I built six Obsidian plugins. Two sold.

Last week I pulled the numbers on everything I’ve put up. Across all six plugins: 204 views in total, 2 sales, around 35 dollars. Not a figure to brag about, I know. But the total isn’t what kept me up. It was where the sales landed.

I have six Obsidian plugins. They all run on the same idea: take the scattered material in your vault and turn it into one clean summary with AI. Technically they’re siblings. On the sales side they’re nothing alike.

I split them in two. One group works on stuff that piles up from outside you: unread articles, web clippings, book highlights. The other group works on notes you produced yourself: your journal entries, your meeting notes, your weekly periodic notes.

Here’s how it came out. The outside-the-vault group (Reading Inbox, Literature Review, Highlight Inbox) pulled 52 views total and made 2 sales. The your-own-archive group (Periodic Notes, AI Journal Coach, Meeting Notes) pulled 152 views and made zero.

Let me read that again, because I didn’t believe it the first time either. Three times as many people looked at my own-archive plugins, and not one of them bought. My most-viewed product was Meeting Notes: 68 views, a flat zero sales.

I have a theory for why, but I’m not sure of it. I think people pay to clear a pile that builds up from outside, because that pile produces guilt. “I was going to read those 40 articles. I didn’t.” That pressure is real, and a wallet opens for something that lifts it. But “synthesizing” the journal or the meeting notes you wrote yourself doesn’t create the same pressure. Most people don’t even keep those notes regularly, let alone buy a tool to process them.

I have to be honest here. You can’t do statistics with two sales, n is tiny, I know. Maybe the problem isn’t the category but the way I described those products. Still, one number keeps bothering me: 152 views, zero sales. A few views is enough to say a product is positioned badly, but 152 people looking and nobody buying stops being a coincidence.

And there’s this. The products I’m proudest of weren’t even these plugins. I had SaaS boilerplates I’d put together over a few days, the “this is the real work” ones in my head. They didn’t sell either. But I’ll be fair about why: they only pulled 27 Gumroad views total, against 204 for the plugins. The plugins ride on the Obsidian community, there’s a built-in crowd that finds them. The boilerplates have no community like that, so almost nobody clicked through. So their zero isn’t the same evidence as 152 people looking at a plugin and walking away. Still, across both, the same shape keeps showing up: the small, very specific tools are the ones that move, and the ones with a community around them get seen at all. The bigger, do-everything stuff has neither going for it. I didn’t want to hear it, but it keeps repeating.

Now I’m looking for the next thing on the inbound side again. The pile of unwatched videos, the unheard podcast queue, the unopened newsletter folder. They all produce the same guilt, and I already have the engine that lifts it. I’ve stopped writing another plugin for the own-archive side.

Maybe a few months from now I’ll come back to this post and say I was wrong. Could happen. But this is the direction I’m going with the data I have, and I’ll put the next numbers here with the same honesty.