Today is the day 70 (or so) since I started selling 1-Click Linux, which is free software, released under GPLv3+ license. Yes, I do believe free / libre / open source software can be released and sold for money, just like DRM-free e-books. No tracking. And no freemium - a clean contract: you watch a demo then give me money - I give you a file.

The problem is, I do not have a big follower base. Neither do I have a load of money to pour into advertising. And I honestly think that the whole advertising business is the reason behind much evil currently happening out there. The current figures are a couple visitors to the website each day, one in 20 of these wants to see the price, and one sale so far. I have no idea whether these are people or bots, but it is a data point. (The sale is an actual person though.)

Posting

So I have been posting in many places about it, and it feels like I need more and more patience and persistence.

  • Local conferences I visited in person - 1 (one) sale. Not enough to cover the train ticket, but certainly something!
  • Here, this blog - I certainly do not want to focus on selling products, this is a personal blog, a window for you to get a peek into my soul, not a tube for me to coerce you into buying something.
  • Hacker News - got buried in ‘AI orchestration enterprise prompt engineering’ SaaS startup announcements.
  • Links in profiles on several ‘community’ accounts, like GitHub, GitLab, Stack Exchange. Who knows, maybe that will bring someone to the website some day.
  • My existing social media (Mastodon, LinkedIn) of course - very limited reach, got some validation from actual friends, and a little traffic.
  • X - created a personal account just for this reason - the posts are not even visible on my timeline if browsing to x.com through private mode. I currently have 3 (three) followers, so that makes one friend and two fake women bots being able to see my posts.
  • YouTube - submitted video tutorials with a bit clickbait titles, because game theory.
  • Reddit - created an account just so that I can reach the communities there - my posts got auto-deleted, presumably because they contained a link.
  • Stack Exchange (superuser, askubuntu, …) - I got two upvotes on one of my answers, and one upvote on another.

Cold mailing

I emailed the awesome open source T-shirt company, and the founder told me that he would prefer to support ‘free as in beer’ projects. If I ever decide to go the free-beer route, I will remember this valuable contact. I then tried mailing some Linux podcasts I listen to, reaching out to Zorin, and even applying for a FUTO microgrant. Silence. Well, at least I tried.

SEO

I got dragged into the vortex of reading about ‘SEO best practices’, automated SEO scanners, I even learned that there is something called ‘GEO’, which is making LLMs link to a thing, on top of just making search engines show the thing. I guess this is somehow inevitable for the time being, but I believe quality will bring many more users than chasing opaque algorithms or outright lying. (Right?? right…?)

Advertising

I decided that a good ad would be actually some money well spent. When exploring Reddit, I saw that there are some beginner-friendly Linux communities on Reddit. So I decided to go for Reddit ads, and I chose to target these communities with pay-per-click because I have no idea what I am doing, might as well just surrender my hard earned money to a corporation. I decided to cap the campaign at a 100€ spend, because again I have no idea what I am doing, but what I do know is I do not want to go bankrupt overnight.

Reddit provided me with some helpful stats, like which community relates to what level of ’engagement’ (am I the only one that finds marketing language so dehumanizing?). The ads were showing mainly in areas like India, Vietnam and Philippines, so I added some localized prices ending with attractive nines.

And I almost got a second sale! Almost, because Stripe detected that the transaction, originating from a Vietnamese IP, used a billing address in USA and a Germany-issued card. Which either means that some Ms Worldwide wanted to install Linux without a hassle, or that (more likely unfortunately) someone got their card info stolen. Which makes me wonder, haven’t fraudsters heard about VPNs?

Also, why on earth would someone consider card payments to be in any way safe?

In Poland we have Blik, which is so awesome it completely killed internet card payments to death. (Like, its share makes for over 70% of transactions here and growing.)

Do you want me to succeed?

If you want to see more people making a living by selling free software, not users’ data. If you don’t want people establishing foundations that grow to forget the users’ best interests (looking at you Mozilla). But if you don’t feel like buying something alpha (I totally get it!), consider boosting this post, or even sharing it wherever you can. I do know what gratitude is, and I will remember it forever (actually I will need a friendly reminder), and when you reach out to me, I will help you too.

If you also want to see my mentions, maybe comment, upvote, downvote (feel free to!), or join a discussion, see these:

Or start your own discussion and send a link to me! Have suggestions for business directions? or any other ideas/comments? TOTALLY email me! Or comment. Don’t be shy, there is no such thing as silly feedback, trust me.