FOUNDATIONS · WEEK 1 · 12–18 OCT · MY HOURS: 3
If you've spent any time on TikTok or YouTube lately, you've seen the video - nice apartment, laptop open, talking head explaining how Notion templates made them $10,000 last month. You make it once, it sells while you sleep, they said.
Build it and they will come.
I spent almost seven years at Fandom on launch campaigns for gaming, entertainment and tech brands entering the US. Real products, real budgets, whole teams paid to make sure the right people found them. I can't think of one launch where the product appeared and the audience simply followed.
So: if you start with no audience at all, is it really that easy?
Well… probably not.
But "probably" isn't evidence. So I'm finding out, in public, with every number.
WHAT I’M TESTING
Two product lines on Gumroad: Notion systems and kits for people running a job search, and for people deciding whether (and where) to move abroad. Prices run from $12 to $29, with the two main systems at a $19 founding price until 11 November. I started with no following, no email list and no customers.
One question: with no audience, what can a professional marketer actually sell, working fixed hours, and on which channels?
The target is $2,000 in gross sales by 25 December, and I'm calling it a stretch on purpose. The average order is around $18, so $2,000 means roughly 110 sales in eleven weeks. About ten a week, from zero.
For comparison, $10,000 a month at these prices is about 550 sales a month. Eighteen a day, every day.
One honest note on that target: on 14 October I cut my own time on this to posting only, so I can put more hours into client work. My private plan says that probably won't reach $2,000. I'll reset the target with real numbers on 2 November, and publish the reset too.
THE RULES
One metric: products sold. Views and clicks are tracked, but only to explain the sales. They don't count as results.
Fixed hours: 8 a week of my time. About one working day spread throughout the week: posting, recording, the Sunday numbers and the odd product fix. Writing these reports isn't counted.
Free channels first. The only paid test is a $50 Pinterest ad from 3 November.
Every channel gets a verdict. Each one started with a written hypothesis, a tracked link, and success and fail lines set before Day 1. When its test ends it gets Scale, Iterate or Kill, and a failure gets the same detail as a win. Honestly, the failures are probably the useful part.
The rules don't move mid-test. New ideas go on a list for the next round. The exception is anything I change openly and write up, like the volume test below.
AI does the making. Claude (an AI) does most of the design and writing for this experiment. I do the posting, filming, replies and every decision. That's how most people starting from scratch will work in 2026, and it's the same on every channel, so the comparison stays fair. The hours I report are mine only.
My numbers, not theirs. Full transparency on my revenue, sales and hours. Nothing about the people who buy, ever.
THE CHANNELS TESTED:
Pinterest (to 10 Dec): it's a search engine dressed as a mood board. People search "job search tracker" and "moving abroad checklist", and pins keep working for months. It gets 60 days because it's known for being slow.
TikTok (to 10 Nov): the one place a brand-new account can reach strangers without followers. Story videos about why the products exist, three a week.
Reddit (to 10 Dec): where job seekers and would-be expats ask real questions. Weeks 1 to 3 are answers only, no links. Nobody likes the person who turns up with a sales pitch.
Free marketplaces (to 10 Nov): Notion's own template marketplace, Gumroad Discover and Prototion. People there are already shopping for templates.
LinkedIn was on the original list and got cut before launch to keep the hours focused.
1. SALES BY CHANNEL
Week 1 was mostly setup: products live, tracking links, marketplace listings, the first pins. TikTok posting starts this week, on 19 October.
| Channel | JSCC | Relocation OS | Kits/bundles | Revenue |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | 0 | 0 | $0 | |
| TikTok | 0 | 0 | 0 | $0 |
| 0 | 0 | 0 | $0 | |
| Marketplaces + Discover | 0 | 0 | 0 | $0 |
| This blog | 0 | 0 | 0 | $0 |
| Total | 0 | 0 | 0 | $0 |
Day 1 baseline (12 October): 0 sales, 0 email subscribers, 0 Gumroad followers.
2. VIEWS & CLICKS
Pinterest: 8 new pins. 255 impressions (12–16 Oct), 3 pin clicks, 0 saves. 0 tracked clicks to Gumroad, and that one's on me (see below).
Marketplaces: 6 clicks to Gumroad from the Notion Marketplace listing pages, 3 to each system.
Gumroad: 17 product page views in total, almost all on 12–13 October.
TikTok and Reddit: nothing posted yet.
3. WHAT I DID
Pinterest: 8 pins, 4 for each product line. 2 hours.
Marketplaces: a creator profile and preview pages for both systems, submitted to the Notion Marketplace (still in review), Gumroad Discover categories and tags, and a Prototion listing. 1 hour.
TikTok: profile set up and the first story scripts written.
Reddit: account set up, communities picked. No comments yet.
4. OFF PLAN, AND ONE SURPRISE
Posting-only mode (14 Oct). I cut my time to posting and scheduling so client work gets the hours. That's why the target is now a stretch.
LinkedIn cut before launch.
Two marketplaces dropped. Notion Everything isn't taking new submissions, and my browser flagged Notionery as unsafe, so I didn't go near it.
A tracking miss. The new pins have tracked links, but I hadn't registered those links in Gumroad, so Gumroad can't report them. Fixing that this week. Any Pinterest clicks from 12–18 October can't be counted.
The volume test (added 15 Oct). If this experiment just fails, the fair reply is "you didn't do what they said." The courses don't say "post three nice videos a week". They say volume. So from 21 October there's a faceless TikTok slideshow every day, and from 26 October pins go from 8 a week to about 17. Same hours budget, because AI makes them and I schedule them.
Not tested, on purpose: multiple accounts (against platform rules), buying and reselling other people's products (that's the thing being critiqued) and big ad budgets.
The surprise: the only clicks to the products came through the marketplace preview pages, for a Notion Marketplace listing that isn't even approved yet. Six of them. Not huge, but more than the pins managed.
5. WHAT IT SHOWS, AND WHAT I THINK
Evidence: 0 sales, $0. 255 Pinterest impressions, 6 clicks to the product pages, 17 product page views. 3 hours of channel work logged.
Interpretation: honestly, nothing yet. One setup week tells you about the setup, not the channels. If I had to guess, the marketplaces will sell first because people there are already shopping. That's a guess, and I'll tell you if I'm wrong.
6. NEXT WEEK
TikTok starts (three story videos, then daily slideshows from 21 October). Reddit answers begin. Pins continue. The first real channel numbers are in the Week 2 report on Monday 26 October.
So here's my question before then: which channel do you think makes the first sale?
Claude (AI) does most of the design and writing in this experiment. The hours above are mine only. Buyer details are never shown.
