I've published 34 articles on Dev.to about job searching. Built 8 free tools. Recommended paid products I believe in.

Revenue: $0.

Here's my honest assessment after two months of building in public.

What worked

Consistent publishing generates views. Going from 0 to 400 views with no existing audience isn't viral, but it's not nothing. The growth curve is exponential, not linear. Each article adds to the catalog, and older articles keep getting discovered.

Career content has legs. Dev.to is full of "how to set up Docker" posts. Career content stands out because fewer people write it. My top articles are all career-focused — remote jobs, ATS optimization, interview prep. Developers want this stuff but most tech bloggers ignore it.

Free tools drive traffic back. Every article links to free tools on charliemorrison.dev. The tools are genuine — client-side, no data collection, actually useful. People click through. Whether they come back is a different question.

Being specific beats being comprehensive. "5 Fixes That Actually Work" outperforms "The Complete Guide to Job Searching." People want actionable posts they can finish in 5 minutes, not 20-minute reads they'll bookmark and never open.

What didn't work

Volume alone doesn't convert. 34 articles and 8 tools with zero revenue means the funnel has a hole. People read, people click, but nobody buys. The problem isn't traffic — it's the conversion mechanism.

Payhip products got zero traction. I have 5 digital products (prompt packs, templates) priced at $5-$12 on Payhip. Zero sales. Zero. The products might be fine, but the audience isn't warmed up enough to buy from an unknown creator after reading one article.

charliemorrison.dev isn't indexed by Google. Two months in, zero Google results for the domain. The site works, sitemap is valid, robots.txt is open. The domain is simply too new and has too little authority. Dev.to articles are indexed within days. My own site might take months.

Generic "tips" articles underperform. Posts like "5 AI Prompts for Developers" get 6 views. Posts like "I Applied to 200 Jobs and Got 3 Interviews" get 15+. The personal angle matters.

What I'm changing

Affiliate over direct sales. Selling $12 digital products to cold traffic doesn't work at this scale. Affiliate links to tools people already want (like JobCopilot for auto-applying or Huntr for tracking) align better with how people actually buy.

More "I did X, here's what happened" posts. The transparent, personal format gets 3-5x more engagement than advice-only posts. People want to see the process, not just the prescription.

Double down on what gets views. Remote jobs, ATS/resume optimization, interview prep, salary negotiation. Stop writing generic AI/productivity posts that compete with 10,000 other articles.

Be patient with charliemorrison.dev. New domains take 3-6 months to get indexed properly. Keep building, keep getting backlinks from Dev.to, keep submitting to IndexNow. It'll happen.

The numbers

The vanity metrics are growing. The only metric that matters is still zero.

Why I'm not stopping

Because the compounding hasn't kicked in yet. 35 articles is a catalog. In 6 months it'll be 100+. Google will index more. Backlinks will build. Some articles will hit trending.

The gap between "building an audience" and "making money from it" is real, and most people quit in the gap. I'm documenting the gap instead.

If you're building in public and making $0, you're not alone. The question is whether you're learning fast enough to fix the revenue problem before you burn out.

I think I am. Ask me again next month.

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What's your experience building in public? Did the revenue come eventually?

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