I suddenly felt anxious today. A thought kept coming back: I am falling further behind, spending my days on things that may not lead anywhere. It has already been six months since I started YouTube, and seven months since I released my first app, Requote. The money earned from all of this is still $0. (Sumof has made about $10, to be fair.) The money spent is much higher. I cannot keep relying on the vague hope that if I work hard enough, things will eventually work out. I am not built for that, and I carry the skeptic’s belief that the world is unlikely to arrange itself in my favor. So I am left with the question of what I should do next.
looking at the work
The first answer, apparently, was to do the slightly embarrassing 2026 version of asking for advice: I showed my YouTube channel and my apps to AI and asked what I should do. I am aware of how that sounds. Still, I wanted another view on what is confusing, what is not selling, and what I keep avoiding because I am too close to the work. Some of the next steps are very practical: adding App Store campaign links to YouTube and the blog so I can see whether they actually send people to the apps, changing each app’s App Store screenshots and description, making a landing page for each app, creating custom product pages for each one, and reviewing Requote’s subscription screen and pricing plans.
They are practical suggestions. But maybe because of the mood I am in today, none of them feel like they will actually work. Did I just make tools that only I wanted, and assume there would be a market somewhere? Does supply really create demand? Have these apps simply not reached the people who think like me yet, or are they just not useful enough? A lot of thoughts arrive at once. It is a low-energy day.
before deciding
I need a checkpoint that does not move with today’s mood. For YouTube, maybe that checkpoint is 100 subscribers. Unlike the number of videos, subscriber count is not something I can decide by myself, so I do not know when I will get there. Still, until then, I should stay with it, try to make better videos, and stop reopening the same existential question every time I feel bad. When I get there, I can look at the numbers again and decide what to do next.
For the apps, the old line was $99 in app revenue by July 29. I do not expect to reach it. I can still make the sales-side changes this month, but that may not turn them into revenue in time. If the number stays where it is, I need to stop putting that much weight on the apps. They can remain products I build and test, but not the main answer to the money problem.
money has to come from somewhere
At the same time, I need to look for work that can actually bring in money. Not as a grand pivot, and not as proof that the apps failed. Just as a practical base. If I want to keep making things without turning every quiet week into a personal disaster, some money has to come from somewhere.
But where is the money supposed to come from? AI makes many things possible, but how many people are actually making money from it? At this point, we seem to have more or less agreed that posting videos about how to use AI can attract more people than actually making an app with AI. There is this belief that AI productivity will raise a person’s income and market value faster than anything before it. But is that really true? Maybe the people opening new markets with AI were already good at their work before AI entered the picture. And today, I do not feel like one of them.
The only thing I used to do was write, which is not exactly a rare superpower. I can speak a few languages too, I guess. The only thing that comes to mind right now is publishing books abroad. I had been thinking about it anyway, so I should at least publish one book through KDP. If nothing comes of it, I do not think I would even be that sad. But I need to do something.
I am also thinking seriously about getting a job. My mood today is negative enough that I cannot even imagine being useful to a person or a company, but someone said life is basically about managing your mood, so there is that. Opening a job site feels scary. I am not very good at being among people. I am too sensitive, too easily frightened, and too afraid of causing even a small inconvenience to someone else. Was I bullied at school? Of course. But that cannot be the cause of every problem I have. I want to become a healthy person. Not perfectly healthy. Just healthy enough to stand on a day like this and become a slightly more cheerful person tomorrow. But to an anxious person, tomorrow is not a neutral word.
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