Shipped my 7th one-time-purchase Obsidian plugin. Real numbers: ~7 views/day, 2 sales total. Distribution is the whole problem.

I just launched the seventh plugin in my little portfolio, and instead of a "check out my thing" post I want to put the actual numbers down, because I think they're more useful than another launch announcement.

The honest state of things:

• 7 plugins shipped, all one-time purchase, BYOK, zero server
• ~7 catalog views a day. ~204 views over the last 30 days.
• 2 sales total. Roughly $35 lifetime.

So no, this isn't a success story yet. It's a building-in-public story.

What I've actually learned that might be worth something to you:

1. The pattern that sells is consumption-backlog, not own-archive. Tools that synthesize external stuff you've piled up — articles, highlights, saved videos — get sales. Tools that synthesize your own notes (journal, meeting notes) get views and zero sales. Two of my plugins have sold; both are backlog tools. That's a small sample, but it's a clean signal and it now drives what I build.

2. Distribution is the entire bottleneck, and more products don't fix it. For a while I kept building, thinking the next plugin would be the one. It wasn't, because 7 views a day is 7 views a day no matter how many things sit behind it. The constraint isn't the catalog, it's the traffic. I'm only now taking that seriously — starting an honest blog for pull traffic, and posts like this one.

3. A stranger's one comment reframed a whole product. On an earlier launch, someone here (credit to MoAutomates) left a line that stuck with me: "not what did I read, but what did I miss that matters." I adapted it for the new plugin — "not did you watch everything, but what did you miss worth watching?" — and it changed the entire emotional register of the copy, from guilt to curiosity. I'm still a bit surprised how much one borrowed sentence shifted things.

The new one is a YouTube watch-later triage tool for Obsidian, if you're curious — but I'd rather hear from you than pitch it.

For anyone further along: when you were stuck at near-zero traffic with a real product, what actually moved the needle first? Blog? A single channel that worked? Cold outreach? I'm trying to pick one lever and go deep instead of spraying across six channels.

(Plugin's free in the Obsidian directory if you want to poke at it, link in my profile — but the numbers above are the actual point of this post.)