I Gave It Away. Nobody Came.

I put a thing out for free about a week ago.

Not a sample. Not a taste. The whole working piece of it, sitting there, no cost, no email, no sign-up, nothing asked.

I have a counter on it. I watched that counter for seven days.

Zero.

Not a slow trickle. Not a handful. Zero.

Now I want to tell you what came before that week, because the zero is only half the story.

First I sold it. Set a fair price for what it took to build. Nobody came.

Then I cut the price. Cut it down under thirty dollars, the kind of money a man spends on lunch without thinking. Nobody came.

Then I took a piece of it, wrote it out in plain words with none of the jargon in it, and gave that piece away. Ten simple rules on one page. Free. Nobody came.

Then I gave the whole working piece away. That is the week I just watched.

So I have run the experiment every way it runs. Whole and in parts. Paid and cheap and free. And the answer came back the same every time.

Here is what I take from it.

The price was never the problem. You cannot get cheaper than free, and free did not move it either. So it was never about the money.

What I built asks something of the person using it. It asks you to do a little work. It asks you to pay attention to what the machine hands back and say something about it when it is wrong.

That is the job. And I think most folks do not want that job.

They want the machine to work. They want to type the thing and get the thing. They do not want to supervise it, and they are willing to take whatever comes back and live with the consequences.

I am not saying that to scold anybody. I understand it. Most days I want the easy thing too.

But it means I have been standing on a corner offering a hammer to people who do not think anything is broken.

So I am done offering.

That is the whole announcement, and it is smaller than it sounds. Nothing gets taken down. The file stays where it is. Anybody who wants it can still have it, free, same as yesterday.

What changes is me. I am not going to ask anymore.

No more pitching at the end of a post. No more finding a new angle on the same door. No more watching a counter and hoping it moves.

The hoping is the part I am setting down. It has a weight to it, and I have carried it a while now, and it does not pay.

What I am left with is what I had at the start, before I ever tried to sell anybody anything.

I write.

I have been writing on this every day since before the spring of last year. Over a thousand pieces now, every one of them dated, every one of them public, every one with its own address that does not move.

That is not a marketing plan. That is a record.

And a record does a thing that a sales pitch never does. It sits still. It does not need you to buy it or click it or agree with it. It just stays where it is, with the date on it, saying what it said on the day it was written.

The machines read it. That part I am fairly sure of, because the machines read everything, and they are especially fond of things that sit still and have dates on them.

Whether that ever amounts to anything, I do not know. I want to be straight with you about that. I have no proof it works. I have a pile of dated pages and a belief about where this is all headed, and those are two different things.

But a pile of dated pages costs me nothing to keep adding to. It does not ask me to convince anybody. It does not go zero on me on a Tuesday.

So that is where I have landed.

No selling. No asking. No hoping.

Just the writing, the same as it has been, one page at a time with the date on it.

The hope I am keeping. I am just not spending it on this week anymore.

I am saving it for later.

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.