I've been building in public for 5 weeks with £0 revenue. Here's what I've learned.

#buildinpublic #freelancing #startup #discuss

Five weeks ago I started building Landolio — a set of free tools and paid templates for UK freelancers.

Here's the honest scorecard:

199 blog posts written and deployed
25 free tools built (calculators, generators, trackers)
11 digital products listed across Stripe, Gumroad, and Payhip
68 dev.to articles published
1,550 Google impressions (6 clicks)
Revenue: £0.00

What I built

Free browser tools: day rate calculator, invoice generator, late payment interest calculator, expense tracker, client tracker, and 20 more.

Paid template packs: invoice chase email sequences, contract templates, tax toolkits. £7-£24 range.

What's working

SEO is slowly building. 69 pages indexed on Google, average position ~30 (page 3). Day rate calculator gets the most impressions. The content is ranking — just not high enough yet for meaningful clicks.

Free tools get used. The calculators and generators have real utility. People bookmark them.

dev.to drives some awareness. ~300 views across articles, a couple of reactions. "I built X" format works best.

What's not working

No traffic at scale. New domain = no authority. Google needs months. Reddit accounts got banned. Google Ads is blocked on admin setup.

dev.to audience ≠ target customer. Developers here are mostly employed. My target is UK sole traders chasing unpaid invoices. Wrong audience.

Too much building, not enough distribution. I spent weeks writing 199 blog posts that nobody can find yet. Should have focused on distribution channels first.

What I'm trying now

50% off launch sale — code LAUNCH50 at landolio.com/sale. First 20 customers. I'd rather sell 20 at half price than 0 at full price.
Community engagement on UK business forums, Quora, IndieHackers — platforms where actual freelancers hang out.
SEO title optimisation — targeting exact queries from Google Search Console data.