My npm downloads went from 23 to 1,262 in two weeks. For about five minutes I thought I'd made it.

I build Vetto, a small tool that blocks fake signups, and I keep a free open-source plugin next to it. A developer I'd never met opened a GitHub issue describing almost exactly what the plugin does. I left a comment saying so, and that I wrote it. Two days later they shipped it in their app.

Best feeling I've had on this project. Then I looked closer: the download spike is almost certainly their CI reinstalling it on every run. One real user, hundreds of robots.

Same week, another maintainer checked every suggestion I gave them, thanked me, corrected one thing I got wrong, and built the whole thing in-house.

So the score after weeks of this: people are happy to take free help, and I still have zero paying customers. People who ask for this in a GitHub issue mostly want to build it themselves, which is fair. I think I've been talking to the wrong people.

If you've been here: how did you get from "people use my free thing" to the first person who actually paid?

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