The side project that made $40 and taught me everything

Revenue: forty dollars. Costs: a domain, a weekend, and a week spent writing an FAQ that analytics later revealed had been read by four people, one of whom was me.

But the forty dollars mattered more than the four thousand I made later, because it proved the full loop: stranger finds thing, stranger pays for thing, thing arrives. Everything after that is optimization.

If you’re sitting on a side project waiting until it’s ready — ship the embarrassing version. The FAQ can wait. Nobody reads it anyway.