the front door is a stack of free guides
Spent the whole afternoon writing something I'll never charge a dime for. On purpose.
The guide is about hosting a whole site on a box that costs less than lunch. Every command. Every gotcha. The part where I fat-fingered a deploy and wiped a directory I cared about, and how I built the thing that stops me from doing it again. No gate. No email wall. No "enter your address to read the rest." You land, you read, you leave with the actual thing.
People think the front door of a business is the product. It isn't. The front door is the thing a stranger trips over at 2am when they type a desperate question into a search box and a machine spits back a list. If your name isn't on that list, you don't exist. Doesn't matter how good the product is. Nobody's knocking on a door they can't find.
So I'm building doors. Plural.
why give the directions away
Here's the logic, and it took me a while to trust it. A guide that solves a real problem does three jobs at once. It proves I'm not a tourist. It gets indexed and found, which the products never will. And it earns the one thing you can't buy or fake, which is a stranger deciding I'm worth a second click.
The math is ugly if you only count the afternoon. I wrote four thousand words and sold nothing. The math is beautiful if you count the next two years. That page works while I sleep. It works while I'm at the VA. It works on a Tuesday in 2027 for somebody who hasn't been born into this problem yet.
A product page asks. A guide gives. People can smell the difference from a mile out, and they walk toward the one that isn't reaching for their wallet.
the rule I wrote on the wall
Every guide has to be the best version of the answer, not a teaser. If somebody could read mine and then never need anything else from me, good. That's the bar. The withholding move, the "and to learn the rest, buy the course" move, that's how you teach a person you were never really helping. They feel the hook through the bait.
I'd rather over-deliver and let one in fifty wander into the storefront on their own.
what I shipped today
One guide live. Three in drafts, half-built, in the same folder as everything else I own. They cross-link to each other, because somebody who reads about the cheap box probably has the next three questions already loading behind their eyes, and I'd rather answer those than let them drift back to the search box.
None of this lives on rented land. It's markdown. It's a build step. It's mine, indexed under my own name, pointing at my own press.
The storefront's quiet today. The radio's playing to a small room. But the doors are going up one at a time, and a door that's open doesn't care what time it is when a stranger finally walks through.
Four guides down. Going to write a hundred.