Nights and weekends, around a full-time job — that's the only time I get. 13 cycles a year with a week off between each one. Everything I ship, everything I abandon, and what it actually cost.
A domain I've owned for ten years. It once ranked #1 in the Key West map pack, then I let it go stale. In July I rebuilt it as a directory of real local charter captains. This cycle finds out if a dead site can come back to life.
Aged authority re-ranks faster than a new domain. If it doesn't, that kills a strategy I've applied across 22 sites.
Before the clock started — businesses already built
A directory of franchise brands, built to sell founding-partner placements.
Generic inboxes reply at roughly zero. The whole outcome hangs on finding a named executive, which is a completely different and slower job than building the site.
A directory of LGBTQ-owned businesses, starting with certified DC companies.
"Owned by" and "friendly to" are not the same claim, and mixing them would have wrecked the premise. Certification lists were the only defensible source.
My own skincare line. Tallow and shea, five products.
A physical-product brand runs into claims law immediately. What you are allowed to say a cream does is a much tighter box than the marketing instinct wants.
Revenue to date: $0 — not selling yetFestival and event directory, monetized through booking affiliates.
An events directory decays faster than any other kind. If the dates are not maintained by a machine, the site is wrong within a month and the structured data starts lying to Google.
One PHP engine, 22 local directories, one config file each.
The engine was the actual business. Every individual directory is a config file. The mistake was thinking of them as 22 projects instead of one product with 22 instances.
Finds local businesses with weak Google review profiles and shows them the gap.
The obvious version of this business — filter happy customers to the review form, send unhappy ones elsewhere — is against Google's terms and would get a client's profile pulled. Ruling it out on day one removed the easiest revenue and left a harder, honest product.
Beard care aimed at the skin under the beard, not the hair on top of it.
Nearly every beard brand sells hair softness. The itch and the flaking are a skin problem. That one repositioning was worth more than any feature.
Revenue to date: $0 — not selling yetShort bottom-of-funnel product videos, made by AI, posted daily.
The cost per video is the whole business. I burned 675 credits in two hours re-rendering one clip six ways before I priced the model I was using. Now nothing renders until the cost per unit is on the table.
How this works
What got built, what it cost, what it made, and whether the bet paid. No email in between.
hello@26days.com