I'll never forget the moment I realized I could actually make money from AI APIs without a single follower.
It was a random Tuesday. I was staring at my screen, coffee going cold, doing the same thing most indie devs do: tinkering with side projects and wondering why my bank account looked so sad. I'd been told for years that affiliate marketing was a game for people with audiences. People with newsletters. People with YouTube channels. People with clout.
I had none of those things.
This is the story of how I got my first commission from the Global API affiliate program anyway — and how I'm documenting the entire thing publicly because I think more people should see what actually works versus what the gurus claim works.
The Honest Starting Point
Let me be brutally transparent here, because that's the entire point of building in public.
When I started this experiment, here's where I actually stood:
- Twitter followers: 312 (and most of them were bots, let's be honest)
- Email list size: 0 subscribers
- YouTube subscribers: 0
- Monthly affiliate income: $0
- Total money spent on "getting started": $0 I wasn't some hidden influencer. I wasn't secretly famous in some developer Discord. I was just a regular person who used AI APIs in my own projects and thought, "Hey, if I'm already paying for this stuff anyway, maybe I should write about it." That's it. That's the whole origin story. No dramatic backstory. No mentorship from a guru. Just a developer with a hunch and a lot of free time. # # Why I Picked the Affiliate Route Over Everything Else I considered a lot of "side hustles" before committing to this one. Dropshipping felt gross to me ethically. Crypto Twitter felt like sitting in a casino all day. Selling courses felt like scamming people who couldn't afford courses in the first place. Affiliate marketing felt different because the math actually made sense
Top comments (0)