I have a platform for expats and this portfolio. Both open, work and do what they promise.
Sales: zero.
Not "a few so far", not "the first ones are coming in". Zero. A round number, pleasant to write and unpleasant to explain.
First, what works
Six demos run right in the browser. A clinic, a cafe, a stadium, a till, reviews. You press a button and it calculates, instead of showing you a screenshot drawn in advance.
My article on VC.ru got nineteen thousand interactions and made it into the platform's top three. I wrote it over six nights. Six nights, not six hours.
And a separate point of pride: I built myself a job search system. You drop a vacancy link into Telegram, and eighty seconds later there's a cover letter. It has processed forty-seven vacancies.
I can build. I can write. I can automate. Nobody pays for what's mine.
A caveat, so I don't look better than I am
I do know how to get paid. Some of what's running here I built for a fee: someone came, asked, I built it, they paid.
That's money too, and I'm glad of it. But it isn't selling, it's work on request. The difference is one thing: there, they came to me, and selling starts when I'm the one who comes.
In six months I never came once.
Here's the funny part
I built a machine that writes letters for me. Forty-seven letters to strangers asking them to give me a job.
In the same period I didn't write a single letter to a person who could have bought something from me.
Not one. I checked when I sat down to write this, and sat in silence for about five minutes.
It turns out I'm ready to ask for work automatically and on an industrial scale. But naming a price to a living person and then shutting up while waiting for the answer, that I didn't manage once.
The vocabulary that covers it up
Laptop idleness has a rich language.
Polish it. Rework the onboarding. Run one more iteration. Do some discovery. Tidy up the landing page. Rewrite it on a proper stack. Gather feedback. Think about positioning.
Each of these words means real work that sometimes genuinely needs doing. And each is perfect for spending another week not asking anyone about money.
You can spend six months honestly improving the product and sincerely believe you're moving towards sales. You're moving fuck all. You're sitting in a warm room where everything is under control and calling it work.
Why it's warm in there
Building is pleasantly arranged. There's a task, there's a result, by evening you can see what got done. The button works or it doesn't, and you're the one who decides.
Selling is arranged the other way round. You write to someone, they're silent. They reply, they don't need it. They need it, but not at that price. They agree, then disappear.
In building there's no rejection at all. In sales it's the norm, and you learn a lot of new things about yourself.
That's why everyone builds. Not out of stupidity. One job gives you a result by evening, the other gives you silence in the chat and no guarantee it will ever end.
Nineteen thousand isn't money
The sneakiest thing about reach numbers is that they look like success.
People read the article, left reactions, wrote in the comments that it was useful. The brain gets exactly the same signal as from a sale, only free and immediate. The perfect substitute: there's effort, there's no risk, the dopamine is handed out.
Nineteen thousand interactions prove one thing: people are willing to read me. A good thing. Just a different one.
Between "interesting" and "I'll buy it" there's a distance, and it doesn't shrink if you make even more interesting things. They're different muscles, and I haven't trained the second one at all.
The question I now test everything with
Not "does it work". Not "do people like it". Not how many views.
So who's paid already.
The question is indecently primitive, and that's exactly why it's so hard to answer. You can talk about "how the project is going" for twenty minutes. "Who's paid" either has an answer or it doesn't.
For my own products, it doesn't.
What's next
The first thing is already done: I wrote this. A text saying "I have zero sales" is noticeably harder to write than "here's how I launched everything", and that's exactly why it was worth writing. Lying to yourself is cheapest when nobody's listening.
Second: I'm going to stop counting building as preparation for selling. They're two different jobs. I did the first and not the second.
Third, and this is where I'm uncomfortable. In three months I'll come back to this section with a number. If the number is zero again, I'll write about that too, under the same headline, with an explanation of where I turned the wrong way again.
I can't promise a result. I can promise a report.
