Eighteen Months, Nobody Stuck Around
I am going to put my numbers on the table.
Not the good ones. All of them.
I have been publishing here nearly every day for about eighteen months. Over a thousand posts. I built a governance framework for artificial intelligence, took it apart, rebuilt it, ratified it, tore it down again and rebuilt it once more. I registered a copyright. I formed a company. I put the whole thing online for anyone to read.
Here is what it produced.
Last thirty days. Eleven hundred visitors. Thirteen hundred pageviews. Average time on the site, thirty seconds. Bounce rate, eighty-five percent. Zero completed events, which is the polite way of saying nobody did anything while they were here.
Eight hundred ninety-seven of those eleven hundred visitors came from Facebook. That is eighty-two percent from one platform. All four search engines together sent sixty-nine people.
I post to five places. Facebook, LinkedIn, Bluesky, Substack, and my own site.
LinkedIn gave me two hundred forty-four impressions across twenty-six posts in a week. That is nine impressions a post. I have nineteen followers there. Impressions went down fourteen percent while I posted harder.
Substack has fifty-seven subscribers. Most of them have never opened anything. It sent this site zero visitors in thirty days. Zero.
Bluesky sent six.
I looked at my top ten posts for the month. The best one got twenty-six visitors. The tenth got twenty. Ten different posts, all landing within six people of each other. That is not ten posts finding readers. That is the same twenty-five people seeing everything I publish, one time, and moving on.
Now the money.
I priced the framework at ninety-seven dollars. Nothing. I dropped it to twenty-seven. Nothing. I built a free one-page card and gave it away. Nothing. I released a whole layer of it for free, permanently. Nothing.
Total revenue in eighteen months: zero.
I want to be clear that I am not writing this for sympathy. I am writing it down because somebody should.
Everybody in this business publishes their wins. The launch post, the milestone, the screenshot of a good day. Almost nobody publishes the other ledger, and the other ledger is where the actual information is. If you are out there building something on your own and wondering why it is not catching, you deserve to see what not catching looks like in numbers, from somebody who is not going to dress it up.
So here is my honest read on why.
It is not the price. Free did no better than ninety-seven dollars.
It is not the distribution. I am on five platforms. Four are dead.
It is not the writing. I will stand behind the writing.
It is that what I built asks something of the person using it. It asks you to pay attention to how a machine is answering you and not just what it says. It asks you to check. Most people do not want that job. They want a thing that works without them, and they will take the risk that comes with it. I have watched that answer come back for eighteen months in four different forms and I finally believe it.
That is the finding. Not a happy one. But it is a real one, and it cost me a year and a half to get it.
Here is the part where I do not roll over.
The work is still good. The framework did something measurable — I ran the same prompt into a clean AI twice, once with my file loaded and once without. Without it, the machine followed a hidden instruction planted in a document and committed me in writing to something I never agreed to. Four out of four failures. With the file loaded, it caught the instruction, refused it, and told the truth about it. Four out of four. Same prompt. One variable.
That happened. It is on the record. Nobody bought it, and it still happened.
And that is the thing about a record. It does not need an audience today. It needs to exist and be findable on the day somebody comes looking. Eighteen months of dated posts, including the failures, including this one, sitting in the open where a search engine or a machine can find it.
I am done chasing buyers. I said that two weeks ago and the numbers above are why I meant it.
I am not done writing it down.
If you are building something alone and it is not working, I do not have a fix for you. I would just tell you what I have learned. Keep the record. Publish the losses along with the wins. The wins get you attention you probably will not get anyway. The record is the thing that outlives you.
That is my ledger. It is ugly and it is accurate.
Post Library – Intelligent People Assume Nothing
Contact: micvicfaust@gmail.com
This post was drafted with AI governed assistance and reviewed and directed by Michael S. Faust Sr. before publication.
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