A list of failures.
That's the most accurate title I could come up with. Here's the summary:
In the last year or so, I have built 4 web apps, 3 open-source tools, wrote one book, onboarded 250+ users overall, and made 25 dollars overall.
Read that sentence a few times. Eight projects and 250+ users went in, and 25 dollars came out. That isn't a monthly number or a per-project number. It's the total.
I'm not writing this to ask for sympathy, or to pretend it was all a learning experience. Some of it was. Mostly, I want the numbers written down in one place, because the gap between building something and getting someone to pay for it is easy to ignore when you only look at one project at a time.
The web apps
These are the ones where revenue was supposed to happen.
Bailoutt.com - Fake AI calls and call reminders - live ~200 users, 2 paid
https://chunkybabies.com - Baby health tracker - 2 users, didn’t take off. Offline now
Kitaaben - Book tracker, journal and AI reviews. - 60+ users - 1 active subscriber
WO Buddy - Build your exercise plan, with illustrated guide - 10 users - none paid
Put those side by side, and you get a funnel that starts wide at "built" and ends at a few coins at "paid."
The open source tools
I never expected these to make money. They're free, they solved my own problems, and a couple of them might solve yours.
GWDAP - Automate verification and adding aliases for multiple domains.
COPE agent - A multi-model content repurposing tool that turns any provided source into a canonical brief, which in turn converts it into multi-format content, i.e. long form like LinkedIn, short form like Twitter, etc., carousel, both image and and pdf
DoCk - A browser extension that routes your Google Workspace links to their respective PWAs rather than opening a new tab for each link.
The book
- Dad, Debriefed - Journaled my experience as a father and turned it into a book that works as a guide to new fathers.
So where does that leave things?
Here's the scoreboard: 8 projects, 250+ users, $25.
You can read that a few ways. Turns out I'm good at shipping. Getting anyone to pay is a separate skill, and the list shows I haven't learned it yet. Every one of these went live. Most of them found at least a handful of people. Almost none of them found people with a reason to pay.
A few things I'm taking from the year:
Shipping is not the bottleneck. I can build things. That clearly isn't what's holding me back.
Users are not customers. Bailoutt has about 200 users and 2 paying ones. That ratio says a lot about what I've actually validated.
One paying subscriber counts. Kitaaben's single subscriber tells me more than its 60+ free users do.
Killing a project is fine. Chunkybabies is offline, and nothing broke.
Not everything has to make money. The open source tools and the book were worth doing anyway. I just shouldn't confuse them with a business.
So it's a list of failures, by the only number that pays rent. By the count of things that exist now and didn't a year ago, the year went better than that number suggests. Both readings are true. I'm just not going to pretend the second one cancels out the first.
Top comments (1)
Respect for putting all eight projects in one table. Bailoutt at ~200 users and 2 paid is the one I'd keep pushing: those 2 probably had a very specific reason to pay. Do you know what they had in common, or how they found it?