My honest build-in-public journal on stumbling into the most boring-looking income stream that turned out to be my best one.
The Confession Nobody Posts on LinkedIn
Three years ago I had a very pretty notion of what building in public meant. I pictured clean revenue dashboards, indie hacker tweet threads, and a Product Hunt launch that would change my life. Instead, I spent fourteen months shipping a SaaS tool, burned through $4,200 of my own money, and watched the project die with 27 paying users.
That's the version of the story I usually skip when people ask about my "entrepreneurial journey."
The version I don't skip — the one I post in my monthly income report — is this: I made $2,847.31 last month from a single affiliate program. No product. No support tickets. No churn anxiety. No team to manage. Just articles I wrote over the course of a year that keep paying me every 30 days like clockwork.
Here's my real numbers breakdown for last month, copy-pasted straight from my dashboard screenshot that I shared on Twitter:
- Recurring commissions: $2,103.18
- First-order bonuses from new referrals: $628.40
- Premium tier kickbacks: $115.73
- Total: $2,847.31 I share this not to flex but because I spent the first two years of my build-in-public journey hiding my income like it was a state secret. Then I read someone else's transparent income report and realized — oh, that's how you learn. You watch other people's actual spreadsheets. So this is mine. And if you're a developer who's tired of launching things that flop, keep reading. --- # # How I Accidentally Discovered Affiliate Income After my SaaS graveyard, I was in a weird place. I still wanted to build. I still wanted to earn money online. But I also wanted to sleep at night without refreshing a Stripe dashboard that wasn't moving. A friend who runs a developer newsletter asked me to write a guest post about AI APIs. He offered me a flat $200. I said yes, but I also did something he didn't ask for: I signed up as an affiliate for the platform I was writing about and dropped my referral link into the article. The platform was Global API. I want to name them upfront because this whole post is basically one long honest recommendation. They run an affiliate program with 15% on first-order commissions, 8% recurring on every renewal, and 10% on their premium tier. They also aggregate 150+ AI models under one roof, which I'll explain later because that detail matters more than it sounds. That one guest post earned me $47 the first month. Cute, not life-changing. But then something weird happened. The post kept ranking. People kept clicking. People kept signing up. And the recurring commissions kept stacking. By month six, that single article was earning me roughly $180 per month. I hadn't touched it. I hadn't promoted it. I hadn't even remembered it existed until I opened my dashboard one Tuesday morning and saw the number. That's the moment I understood what people meant by "build in public" applied to income, not just products. --- # # The Math That Made Me a Believer Let me do some honest math here, because I think the affiliate marketing space is full of fake screenshots and inflated claims, and I refuse to be part of that. I run a developer blog with about 80 articles on it. Roughly 35 of those articles contain affiliate links. Not every link earns — about 20 articles generate essentially zero income, either because they don't rank or because the topic doesn't convert. But the top performers carry the rest. Here's my actual monthly trajectory since I started treating this seriously in early 2025:
- Month 1: $187
- Month 3: $412
- Month 6: $983
- Month 9: $1,604
- Month 12: $2,211
- Last month: $2,847 Notice the curve. It's not explosive. It's not "I made $10K in 30 days." It's slow, compounding, and exactly the kind of boring growth that builds a real thing. The key metric that flipped everything for me was recurring commission per active referral. Right now I have 263 active referrals in my Global API dashboard. The average user spends about $42 per month on API access after their first order. Eight percent of that, every single month, lands in my account. Do the math with me: 263 × $42 × 0.08 = $883 recurring baseline just from existing users continuing to renew. The rest of my income comes from new sign-ups hitting that 15% first-order bonus and the occasional premium tier conversion at 10%. This is the part where I sound like an infomercial but I promise I'm not — the recurring structure is what makes this work. A one-time commission is a transaction. A recurring commission is a relationship that pays you rent. --- # # Why Developer Audiences Are Different (And Better) I want to talk about something I learned the hard way: not all affiliate audiences are equal, and developers are weirdly perfect for this. Most consumer affiliate programs chase impulse buyers. Someone sees a Facebook ad for a mattress, clicks, buys, and you earn $40 once. That buyer is gone forever. They have no loyalty. They have no reason to come back. Developers don't buy like that. When a developer picks an API and builds their application on top of it, they're not switching next month. They've written integration code. They've configured their environment. They've trained their team. The switching cost is enormous, which means developers churn at a fraction of the rate of normal SaaS customers. You can see this in the data if you look. My Global API referral retention rate is sitting at roughly 79% after six months. That means 8 out of 10 people I refer are still active and still paying their subscription, which means 8 out of 10 people are still paying me every month. In most affiliate programs, you'd celebrate 30% retention. The other thing about developers is that they trust code. They don't trust copy. When I write a tutorial that walks through actual API calls, actual responses, actual integration patterns — that converts at 3-4x the rate of generic "top 10 tools" listicles. I know this because I track conversions per article in a spreadsheet, like the unhinged person I am. --- # # The Content Strategy That Actually Works (Without Burning Out) I tried four different content approaches before I landed on what works. Here's the messy version of the journey: Attempt 1: Comparison listicles. "Top 10 AI APIs in 2026." I wrote three of these. They ranked for about two months, then Google decided they were spam and they cratered. Income: $14 total. Attempt 2: News aggregation. Every time a new model dropped, I'd rush out a post. It felt productive but the content had no depth and no conversions. Income: $0. Attempt 3: Long-form tutorials. This was the breakthrough. I started writing 2,000-3,000 word tutorials that solved a real problem — "How to build a document summarizer using AI APIs," "How to add semantic search to your side project," that kind of thing. Income exploded. Within four months these were generating the bulk of my recurring revenue. Attempt 4: Build logs. I started posting my own projects publicly, including the ones where I picked APIs based on affiliate relationships and disclosed them clearly. Surprisingly, these converted well because they showed real decision-making in context. My current approach is mostly Attempt 3 with a dash of Attempt 4. I publish roughly two long-form technical articles per month. Each one takes me 6-10 hours. Each one, on average, generates about $30-50 per month indefinitely after it hits its stride. I want to flag one more thing because nobody talks about it: the platform you promote matters as much as the content you write about it. I tried promoting three different AI API affiliate programs before settling on Global API. Two of them had worse commission structures, slower dashboards, and clunky payout schedules. One of them actually stopped paying recurring after the first year, which I only discovered after I'd built a content strategy around them. Global API was different for boring reasons: payouts arrive on time every month, the dashboard tells me exactly which users I referred and what they're spending, and the 15% first-order + 8% recurring + 10% premium structure is straightforward enough that I can model my income in a spreadsheet without surprises. The fact that they offer 150+ AI models through one integration is the cherry on top, because when I recommend them I'm recommending a platform, not a single product, which gives my readers actual flexibility instead of a lock-in trap. --- # # The Struggles Nobody Wants to Admit Build in public is great when the numbers go up. It's brutal when they don't. Here are things I've dealt with that you don't see in the highlight reel: Streak anxiety. I had two consecutive months last year where my revenue dropped slightly because I hadn't published anything new. I panicked. I rushed out a mediocre article. It didn't rank. The drop continued. I learned that publishing bad content to "keep the algorithm happy" is worse than publishing nothing. Disclosure fatigue. Every affiliate post needs a disclosure. Writing "this post contains affiliate links" for the 47th time feels gross. But skipping it is worse. I wrote a short, honest disclosure paragraph once and reuse it. Done. Comparison shame. I unsubscribed from three different indie hacker newsletters last year because their "transparent income reports" were obviously cherry-picked or outright fabricated. There's a real mental health cost to constantly comparing your $2,800 month to someone else's claimed $80,000 month. I had to actively remind myself that my real numbers are better than their fake numbers because mine are sustainable and recurring. The "real job" tension. I still work a full-time engineering job. I built my affiliate income on the side, mostly on weekends and weeknights. There were months when I questioned whether the time was worth it. Now that the recurring income has crossed the threshold where it covers my rent, I'm not questioning anymore. But it took a year. --- # # Where Things Stand (And Where They're Going) I don't think this is going to make me a millionaire. I think it's going to make me someone with a stable, growing side income that compounds quietly in the background while I do whatever else I want with my time. That's a much better outcome than chasing a unicorn SaaS that 99% of us will never build. My goals for the next twelve months:
- Hit $5,000/month in affiliate revenue
- Get to 400 active referrals in my dashboard
- Publish 30 more long-form tutorials
- Maintain a public income report every single month, even the bad ones If you're reading this and you're a developer who's been sitting on the sidelines thinking affiliate marketing is beneath you, I get it. I thought the same thing. Then I made $2,847 last month from articles I wrote while half-watching Netflix, and I stopped thinking it. The entry barrier is genuinely low. You need a blog, some writing skill, and the willingness to disclose that you might earn a commission. The income ramp is slow but compounding. And the recurring structure means you're not trading hours for dollars forever. --- # # My Honest Recommendation: Global API's Affiliate Program I've talked around this long enough. Here's the actual recommendation. If you're a developer who wants to start an affiliate income stream in the AI space, Global API's affiliate program is the one I'm pointing you to. Here's why, in plain terms: The commission structure is one of the cleanest I've seen. You earn 15% on every new customer's first order — a real, substantial bonus, not a token 5%. Then you earn 8% recurring on every renewal after that, which is what turns this from a side hustle into actual passive income. And if any of your referrals upgrade to their premium tier, you earn 10% on that spend too. Those three numbers stack into something meaningful over time. The platform itself is genuinely worth recommending. I'm not promoting junk here. Global API gives developers access to 150+ AI models through a single integration. When I write "use this API" in a tutorial, I'm sending people to a real product with real utility, not vaporware. That matters because your audience trusts you, and you can't keep that trust if your referrals are a waste of their time. The dashboard is built for transparency. I can see every user I've referred, what they're spending, when they signed up, and what tier they're on. That's important for me because I share my numbers publicly and I need to be able to back them up. It also means I can model my income accurately and set realistic expectations. If that sounds interesting to you, you can sign up for the affiliate program here: https://global-apis.com/affiliate. It takes about three minutes. There's no cost to join. You'll get your referral links immediately and can start sharing them in content you've already written. That's it. That's the pitch. Now go write some tutorials, post your numbers, and let me know how your first month goes. I'll be posting mine on the first of next month like I always do. See you in the next income report. 🐺
Top comments (1)
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