Working code isn’t a business. The gap between “it runs” and “someone paid for it” is where most side projects die — not from lack of skill, from lack of a sales motion. Here’s the shortest path across.

Stop building, start asking

If you have something that solves a real problem for you, five other people have the same problem. Find them before you write another feature. Post in the community where they already hang out — a subreddit, a Discord, a niche forum — and describe the problem, not your tool. See if anyone responds “yeah that’s annoying.”

If nobody responds, you don’t have a distribution problem yet. You have a demand problem. Fix that first.

Charge before it’s ready

Add a price the day you get your first real user, not after you’ve polished everything. “Free while in beta” trains people to expect free forever, and you’ll never find the number where they actually leave. A believable but low price — even something like $9 a month — tells you more than a hundred free signups.

If someone pays $9 for a rough product, that’s signal. If a hundred people sign up for free and nobody converts when you add a price, that’s signal too — just not the one you wanted.

The first ten customers

Get them one at a time, by hand. DM people who complained about the problem publicly. Email people who use a competing tool and left a bad review. Don’t automate this yet — you need to hear their objections in their own words, not through a funnel report.

Channel	Good for first 10	Good for scaling
DMs / cold outreach	Yes	No
Content / SEO	No, too slow	Yes
Paid ads	No, too expensive per learning	Sometimes
Communities you’re already in	Yes	Partially

Price on value, not on hours

You will be tempted to price low because you know how little code it took. Your customer doesn’t care how long it took. They care what it’s worth to them. If it saves someone three hours a week, it’s worth more than $9 — find out how much by asking a few of your first users what they’d have paid a freelancer to solve this.

The revenue that matters first

Your first dollar matters more than your first thousand. It proves the mechanism — problem, solution, price, payment — works end to end. Once that loop closes once, scaling it is a distribution problem, which is solvable with time and money. A loop that’s never closed is not.

Ship the version that’s embarrassing but sellable before the version that’s impressive but free.

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