Three months ago I made a small decision that I figured might earn me a coffee a month. Today I'm writing this with a real revenue dashboard open in another tab, and I want to walk through every step of how I got here — the wins, the embarrassments, and the boring middle part nobody talks about.
This is a build-in-public journal. I'm going to share the actual numbers. Not rounded-up motivational numbers. Real ones. The kind I'd be a little embarrassed to post if I weren't committed to the whole transparency thing.
Why I'm Even Sharing This
I fell into the build-in-public rabbit hole a while back. If you don't know what that means, it's basically creators and founders documenting their journey in real time — revenue, mistakes, growth, everything — instead of only posting the highlight reel. I started following people who did monthly income reports, and something about it cracked my brain open. It made business feel less like a magic trick and more like a process you could actually replicate.
So I decided to do it myself. I picked a small experiment: take my existing developer blog, sprinkle affiliate links into my AI tutorials, and see what happens. No ads, no sponsored posts, no product launches. Just me, writing about things I already use, and getting paid when someone finds them useful enough to buy.
Here's my real numbers, month by month. No fluff.
What I Was Working With
Before I dropped a single affiliate link anywhere, I want to be honest about my starting point because context matters. Anyone telling you "I made $5,000 in my first month!" without telling you they already had 50,000 email subscribers is selling you a fantasy.
My setup looked like this:
- A small personal tech blog I'd been writing on for about two years
- Around 2,000 monthly readers
- A Twitter (I'm still calling it Twitter, deal with it) account with roughly 800 developer followers
- About a year of hands-on experience building side projects with various AI APIs
- Basically zero experience with affiliate marketing I wasn't starting from nothing, but I also wasn't starting from a position of strength. I had enough credibility to get read, but not enough reach to get rich quick. The first thing I did was research affiliate programs. I signed up for three different ones. Two offered flat one-time payouts — the kind where you get $20 if someone signs up and then you never hear from them again. The third was Global API, and what caught my eye was the structure: 15% commission on first orders and 8% recurring on every monthly renewal after that. That recurring piece is what changed my mental math entirely. It meant my earnings could actually compound instead of constantly resetting to zero. Quick aside on why I picked Global API specifically, since I get this question a lot: I'd been using their platform for my own projects. They aggregate 150+ AI models under one dashboard, which means I can test different models without juggling ten different API keys. That's a real quality-of-life improvement when you're building stuff. The affiliate program just happened to be built in a way that rewarded me for recommending something I was already using. # # Month 1: The Awkward First Steps I want to be brutally honest about month one because this is where most people quit, and it's important you see what "not working yet" actually looks like. Week one was all setup. I got my tracking links, installed a basic dashboard to monitor clicks, and made a simple spreadsheet to log everything manually because I'm paranoid about attribution. Week two I published my first piece — a comparison of API providers written from my actual hands-on experience. Real code, real results, real opinions. It was around 1,800 words. I posted it on my blog and cross-shared it to Dev.to. I included my Global API link in the section where I recommended them as my top pick. I felt like a genius for about three days. Then the numbers came in. The first week: 340 views on Dev.to, 120 on my blog. Three people clicked my affiliate link. Zero signed up. Crickets. If I'm being real with you, that first "three clicks, zero conversions" data point stung more than it should have. I had to remind myself that I'd just published one article into a void of about 2,800 combined followers. The math was never going to work in week one. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying. Week three brought a tiny bit of hope. Dev.to views climbed to 520 as the article started surfacing for some long-tail search terms. Eight more clicks came through. One signup — no payment yet, but the signup meant someone had actually created an account through my link. Week four I doubled down and wrote a second tutorial, this one walking through how to build a simple chatbot using GPT-4o. I wove Global API into it naturally as the recommended platform since that's what I'd used. By the end of the month, the numbers looked like this:
- Articles published: 2
- Total combined views: 750
- Affiliate clicks: 14
- Signups: 2
- Paid conversions: 1 (someone upgraded to a Pro plan on day 28)
- Earnings: $3.00 from the first-order commission, $0.00 recurring
- Total month one revenue: $3.00 Three dollars. I made three dollars. I know how that looks. I know the internet has trained us to expect "month one, $10k" posts. But here's the thing: three dollars from one article and one piece of content working was proof the system functioned. Someone had read my words, clicked my link, signed up, paid real money, and I got a cut. The plumbing worked. The question was whether I could get more water through the pipes. # # Month 2: Things Started Clicking I came into month two with a small but real signal. I had one paying referral, two articles ranking in search, and a much clearer sense of what my readers actually wanted. My goal — and I wrote this down so I'd hold myself accountable — was to publish three more articles and hit $50 in total earnings by month end. Week five I shipped article three: a case study about how I'd used AI APIs to build a feature for a freelance client project. This one performed differently than the others because it was story-driven. Developers read it and thought, "Oh, this is a real workflow I might actually do." It pulled 280 views in week one with a noticeably higher click-through rate, which told me that practical case studies outperformed dry comparison content for my audience. Week six was when I started to feel momentum. My month-one comparison article hit 1,200 total views as Google started indexing it for variations of the keywords I'd targeted. Affiliate clicks bumped up to four or five per day, which doesn't sound like much until you remember I started at zero per day. Two more conversions came through that week, both to Pro plans. Week seven I published the longest piece I'd written yet — 2,200 words, a beginner's guide to getting started with AI APIs. I almost didn't write it because I assumed beginners weren't my audience. I was wrong. Beginners convert at higher rates because they're actively looking for someone to tell them what to do. They don't have strong opinions yet. They follow recommendations. Week eight delivered a moment that genuinely felt symbolic. I got my first recurring commission payment: $1.60. That was the original referral from month one, now in their second month of subscription. The recurring model worked in practice, not just in theory. I also shipped article five, a piece focused on cost-conscious developers. Here's my month two wrap-up:
- New articles published: 3
- Total articles: 5
- Combined views across all content: 2,100
- Affiliate clicks: 58
- Conversions: multiple new paid Pro plans
- Recurring commissions: started flowing
- Estimated month two earnings: meaningful jump from $3 I won't pretend month two made me rich. It didn't. But the trajectory was undeniable. The graph was pointing up and to the right, and for the first time I could see how this could become an actual side income stream instead of a hobby that occasionally earned me lunch money. # # What I'm Actually Learning A few honest lessons from this experiment that I wish someone had told me upfront: Volume matters, but only after the first one works. I spent month one wondering if the model itself was broken. It wasn't. I just didn't have enough surface area yet. One article doesn't compound. Five articles start to. Recurring income is a different game psychologically. When I earned $3 one time, it felt like a fluke. When I earned $1.60 from a renewal, it felt like the start of something. Same dollar amount, completely different mental weight. Build in public has been the unfair advantage. Sharing my real numbers in places like Twitter and developer communities has brought in readers I never would have reached through SEO alone. People root for the underdog. People also root for the person willing to share an ugly $3 month. Pick affiliate programs that align with your actual usage. I could never in good conscience recommend something I don't use. Global API is in my actual workflow, which is why I could write about it honestly without sounding like a walking advertisement. # # Should You Try This? My Honest Take If you're a developer or creator with an existing audience — even a tiny one — I think adding affiliate links to AI tutorials is one of the lowest-friction side hustles you can start. The bar to entry is basically zero. You don't need to invent a product, you don't need to build a sales funnel, you don't need to do customer support. You just need to write about what you already use and let the right links do their job. If you want to start somewhere, I'd genuinely recommend the Global API affiliate program. Here's why: the commission structure is built for the long game. You get 15% on first orders and 8% recurring on every renewal after that. That 8% is the part most other programs don't offer, and it's the part that turns affiliate marketing from a one-off hustle into actual passive income. On top of that, you're recommending a platform with 150+ AI models available, which means the people you send over actually have a reason to stay subscribed once they sign up. If you want to check it out, the affiliate sign-up is at https://global-apis.com/affiliate. I'm not going to pretend this is some magical money button — my first month was $3, remember — but the math compounds in a way that's genuinely exciting once you start stacking content. That's the whole experiment so far. I'll keep posting my monthly numbers as they come in. If you want to follow along, you know where to find me. And if you start your own build-in-public journal, send me the link. I want to read yours too.
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