My crawler hasn't missed a day in 30 days. My revenue is still $0.
Revenue to date: $0. Not "close to zero". Zero.
Meanwhile the thing I built has been recording a daily price across 70,387 AliExpress listings and now holds 30 days of its own readings. It has checked 16,128 seller discount claims and caught 14,041 of them inflated. It has 65,454 pages sitting in Google's index. Today it can tell you that 2,679 listings are at or near the lowest price it has ever recorded for them, and that 42 products are being sold by two different shops using the identical photograph, one charging at least double the other.
It does all of that flawlessly, for exactly the number of people using it: none.
What I spent
More than I want to write down, and all of it before I had a single user. Infrastructure to crawl and store prices every day. A ten-day Google Ads test in the US, which I switched off because the results were bad enough that I stopped opening the dashboard. And the expensive kind of time, the kind where you tell yourself you are working on the business.
None of it has come back yet.
What I learned, in the order I learned it
Building was the easy part. I know that is the oldest lesson on this site. I still had to learn it by living it. The crawler was a solved problem in a few weeks. Getting one stranger to care has beaten me for a month.
My distribution plan was built on numbers that were not real. I went looking for users in Facebook groups in my niche. Facebook's search told me one group had 81,800 members and 5 posts a day. Inside the group, the real figure was 13 posts in the entire previous month. Another had 61,200 members and a single post in the whole feed. A third had 17,300 members and nothing at all for a month. I joined and posted before I checked. The room was empty and I was talking to it.
I am late to my own market, and I only worked out how late this week. My main competitor has been recording AliExpress prices since 11.11.2016. Another claims over two million shoppers a month. I have thirty days of history. For a product whose entire value is history, that is not a small gap. That is the gap.
Being indexed is not the same as being found. All 65,454 pages are in Google. I searched for one of my own products using its exact title and got Amazon, then four regional Ubuy domains, then a comparison site. Not me. The site is one month old and there is no trick for that.
Why I am still going
Because the one thing I have that the incumbents do not is that I write down what I do not know.
When a listing drops more than 30% overnight I throw the reading away, because it is usually the seller switching which variant they quote and I cannot prove otherwise. That excluded 32 listings on one day. When two shops sell the same photo at different prices, I say plainly that I have not compared pack size or shipping. When a discount badge is fake but today's price genuinely is the lowest I have on record, I say both things instead of only the one that sounds better.
That is a small thing. It might be the only thing. But every competitor in this space is a browser extension that hands you a number, and none of them tell you what their number cannot do.
Where I actually am
One month of data. Zero users. Zero dollars. A crawler that has not missed a day, and a founder who has now personally confirmed that three of the largest Facebook groups in his niche are ghost towns.
If you have stood at this exact point, with a real product and real data and nobody looking, I would genuinely like to know what the first thing was that worked. Not the channel. The specific moment when one stranger first cared.
