TinyCoder Web Toolbox
Ship client PWAs in an afternoon
I'm Seth — solo dev . TinyCoder is a lean studio: just me, no runway, no revenue yet. This is the honest state of my first product launch.
The problem. Freelancers I know (and I've been one) lose hours to the same busywork — formatting JSON, generating UUIDs, hashing, encoding. The options are bloated paid suites or five browser tabs open at once. I wanted a toolbox that opens in one click and works offline. The free JSON tool asks for nothing — no account, no install. The kit itself is a template you npm install and extend.
What I built. TinyCoder Web Toolbox — a 5-tool PWA starter kit. It's a foundation freelancers can copy and extend into their own products. The template source is vanilla JS with zero npm dependencies. Three tiers: $29 Basic, $49 Pro, $79 Agency (commercial license + branding guide + sales materials for client work).
The numbers. ~3 months since launch. $0 in sales. 0 email subscribers. The free tool — a browser-based JSON formatter/minifier/validator I built to start a distribution channel: https://toolbox-lilac-three.vercel.app/#/json. No reviews, no waiting list, no press. Just a product with zeros under it.
I'm not posting this for sympathy. I'm posting it because most build-in-public stories here show a revenue chart going up — mine is a flatline, and I think that's a useful data point too. Zero sales tells me something real: nobody lines up at the door for "another toolkit." The kit was never the bottleneck; the audience was. I shipped the product before I shipped distribution. That's on me.
What I'm trying next:
- Treat the JSON formatter as the lead, not the kit. Improve it until it's genuinely the best free browser JSON tool, and let it rank.
- Publish teardown posts about how it's built (vanilla JS, no deps, offline PWA) — aimed at the devs who'd actually buy a starter kit, not passive readers.
- Go cold to agency owners, not freelancers. The $79 Agency tier is built for client work; pitching $29 to broke freelancers is pitching the wrong buyer.
The question for you. For those of you who launched into silence — what's the one thing that actually moved the needle first? More organic content, direct outreach, pricing changes, something I haven't named? I'd rather learn from your flatline than repeat mine.
1 Comment
The agency pivot makes the test much cleaner. When you reach the intended buyer directly, do agencies see enough value in the $79 kit to consider buying, or is the product proposition still the bigger bottleneck?