I wanted to build something small.
Not another project that starts with "I'll just make the MVP" and somehow turns into three months of work.
So I gave myself a very simple idea:
What if the internet had one switch?
Someone can pay to flip it ON or OFF.
When they do, their website takes over the page until somebody else pays to flip it again.
That's the whole idea behind:
The first version took about 5 hours
Most of it was pretty straightforward.
One current website.
One switch.
One payment.
One history of who flipped it before.
I got the first version working in around 5 hours.
Then I did the developer thing and spent more time changing the UI than building the original product.
The difficult part wasn't really the switch.
It was figuring out how to make the website that paid actually feel like it got something.
I didn't want someone to pay and end up as another tiny logo in a list of 200 websites.
If you're the current holder, you should basically own the page.
So I kept removing things and making the promoted website more visible.
Then a one-button website needed two payment providers
I originally used Stripe.
Then I realized that wasn't enough for some of the countries I wanted to support, especially India.
So I added Dodo Payments as another option.
I didn't expect payment infrastructure to become one of the more interesting parts of a website whose main feature is literally an ON/OFF switch.
But that's side projects, I guess.
You start with one button and somehow end up reading payment-provider documentation at midnight.
3 days later
The numbers so far:
- Around 880 visitors
- Traffic still coming every day
- $0 revenue
I've mainly submitted it to a few .lol directories and places where people discover small/weird internet projects.
So getting people to visit hasn't actually been the biggest problem.
Getting someone to pay is.
And that's something I'm starting to find much more interesting than the code.
Building is the part I know
I've been developing software for a long time.
Give me a technical problem and I'll probably find a way through it.
But getting the first stranger on the internet to take out a credit card and pay for something I made?
Completely different skill.
You can improve the UI.
Change the checkout.
Optimize performance.
Add another payment provider.
Refactor everything.
And still make exactly $0.
At some point the answer probably isn't in the code anymore.
I'm trying not to overbuild it
This is probably the hardest part.
My natural reaction to zero sales is:
Maybe I should add something.
More stats.
More history.
More animations.
Accounts.
Achievements.
A better dashboard.
But the original project took about 5 hours because it was intentionally simple.
Turning it into a three-week project just because nobody paid during the first 880 visits would defeat the point.
So for now I'm keeping it simple and watching what happens.
Maybe 880 visitors isn't enough.
Maybe the mechanic is fun to look at but not fun enough to pay for.
Maybe it just needs the first person to flip it before others want to participate.
Or maybe it will stay at $0 forever.
That's also a perfectly valid result for a 5-hour experiment.
For the developers here who have managed to turn side projects into actual paid products:
What helped you get the first stranger to pay?
That's the part I'm trying to learn now.
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