 2015, we sold our house, began traveling full-time, and upended our lives forever. What started as a way to simply catalog all our adventures (so we wouldn’t forget them) has slowly evolved into so much more.

Whether it’s step-by-step articles about our Airstream renovation, in-depth video courses about boondocking, super nerdy articles about our internet setup, or weekly videos about our off-grid homestead build, we’ve slowly created a huge amount of content that millions of people have used.

Wait, millions of peoples? Yep millions. It boggles my mind that our little website could help so many folks ☺️.

And it’s not like we just threw the articles or videos up and never talked about them again. Over the years, we’ve responded to hundreds of emails and hundreds of thousands of comments - providing support, clarification, and encouragement whenever we could.

Between Ashley & I we routinely spend 60-80 hours a week on all things Tiny Shiny Home.

So eventually we had to make a decision - how do we keep up with the scale of our community, continue to help people, and keep making new content?

The simple answer is the Longneckers needed this thing to make some money.

Here's how you help us not die in the desert 😂!

Overview

  1. How we don't make money
  2. How we do make money
  3. Products, Resources & Courses
  4. Tiny Shiny Homies (Patreon-style support)
  5. Affiliate Links
  6. Apparel
  7. YouTube
  8. Donations
  9. Brand Partnerships
  10. Video Production
  11. Web Design
  12. How does our revenue break down

How We're Not Making Money

Before we talk about how you can support us, we need to talk about how you can't.

Early on we made a decision not to rely on advertising to fund our adventures (YouTube being the exception - more on that below).

I know you’ve been to those websites where you can’t even read the article you want because ads are slowing things down and bouncing stuff all over the screen. It’s infuriating. So first off, we wanted a fast, clean, and enjoyable reading experience.

Second, we’re hyper aware of the shady stuff many ad networks are doing by tracking you across multiple websites, storing your browsing patterns, and selling that info to other marketers. Honestly, it sucks, and we are constantly doing our best to keep trackers out of our site.

Does that mean there are zero tracker things on our site? Unfortunately, no. We do rely on some 3rd parties like:

  • Google Analytics (to give us important info about how people are using our site)
  • Disqus (to allow comments and conversations that aren’t plagued by spam)
  • YouTube embeds (in case you want to watch our videos on our site)

We always turn on their privacy and anonymous features where we can, and make no profit from any data they might collect.

How We Do Make Money - And How You Can Help

Basically we want to make an honest living at this stuff, create resources that are worth paying for, and not trick you into selling all your private data!

Cool? Cool.

So let’s talk specifically about the ways our family does make money at Tiny Shiny Home.

Products, Resources & Courses

We’ve learned a lot since 2015, and while we do give most of our knowledge away for free, we realized we needed to create some paid resources if we weren’t doing ads.

This meant even more time and investment in gear, research, writing, video, editing, and more. But we’re really proud of the products and courses we’ve made. Here’s a list of what’s available:

Homies Banner

Tiny Shiny Homies (Patreon-style support)

Ongoing patronage or membership supporters are a huge lifeline to creators like us. Direct access to our community is so important, and supporters help us continue making fun videos and content for them each week.

Subscribe & Support Here

Affiliate Links

Over the years we’ve created partnerships with brands we love and have become affiliates for them.

This means that if you follow a link to a product from our site and buy it, we make a small commission on the sale. We only link to products we love and can recommend honestly. No one’s buying our loyalty, we promise.

Here’s a list of links to our major affiliate partners if you’d like to help support us:

Merchandise

Many moons ago, this blog was called “Last Night Ago,” and we made hand-carved, block-printed t-shirts as a family. While we don’t have the time or space to make them that way currently, we’ve partnered with Cotton Bureau to print our designs on-demand. This means they are a little more expensive - our cost per shirt is pretty high so we have to add a few dollars to make a profit - but we promise they’re super comfy and you’ll actually want to wear them out and about. We're also selling fun stickers now, too!

Buy Merchandise Here

YouTube Videos

YouTube is the asterisk in my posturing about no ads above. We love making videos, and genuinely feel like it creates an amazing community of friends on the internet. But...

  1. It takes an enormous amount of time to shoot and edit each week. Like 40+ hours between the two of us. Ads help cover some of that time.
  2. If we want anyone to see those videos, we need ads on. It’s a “pay to play” system that we don’t love, but are experimenting with currently.

So how can you help? Watch our videos all the way through! Leave a comment, like, and make sure you’re subscribed. Does an ad actually seem useful and tell you about something you’d like to buy? Click through and purchase! Make those algorithms work for us - every little bit helps :)

Donations

Tired of reading all this, trying to figure out the best option, and just want to send us some cash? Totally understand. We've setup an easy donation option that uses PayPal or Credit Cards. Follow the link below, and choose or enter your amount.

Donate to Tiny Shiny Home Here

Talking Irons Coffee Saloon Gift Card

Every Saturday morning we get up early, work hard on our projects, and head to our favorite local coffee shop for a well deserved break. Not only do they make the best pastries and drinks for miles, they're an amazing local business, and we love supporting them. If you'd like to gift our family the joy of delicious beverages and snacks, follow the link below.

Gift Talking Irons Coffee Saloon Card

Brand Partnerships

Over the years we’ve worked with several brands, creating content, ads, or reviews in our own unique style. If you work at or know someone who works at a company you think would be a good fit, feel free to make an introduction!

Video Production

Have a product or project that involves some marketing, writing, or video editing? We’ve got years of experience building brands & making fun videos. Use the contact form to get in touch and we’ll see if we can help.

How Does Your Revenue Break Down?

Good question - we’ve been intentional about creating several “legs” to stand on so we aren’t reliant on any one way to make money. We might share detailed numbers one day, but for now the best ways you can help are:

  1. Sign up for Tiny Shiny Homies, our patreon style support membership.
  2. Use our Amazon affiliate link to buy things
  3. Buy one of our paid courses (only if you need it of course)
  4. Watch our videos, leave comments, share when you can

These 4 make up the majority of our revenue from Tiny Shiny Home. 

Thank You

As you can see, this stuff is complicated! We’re constantly trying to find the balance between sharing our knowledge, protecting your privacy, and knowing when to charge for something in an honest way. We’re still figuring it out, and I’m sure we’ll make mistakes along the way.

But I can say for certain, 100% - that we could never do this without you. Your support and encouragement is such a huge part of our family, and we’re so thankful that you’ve chosen to share in our journey.

We love you all,

Jonathan, Ashley, Adali, Jett, Jax & Ada
Tiny Shiny Home

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