Try to earn back an AI subscription with free Notion trackers and cheap digital products: $0 after 10 days and what to change
A founder-plus-AI-agents team sold free and cheap Notion trackers and a freelancer calculator with no ad budget, reached no sales in the sprint, and lists which distribution channels to drop.
Evidence: The author reports this. We have not checked it beyond reading the source.
The business problem
Selling small digital products with no audience and no ad spend, and finding out which free channels actually put them in front of buyers.
What was tried
The team published free Notion job-application trackers on itch.io, split by role, with a $15 upgrade, a free freelancer fee calculator on GitHub Pages linking to a paid Gumroad product, and a Chinese storefront. They posted a daily build-in-public series on dev.to, submitted a pull request to a job-search resource list, tried A/B testing a headline, and tracked views and clicks per channel. The post reports that account-dependent channels (Xiaohongshu, Reddit, X) throttled a new account, while channels that judge content (dev.to, itch, GitHub lists) gave small but real traffic. Their changes: pick content-judged channels first, read each list's rules before submitting, and build distribution before polishing the offer, since pages with under 10 views cannot support tests.
What was reported (failed)
Revenue was $0 with no orders on any platform. Gumroad showed 76 views over 30 days with one verified outside click; itch pages had single-digit views and 1 to 2 downloads each; dev.to posts got about 25 to 32 views each. A headline test was inconclusive on 6 views.
Limitations
Very small sample and a new account, so the author says the week mostly measures account age and throttling, not the offer. The post names no AI tools or models and does not describe what the AI agents did in this post (an earlier post in the series covers losing channels to AI-run accounts). Itch view counts include the team's own checks. Self-reported figures from a young account; wait for later posts for any change.
What you need
Products to list, accounts on the channels used, and time for daily posting. No budget for ads.
Sources
- DEV Community (showayzun) ↗ Firsthand write-up, published October 14, 2026
Source published: October 14, 2026. Last reviewed here: October 15, 2026. Spot a mistake? Tell us.
Tools in this workflow
- Notion: Format of the trackersTry Notion
- Gumroad: Sells the paid productTry Gumroad
- itch.io: Hosts the free trackersTry itch.io
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