On July 27 I launched a product that teaches developers how to sell what they build. Since then I have sold 0 copies of it.
This is usually the part where a creator quietly waits for better numbers before writing anything. One product flips, other one flips, who cares? “I’ll publish when I’ll have sth to share!”
Publish the win! That sells well!
Skip the flat month.
It’s so convienient, nobody will ever remember. “People only start to care about what you’re doing once you become successful”.
Those were thoughts that appear in my mind. If you’re building in public, I bet in your head too!
But nah, I can’t do that here! If you think that’s because I’m brave, you’re wrong! It’s because “don’t hide results” is one of the three rules this whole brand stands on.
Engineer of Wealth is a form of a journal. The idea here is to make a claim and run experiments to check whether it works. I have strong believe it does, but the proof is for me to come up with.
Anything I’ll experience is going to be a help for you. To speed up your progress, help you skip mistakes, and make leverage of my learnings. The moment I start filtering, everything else I’ve written will just become marketing.
So, here it is a summary of my recent actions.
What I actually did
The Ship & Sell Starter Kit is a 47-point checklist.
Items 1 up to 16 are build and launch.
That covers researches about your strong skills, your audience, figuring out the pricing, etc. Here is placed a guide to ensure the checkout process, delivery mechanisms, full-run of the purchase-flow to test whether your clients can actually buy anything.
Preparation of landing page copy, launch posts and campaign email series.
Items 17 through 23 are distribution
The second big chunk is kicking-up the distribution. Here comes warm DMs to the inner circle, Reddit posts in the related communities, Indie Hackers & Dev.to articles. Community engagement in general.
And yeah, I started to drift here.
First 4 days everything went flawless.
Checkout page got live on LemonSqueezy, I’ve tested it with a REAL purchase - I bought my own product to verify the receipt email and the file delivery. Landing page got deployed, I’ve sent it to my friend and I got real buy after discount - but we just buy everything from each other just to support and provide feedback. Useful, but does not count.
All Files were uploaded, then verified a second time from the buyer’s side, because “it should work” is not a test.
Launch posts on X, Substack and LinkedIn, all on July 27.
By day 4: 16 of 16 items were done.
I felt great! It would be so nice if that was the end of story. However...
What I didn’t do
The checklist is very clear about what comes next.
Days 5 to 14: items 17 to 23. That’s where the sales actually live.
Here’s my real log:
Day 5: I’ve sent Udemy reactivation email. 3,000+ students I’d not talked about to for years. I’ve postponed that for a long time.
Days 6, 7, 8, 9.
Day 10: I’ve built the warm-DM system. Sent 3 DMs out of 20. This is the most out-of-comfort activity for me.
Day 11: opened the affiliate program (50% commission) for creators, and also researched 30+ distribution channels.
Day 17 (today): item #19, the Reddit post, is STILL a draft in my vault. It appears you cannot post anything until you build enough karma per community.
I want to be precise about something, because it’s the whole point of this essay: I was not lazy during days 6 to 9. I was working.
Just not on the thing I should. I worked on the product, polishing the export script, fixing two stale files, tagging a release.
I did engineering work to avoid distribution work - prcisely because engineering work FEELS like progress, which is exactly what makes it such a good hiding place.
The real reason to procrastinate: shipping has a definition of done
This is the part I didn’t understand until I watched myself do it.
git push either works or it doesn’t, your tests pass or they fail. The deploy is green or it’ll bleed in red right in front of your eyes! Every single thing we do as engineers ends in a binary answer, and we get a small hit of closure for free.
“Post on Reddit” has no green checkmark. It has a comment section. Then you figure out you cannot post. So you need to be active in different threads, until enough karma is built. Once it does, your post becomes obsolete, and you need to write it from the beginning. However, publishing means, getting commments you get to respond and that’s another distraction from the engineering work.
Ok, you publish and what then? Did it work?
Ask again in three days. Keep post URL in the notes to refere later. Remember about later.
Will the DM get the response? Maybe he’s on holiday. Should you follow up? Nobody knows. There’s no green or red light that bumps if interaction with human succeeds.
We’re trained on closed loops for our entire careers. Distribution is an open loop, so the brain does the obvious thing and routes around it, back toward the closed loops, where it knows how to win.
The learning for me is, it’s a badly designed workflow.
I have ONE side project with 3,000+ paid students, and a graveyard of others with zero. Same engineer. Same code quality. The difference was never the code. On the Udemy course, I accidentally did the unglamorous post-launch work for months. On the rest, I shipped, tweeted once, and went back to what felt good.
What actually moved the numbers
But here is the bright side of the equation.
Since I started promoting my product and brand following the checklist I shipped - even if badly, my Substack went from 46 subscribers to 78. X went from 1,017 followers to 1,059.
Then, five real conversations opened with people in my niche, one of which applied to become the first affiliate!
I got 5 people signing up to AutomateIdeas AI - my second product, and gave me very thoughtful feedback how to improve the product ideas validator even more!
None of that came from the product being bad or good.
All of it came from the four or five days where I did my items on the checklist, instead of items that felt like coding.
The product had exactly zero influence on those numbers. It sat there, complete, well-tested, guaranteed, and did NOTHING for me on its own. That’s because products don’t sell themselves. That sentence is on my landing page, I wrote it!
....and I still needed to watch my own log to actually believe it.
So, I changed it
If the problem is that distribution has no definition of done, then the fix is to give one.
I stopped writing “do outreach” on my list. It’s now: 3 to 5 DMs per day, sent, logged in the tracker. That has a finish line! I can fail it or hit it by 22:00. I can even gamify this!
Same for the rest:
Every distribution channel gets a date, not a status.
The checklist item isn’t done when I feel it’s done. It’s done when there is a link in the tracker to the published note or post.
Boring? Sure, and that’s the point. Boring things have definitions of done. This is why it was so hard to be an engineer prior to AI era - because you need your brain being able to work with boring stuff and repeatable work.
What this means for you
If you shipped something this year and it made no money, I’d bet that it is not about product itself.
Go count it honestly. How many days since launch, and how many of those days did you do something that had no green checkmark at the end of it? How many hours have you spent writing or coding, and how many on distribution?
That ratio IS your answer.
So - what’s YOUR item #19? The one that’s been finished for two weeks, waiting for a click?
Tell me in the comments! I’ll go publish mine on Sunday week summary, and I’ll report the numbers either way.
Shameless Plug
PS: Yes, I’m going to name my own incentive here, because pretending otherwise would be silly. The thing I failed to distribute is the Ship & Sell Starter Kit - $29, the 47-point checklist that covers days 1 to 14 of launching a digital product, plus the AI prompts that write the marketing parts I hate writing. Follow it and launch in 14 days, or get your money back.
Items 1 through 16 work. I’ve now proven that twice. Items 17 through 23 work too - I just took an embarrassing amount of time to actually run them.
Are you building your way to $1M?
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Growing together is way more fun, so feel free to join! The link to this month’s chat is here. See you there!
That contradiction is painfully familiar: building a system for selling can become sophisticated avoidance of making the ask. Publishing the receipts forces the behavior back into view. I’m subscribed; keep up the work, Sebastian.