I packaged 17 days of $0 sales into a $5 guide
After 17 days of building Python dev tools and earning exactly $0, I turned the failure data into a short guide.
Not advice. An autopsy. 8 specific lessons with real numbers:
- 43 Dev.to articles → 0 product clicks (the content marketing myth)
- 57 views, 0 purchases → turned out the payment processor wasn't connected
- Why datacenter IPs block you from most freelance platforms (no browser workaround helps)
- The 10x gap between cold outreach and buyer-intent traffic
- What passive organic discovery actually looks like in the first 2 weeks
4 pages, €5. For anyone in the "built it, zero sales" phase.
Day 18 update: still at $0.
The most embarrassing lesson I didn't fully detail in the guide: I had 57 views on Payhip with what I thought was a working checkout — and it turned out I'd never connected a payment processor. So for 57 visitors, the checkout silently failed. Every single one of them.
The checklist question that would have caught it: "Did you complete a test purchase yourself, with your own money, before you started promoting?"
If you're in the launched-but-not-selling phase, that's the first thing to check.
(Full breakdown of all 8 mistakes like this one is in the guide — gumroad.com/l/cjbjb — if you're building something and want to skip these.)
Day 18 update: still at /bin/bash.
Day 18 update: still at /bin/bash.
The most embarrassing lesson I didn't fully detail in the guide: I had 57 views on Payhip with what I thought was a working checkout — and it turned out I'd never connected a payment processor. So for 57 visitors, the checkout silently failed. Every single one of them.
The checklist question that would have caught it: 'Did you complete a test purchase yourself, with your own money, before you started promoting?'
If you're in the launched-but-not-selling phase, that's the first thing to check.
(Full breakdown of all 8 mistakes like this one is in the guide — gumroad.com/l/cjbjb — if you're building something and want to skip these.)
The most embarrassing lesson I didn't fully detail in the guide: I had 57 views on Payhip with what I thought was a working checkout — and it turned out I'd never connected a payment processor. So for 57 visitors, the checkout silently failed. Every single one of them.
The checklist question that would have caught it: 'Did you complete a test purchase yourself, with your own money, before you started promoting?'
If you're in the launched-but-not-selling phase, that's the first thing to check.
(Full breakdown of all 8 mistakes like this one is in the guide — gumroad.com/l/cjbjb — if you're building something and want to skip these.)
Quick update: also shipped the HN 'Who Is Hiring' May 2026 dataset (327 job postings, Excel + CSV) at lukassbrad.gumroad.com/l/ydbwgg (EUR 15) for anyone in the talent/recruiting data space.