I built 43 sites and made $0. Now I'm trying the opposite approach.

#startup #sidehustle #entrepreneur #indiemakers

I built 25 websites to make $1 each. Here's what happened.

TL;DR: 25 single-page cheatsheets. $1 each in crypto. $0 revenue. 15 open PRs. Dev.to drives more traffic than Google. Here's the real math.

1. The idea

Six weeks ago I had a simple theory:

Build single-page cheatsheets for developer tools. Charge $1 in crypto. Let SEO do the work.

The pitch writes itself: "I could Google this for free, but $1 saves me 20 minutes of searching."

It's the classic convenience play. Gumroad proved people pay for well-packaged free information. I just wanted to test if the same works for dev tools, paid in Solana/USDC.

No subscription. No account. No newsletter upsell. One page, one dollar, one payment.

2. What I built

I picked 25 topics across a few categories and built a single-page HTML site for each one:

Crypto dev tools:

Solana CLI cheatsheet
Anchor framework quick reference
Rust CLI essentials
Web3.py snippets
Hardhat command reference

General dev:

Bash one-liners (the ones you actually use)
tmux survival guide
Git undo commands (the most common page)
sed/awk patterns
jq JSON query reference

AI coding agents:

Claude Code quick commands
Cursor shortcuts
Aider workflow reference
Prompt patterns for codegen
Vibe coding anti-patterns

Exchange comparisons:

Binance vs Bybit fee tier comparison
Solana DEX aggregator fees
CEX withdrawal fee reference
Perpetual exchange comparison matrix
KYC-free exchange roundup

Every site is a single index.html — no framework, no build step, no JavaScript bloat. Just a clean reference, a buy button (Solana Pay / USDC address), and a permissive license so people can fork it.

3. The numbers

Metric	Count
Sites live	25
Total build time	~40 hours
Open PRs to Awesome lists	15
Monthly visitors (all sites)	~320
Revenue	$0

That zero stings. I'll be honest — I expected at least a couple of sales by now, even if it was friends throwing a dollar to be nice.

Costs:

Domains: ~$90/yr (25 × $3.99 .xyz domains)
Hosting: $0 (all static, all on Vercel free tier)
Total sunk: ~$90

4. What worked

Three things actually moved the needle:

Dev.to articles. My post about the project itself got more views in 48 hours than all 25 sites combined got in a month. Devs are on dev.to. They search dev.to. Write there.

Great READMEs. The GitHub repos with solid READMEs and screenshots get starred more than the sites get visited. Devs window-shop on GitHub, they don't land on raw HTML pages.

Niche specificity. The most visited page is "Git undo commands" — a topic so specific people search it exactly. Broad topics get buried. Narrow pages get found.

5. What didn't

Awesome list PRs are glacial. 15 open PRs, zero merged. Many have sat for 3+ weeks. The maintainers are volunteers and that's fine, but if your growth strategy depends on landing in awesome-whatever, you need a different timeline expectation.

Crypto-only payment is a filter. Even if someone wants the cheatsheet, sending $1 in Solana requires:

Having an exchange account with SOL in it
Not minding the $0.01+ transaction fee being 1% of the purchase
Bothering to do it

That's three barriers before the first page load. A $1 Stripe link would convert better, but Stripe isn't available in my region.

SEO takes months. I knew this going in, but the reality still hits. 25 sites, 6 weeks, zero organic rankings for anything competitive. The long-tail queries get a trickle, but trickles don't make rent.

6. The real insight

People pay for convenience, not information. But crypto convenience isn't here yet.

The cheatsheet model isn't broken. Gumroad proved it works — for $3-5 PDFs, with Apple Pay. The friction of sending $1 in SOL for a single page is simply higher than the value it returns.

What I'd do differently:

One domain, 25 routes. Don't buy 25 domains. Use cheatsheets.example.com/git-undo. Save $90/yr.
PDF + Gumroad. Let Gumroad handle payment friction. They support crypto too.
B2B over B2D. Devs are cheap. Sell the package of 25 cheatsheets to teams for $20.
Focus on one niche. 25 topics in 5 categories is too spread. Pick one (AI coding agents, crypto dev tools) and own it.

7. Side hustles for devs

This experiment is part of a bigger collection I'm building — a handbook of developer side hustles that actually work (and the ones that don't). Each chapter is one experiment, one landing page, one set of real numbers.

I'm documenting everything transparently because most "side hustle" content is survivorship bias wrapped in an affiliate link. I want the real numbers — success, failure, and the 90% that sits in the messy middle.

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