Doing Content Right: After Four Side Projects That Made $0, a $99 Ebook Did $130K in Eight Months

Digital-product success stories usually get told as “the first one hit.” Steph Smith’s record is specific about what came before. Between 2018 and 2020 she shipped four projects, and every one of them earned zero. By her own account she never charged for them. They were built “mostly for fun.”

The fifth was different. The ebook “Doing Content Right” took 50 days to write, a week longer than she had estimated. According to her Indie Hackers interview, it sold more than $130,000 in its first eight months. Her total project revenue for 2021 was $150,000. Through all of it she kept her day job, working on the growth team at Toptal.

And five years later the product is still alive. The Gumroad page has been updated as a 2026 edition, priced at $99, with a podcast chapter added. One ebook is still selling years after it was written.

The numbers, lined up

The course numbers show that the ebook was not a standalone product but a distribution channel for the next one. The 3,000-person email list was assembled from buyers and readers of the ebook; a course built in 20 days and offered to that list drew 750 people. Twenty days of work against $45,000 is a ratio you get only when the list exists first.

The decision not to launch immediately

What she emphasizes most is neither price nor page count but sequence.

She deliberately delayed the Product Hunt launch rather than shipping it the moment the book was done. Her reasoning: if you launch immediately, you are relying on the success of a launch instead of your audience creating the success.

The actual order ran like this. First a tweet asking whether anyone would pay for such a thing, then pre-sales. The people who bought early became the initial base of support. Seven thousand followers is small for engineering a viral moment but plenty as a pre-sale audience. She secured buyers before writing rather than looking for distribution after finishing.

The pricing follows the same logic. She used tiered pricing that rose as more copies sold, which manufactured scarcity. “Cheaper if you buy early” gives pre-sale participants a reason to act now. She also ran Gumroad’s affiliate program and says “a ton of sales came through there”, reaching beyond her own followers through other people’s recommendations. The platform side of that economy is covered in our piece on Gumroad’s own business.

There is also design work inside the product: quotable lines and shareable graphics, so readers screenshot and spread them. It is one of the few distribution levers a writer fully controls without spending on ads. The path from 7,000 followers to a 3,000-person list to 750 course students is the same move repeated at each stage, sell the next thing to readers you already have.

Were the four failures wasted?

She says she “learned so much” from the four zero-revenue projects, but as far as this case can be verified, the lesson was finding a hole in the market, not craft. She describes the ebook as filling a gap. The four before it were “mostly for fun.”

So what divided the five projects was not the ability to build but whether she chose something to charge for. Those four projects had no monetization design, so they went unsold rather than failing to sell. That distinction matters: “she failed four times and succeeded on the fifth” is a worse description than “for four rounds she wasn’t running a business, and on the fifth she was.”

The same shape appears in Japanese cases. An office worker who quit on reselling, blogging, YouTube and crowdsourcing then moved to selling articles on note and passed ¥400,000 a month within five months, see that record, changed what he sold and how, not how hard he worked. The case examining eleven indie products, eight of which earned between ¥0 and a few thousand yen, asks the same question.

Weak points and the risk in this shape

There are constraints here that are easy to miss.

One constraint hides inside the $130K itself: it is a function not of “the power of ebooks” but of having 7,000 followers and a 3,000-name list in advance. The same content from someone with no readers, priced at $99, does not produce the same result. She had been publishing while working in growth, and that accumulation was the distribution.

Pricing carries its own constraint. $99 is a high price and a fragile one. It is a one-time purchase, so revenue only exists if new buyers keep arriving. Nothing compounds the way a subscription does. Stop publishing and sales stop. Shipping revised editions through 2026 is partly the maintenance required to keep the product alive.

The design is also incompatible with a volume strategy. It is the opposite design from the portfolio of 24 Kindle titles yielding ¥50,000–70,000 a month in royalties. Spending 50 days on one product priced at $99 raises the expected value per title and raises the loss when you miss. Her insurance against missing was the pre-sale.

What can be taken from this

The transferable parts are the sequence and the validation method. Ask whether people will pay before you build. Pre-sell to the ones who say yes. Don’t broadcast the moment it’s finished. Widen the circle after the first buyers start talking. All three moves are available to someone with a few hundred followers.

What doesn’t transfer is the several years it took to reach 7,000 followers, and the growth expertise from the day job. Before the $130K sit four zero-revenue projects and a long stretch of publishing for free. Quoting “$130K in eight months” on its own erases that runway.