I spent two days on teaching materials. Code, diagrams, slides. On the second day it landed: nobody will pay me for this. Nobody.
So I am paying. With two days, my hourly rate, and the paid work I did not take.
To an accountant this is a hole in the till. I sat down and counted anyway.
If they do not pay you in money, you pay. With time, nerves, and the work you skipped next to it. Two days on materials is two days not on a paid project, not with family, not asleep. The price is real.
The bill at first glance
- Time: 2 days of 8-10 hours, about 18 hours net
- Opportunity cost: 18 hours × my rate
- Direct income: $0
On a quarterly horizon the deal is a loss. The only remaining question is whether those hours leave my name on something that lives without me.
How territory is taken without an ad budget
Google gives away mail and documents so you live in its cupboard. Stripe writes developer guides not to sell guides, but so the payment stack is chosen by habit. Vercel feeds Next.js because deploy later crawls home by itself.
Teaching material runs the same loop. Someone finishes a breakdown, and I am no longer an abstract "developer Constantin". I am the person who wrote about FSD. You can write.
Then the filter kicks in. PostgreSQL with Python, Feature-Sliced Design, Next.js on your own iron: if a guide already sits on the topic, competence does not need to be proven from zero. While others make cold calls, people arrive with "we need the same thing".
The gap between publishing and money is one to twelve months. A 2023 article still brings people in 2025. Ads die with the invoice. Text stays and grows neighbours.
What two years produced
- about 30 articles on the site
- about 10 talks and external pieces
- 50-60 hours of net time
From that: 3 clients arrived saying "I read your article about X", 5 invitations through referrals, dozens of warm letters. A SaaS owner after the FSD piece wrote: "You saved us months of architecture arguments. Will you run a workshop?" The workshop and the project after it covered all 60 hours with a margin.
The first three projects paid the time back. After that compound interest starts: reputation, referrals, new cases.
Three filters before you sit down to write
Not every unpaid hour leaves territory. Endless "trial" edits, work for thanks with no right to mention it, "can you help, it is five minutes" burn the rate and leave no name.
What stays: a public text with your name, a talk where you are the expert, an open repository other people use. The name has to remain attached to the result.
Second: does it scale without you. An article works at night. A free consult burns in the conversation. One recorded talk feeds years. One call feeds one evening.
Third: can you afford to pay for it. If you are broke, as I was in 2015 (see conflict of interest), bills come first. Content starts when you have at least six months of operating reserve and can give 20% of time with no immediate return. Sowing your last energy while the till is empty is not a strategy. It is a way to run out of firewood in the snow.
The trap: spending the last reserve on "seeding" instead of closing current invoices.
What else remains besides money
While you write, chaos turns into a system. A project does not vanish from memory: portfolio amnesia starts where nothing was written down. Comments show what landed, without a separate focus group. Publishing raises the bar: it is embarrassing to ship half-ready work.
Two days on materials pay back on the evening a letter arrives instead of a cold call: "I read it. We need the same. How much?"
