The first sale I had almost stopped waiting for

For weeks the page just sat there. A view here, a view there, and nothing after it. I’d open the dashboard, see the same numbers, and close it again. You tell yourself you’re checking the data. You’re not. You’re hoping.

I’d put up a few small things by then. The one I listed first, back on 24 May, was the Literature Review Synthesizer, a little Obsidian plugin that takes a mess of research notes and pulls them into something structured. After that I shipped the rest of what I’d been building, including four bigger SaaS boilerplates I cared about a lot more. In my head those were the real products. The plugins were the warm-up act.

Seventy-five views in, it happened. A sale.

It was the Literature Review plugin. 19.99. Not one of the boilerplates I’d bet everything on, but the quiet little tool I’d half forgotten about.

I don’t know how to explain what that did to me without sounding dramatic, so I’ll just say it. It had been a long, lean stretch with no money coming in, and this was the first that had. I sat there and my eyes went hot. Twenty dollars. I’ve earned more than that in an afternoon before and felt nothing. This one I felt in my chest.

The second sale came at 207 views. Another plugin, 14.99. Not the boilerplates again.

Two sales, both from the small specific tools, none from the ambitious ones I was proud of. The boilerplates try to be a whole product for everyone. The plugins do one narrow thing for someone who already has that exact problem and just wants it solved. Turns out that’s the easier thing to sell, and I’d had it backwards the whole time.

So the totals are tiny. 207 views, 2 sales, a little under 35 dollars. I’m not putting them here to impress anyone, obviously. I’m putting them here because they pointed me somewhere. The thing you’re proudest of and the thing people actually pay for don’t have to be the same thing, and the second one is the one worth listening to.

I’ve turned toward the plugins now. It’s early and I’m sure of almost nothing. But I caught a real signal instead of a guess, and after all those weeks of refreshing a dead page, that’s the part that actually moved.

If you’re sitting in front of your own empty dashboard right now, I won’t pretend I know much yet. Only that the first one takes longer than you think, and it lands heavier than you expect.