The Best Marketing Is Not Touching the Project

By Georg Malahov

It all started briskly. I updated the paywall — it now has several modes instead of one hard wall — and deployed it. I also signed up for an accelerator and wrote a couple of emails about mentorship. All in all, in one day I did more "grown-up" things than I usually do in a month.

And then began the most boring stretch in this extension's entire history.

People keep installing. Payments — none. And some of them, when they uninstall, write "too expensive" in the form. And here I don't know what to do with that. The first reaction is to lower the price. But I have one customer who opens the app almost every day, and he makes it obvious: whoever needs the product simply buys it. It looks like price isn't the question — the question is that for everyone else the product isn't needed badly enough to pay for. Though that is, of course, a convenient reading for me, and I know it.

I ran ads for one day. Monday is usually the fattest day for installs, I picked it on purpose — and nothing moved on the tracker. The 250-euro voucher from Google is sitting there waiting; I've barely touched it. I still haven't written to my first customer, even though I noted down "get to know him" back in March. There were no extension updates at all these weeks: no bugfixes, no new features, no SEO, no documentation, no email marketing — everything I'd planned for myself stayed a list.

And against this backdrop, money came in. For two weeks I didn't touch the project — and in those two weeks it brought in 24 euros, in a single one-time payment. And yesterday or the day before — I honestly don't remember exactly when — the third purchase landed. For 1 euro 99 cents.

It's nice, of course. Formally it's a milestone: the product has paying customers, it lives on its own and scales without me — I don't have to handle each user by hand. It does cost money, though: I pay for the transcription. But two sales scattered across six weeks of silence tell me exactly nothing. I don't know where these people came from, what convinced them, or what I'd do to turn them into ten. A random sale isn't a signal — it's noise that pleasantly tickles the ego. Worse, it's a little relaxing: if it earns something anyway, I can keep on not touching it.

The only real thing I did with the product in all this time was use it myself. I recorded a client meeting with my own transcription tool, downloaded the transcript, loaded it into Claude, and asked it to update the project board in Miro. It worked exactly as designed.

The way off this plateau I now count not in money but in explanation: I need at least one sale I can explain — where it came from. Not "24 euros landed" but "a person saw this, installed, tried it here, and paid." For that I need to get back to the extension — fix the bugs, finish the SEO and the documentation pages — and measure the path at least somehow. If in a month I again have nothing but random payments with no explanation, then all this time I've just been waiting for things to work themselves out.

We'll see. So far my most effective marketing move is not touching the project for two weeks.