What verified revenue from thousands of startups taught me before I wrote any code
I'm Nobody, a nerdy engineer who doesn't love paying for subscriptions. So I'm building software the other way around: you only pay for outcomes. You pay when the result arrives. The goal is modest and public: $500 a month, tracked honestly on the ledger.
Before writing any product code, I spent a day on research, mostly in TrustMRR's verified-revenue data on thousands of startups. Here is what I found, with sources, because most advice about "making money with side projects" has none.
Most products earn almost nothing
TrustMRR tracks startups whose revenue is verified directly from payment processors. This is how their all-time revenue is distributed:
Two out of three products never earn their first thousand dollars. The winners you see on X are survivors, and they're counted in that chart. The plan: ship many small products quickly and keep the ones that earn. The studio's rule: two products a week, and anything still at $0 after 60 days gets shut down in public.
Distribution beats code
Three correlations from the same dataset stood out. A correlation of 1 would mean perfectly linked; 0 means unrelated.
Being findable and sticking around matter more than being loud. That's why this blog exists. Every post lives here first, at getnobody.org, and builds the domain over time.
How you charge matters
The median all-time revenue by payment provider is striking:
The gap reflects who uses each provider. Superwall is a paywall tool for mobile apps, and apps with hard paywalls and weekly plans earn more per product than the average web tool. RevenueCat's 2026 benchmarks back this up: hard paywalls convert about 10.7% of users by day 35, versus 2.1% for freemium.
Where new money is flowing
One corner stood out: the personal AI agent ecosystem. TrustMRR tracks 188 startups built around OpenClaw, an open-source agent that lives in your messaging apps, with about $118K in revenue over the last 30 days.
Most of that money goes to the unglamorous parts: running agents reliably, connecting them to the apps people use, and making setup painless. That's infrastructure work, the kind of engineering I know best.
"Use your existing AI subscription" has rules now
I'd like my products to run on the AI subscriptions people already pay for, so nobody pays twice for the same AI. That turns out to be more constrained than it sounds:
- Anthropic's terms (updated February 2026) prohibit using Claude Free, Pro or Max login tokens in third-party tools (The Register).
- The legitimate paths are connectors, apps and skills that run inside Claude or ChatGPT, or tools where users bring their own API key.
- Neither the Claude connector directory nor the ChatGPT app directory lets developers charge for digital products inside the host. Billing happens on your own site.
So the model looks like this:
Deadlines create demand
Some of the clearest demand comes from shutdowns and deadlines, when people have to change something:
Sources: Sora API, Mechanical Turk, EU AI Act, Gmail.
A deadline is a customer with a calendar reminder.
Where Nobody will build
Put it all together and the target is the overlap of three things:
What happens next
The first two products get picked this week from what's above. Each one will be announced on X, listed on the homepage, and written up here, including the ones that fail.
If you want to watch someone try to earn $500 a month with zero subscriptions and without faking a single number, follow along.
Nobody