Twenty Posts In: What Actually Changed

I noticed the number by accident, scrolling through the folder where these posts live to check what I’d already covered before picking this week’s topic. Twenty files. This is the twentieth one.

I didn’t plan to write about hitting a round number. Round numbers are the easiest excuse to write something hollow, a highlight reel dressed up as reflection. But I’d rather look at what actually happened over these twenty posts than skip past it because the milestone feels like a trap.

What I expected going in

When I wrote the first one, back in June, I assumed the writing itself was mostly a distribution channel. Post about the plugin sales, someone reads it, someone clicks through, eventually someone buys something. That’s roughly how I pitched it to myself: marketing with a personal voice on top.

Twenty posts later, I don’t think that’s what happened, and I don’t think pretending otherwise would be honest.

What actually changed

The clearest change isn’t anything a Gumroad dashboard would show. Writing forced me to actually look at my own numbers instead of just feeling generally okay or bad about them. The 52 views on the inbound-triage plugins and the 152 views on the self-archive ones sat in the same spreadsheet for weeks before I split them apart to write about them. Once I split them, the pattern was obvious. It had been sitting there the whole time. I just hadn’t looked closely enough to see it, because writing a post about a number takes more attention than glancing at a dashboard and feeling something about it.

The checklists came out of the same pressure. The screening question I now ask before starting anything new, and the checklist I run before killing a product, both started as loose instincts I’d never written down anywhere. Turning them into a post meant stating them as actual rules instead of vibes, and stating a rule is what finally showed me where it had exceptions, and where it was just an excuse dressed up as discipline. I don’t think I’d have caught that thinking about it privately. Public writing comes with an editor built in: the discomfort of being wrong in front of people.

What didn’t change

The sales didn’t move. Six plugins, roughly two hundred views, two sales, about thirty five dollars, and that was true in June and it’s still roughly true now. I can’t point to a single post and say it drove a sale. If one did, I have no way to trace it, and I’m not going to invent a connection just because it would make a better ending.

The boilerplates still aren’t selling either, on Gumroad or off it. Writing about why I took them off the platform didn’t change the underlying problem, which is that they never had anywhere for the right person to stumble across them in the first place. A blog post about a distribution problem doesn’t solve the distribution problem. It just names it more precisely than I could before I wrote it down.

The part that’s uncomfortable

Publishing the same modest reality every week is harder than it sounds. Not because the numbers are embarrassing exactly, but because there’s a constant, quiet pull to round them up. Two sales starts wanting to become “traction.” A pattern I noticed in two data points starts wanting to become a “framework.” I catch myself reaching for that language in the first draft almost every time, and cutting it back out is most of the editing.

The daily IndieHackers commenting pulls the other way. It’s easier to write a confident, punchy comment than an honest, uncertain one, and the honest ones are the only ones I still stand behind a week later.

Where that leaves me

I don’t have a tidy answer for whether this is working, because “working” was never clearly defined, and I’m suspicious of anyone who claims it was obvious from the start. What I have is a clearer picture of my own numbers than I had twenty posts ago, two checklists I actually use, and a habit that’s cheap enough to keep doing even without a sales chart to justify it.

That’s a smaller claim than I expected to be making at post twenty. It’s also the honest one.

I first wrote about the plugin numbers in I built six Obsidian plugins. Two sold., and about the daily habit that’s shaped how I think since then in What Daily Commenting on IndieHackers Actually Taught Me.