I opened Google Analytics to check the traffic to a website I’d been working on. Here’s what I saw:
Active users: 0. New users: 0. Average engagement time: 0 seconds. Event count: 0.
Four zeros. I stared at the screen for a while. There was nothing technically wrong with the dashboard. It was simply showing me what had happened. And somehow, that felt worse, because behind those zeros were many hours of work that the dashboard knew absolutely nothing about.
The Website Nobody Asked Me to Build
A few weeks earlier, I had started building a website called CutDone. Most productivity apps help people add tasks, organize them, and track them. I wanted to build something that helped people make tasks disappear. With CutDone, you create a checklist, print it on paper, and physically cut off each task after completing it.
It wasn't a revolutionary invention. But it was a small idea that I genuinely enjoyed building. I created templates, an AI feature to break down goals, and made the basic tool free. Eventually, I had a functioning product. There was just one small problem: almost nobody knew it existed.
The Part Nobody Talks About
Building a product is satisfying. You have a problem, you fix it, and you see progress. Marketing is entirely different. You can spend an entire afternoon doing things that seem productive and have absolutely nothing to show for them afterward.
I submitted CutDone to software directories, created Pinterest posts, and personally worked through more than 100 outreach emails. I read articles, found contact details, and explained why the tool might be useful. And then I waited. No flood of visitors. Later, I discovered Gmail had stopped dozens of sending attempts because I'd reached a sending limit. My supposedly unsuccessful marketing experiment was messy from the start.
Twenty-Seven Thousand Requests. Almost No People.
At one point, Cloudflare showed 27,040 requests in seven days. For a moment, that number felt wonderful. Then I remembered that server requests are not people. Search engines and automated bots can generate thousands of requests while a website has almost no human audience.
My Google Analytics dashboard showed 163 active users over the previous 28 days—some of which were likely my own testing or automated tools. I still hadn't found a reliable source of people who genuinely wanted to use the product.
Something Someone Said at Dinner
Around this time, I remembered a conversation over dinner. An older friend had said: "Some people just aren’t destined to make money. It doesn’t matter how hard they try."
What if he’s right? What if I’m simply not the kind of person who can make money from a business? I can spend weeks building something and then struggle to convince even ten strangers to try it. Maybe I’m good at building things that nobody needs. Maybe I’m confusing technical progress with business progress.
I'm Old Enough to Know Effort Doesn’t Guarantee Success
I’m 46 years old. I’ve seen enough of life to know that hard work doesn’t automatically lead to financial success. Timing matters. Luck matters. The market matters. And sometimes a product simply isn’t as useful to other people as its creator believes.
There’s also something slightly ridiculous about spending hours discussing button colors and sitemap structures when the website barely has an audience. It’s like carefully arranging the furniture in a restaurant before checking whether anyone wants to eat there.
Maybe I Need a Smaller Definition of Success
Before asking whether CutDone can earn $1,000 a month, maybe I should ask whether ten strangers can find it and genuinely enjoy using it. For the next 30 days, the question doesn’t have to be how much money the website makes. It can simply be whether I can find a repeatable way to bring in real users.
If you want to read more about this journey of building in public without the hype, you can check out the original post on Ordinary Man Trying.
An Ordinary Man, Still Trying
A business can fail without proving that its creator was destined to fail. And a person can be good at creating things without being good at selling them—at least not yet. A Google Analytics dashboard can tell me what happened yesterday. That’s all. Tomorrow is another experiment.
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