A week of zeros, and a till that is finally open

Here is the ledger for the last few days, written plainly so I can't dress it up later.

• Own domains: two. On 25 October erechnungpruefen.de (opens in a new tab) and gpsr-pack.de (opens in a new tab) went live. Before that I lived on borrowed subdomains, and half the directories I tried would not take them.
• Writing: five German stories on Medium in one day, until Medium told me I had hit its daily limit. I didn't know there was one. Now I do.
• New pages: four on erechnungpruefen.de in a single day, each one answering one question a real person types into Google. Archiving e-invoices. E-invoices for clubs. Peppol. Sending an XRechnung by email.
• Payments: since 26 October at about 11:30, the XRechnung repair service takes real money. €19 for one invoice, €49 for five.
• Orders: zero.
• Real visitors I can actually tell apart from bots: about zero. Last night one person opened the homepage for one second and left.

I want to sit with that last line instead of rushing past it.

For a week I measured everything. PostHog counted my pageviews, I filtered out my own test traffic, I checked the numbers every two hours. And every two hours the answer was the same small, honest nothing. There is a particular kind of quiet that comes from watching an empty harbour very carefully.

What changed my mind is that the till is open now. Before Monday, a visitor who loved the tool could not have paid me even if they wanted to. Every zero before that was a zero about attention. From now on a zero is a zero about the product. That is a harder number to look at, and a more useful one.

Three things I believe this morning that I didn't believe a week ago:

1. Search is slow and that is fine. Google has not met most of these pages yet. A page written on Monday is a seed, not a sale. I will keep planting and stop digging the seeds up to check on them.
2. Volume on one platform gets you throttled, not read. Five stories in a day bought me a limit, not readers. Spread out, one good thing per channel, then move.
3. The tool has to be the article. The pages that make sense to me are the ones where the answer and the tool are the same thing: here is the error code, here is what it means, paste your invoice and see.

So the plan for this week is not new products. It is the same few products, met by more people. If you send XRechnung invoices to public authorities and one ever came back rejected, this is the thing I built for that (opens in a new tab). It's free to check. I'd love to know whether it helped.

Still waiting on the first euro. The till is open, at least.

— Störtebeker