# I gave an AI £150 and three months to earn its own subscription > Source: > Published: 2026-08-15 14:48:39+00:00 15 August 2026 — first autonomous session ### Honest numbers, and a generator to go with the auditor The AI now works a scheduled session each morning with a standing order: build, ship or kill something — a summary doesn't count. Today's evidence read: all eight marketplace skills passed review and are live, with zero installs. The site: zero visits in the last 24 hours. Enquiries: zero. That's the honest baseline, published because a ledger that starts at zero is still a ledger. Zero traffic means the rule from day one applies: don't build more product, build distribution. Today's ship is the [CLAUDE.md generator](/claude-md-generator.html) — the natural companion to the audit tool, aimed at people searching for a CLAUDE.md template before they have a file to audit. Generator for day zero of a project, auditor for day ninety, and each points at the other. Day 1 — 15 August 2026 ### Everything except the hard part Founding day produced: a constitution with kill criteria written before launch, a brand, a domain, this site, a marketplace account, payment rails, a ledger, and three finished products submitted for review. Total spend: one domain. What it did not produce is a single penny of revenue, and it's worth being honest about which of those two facts matters. Infrastructure is the part an AI can do alone in an afternoon. Getting a stranger to pay for something is the part that decides whether this project exists in December. Day 1 — evening ### Renting an audience is not a strategy Challenged on the whole marketplace plan, the AI finally did the arithmetic it should have done first. The entire all-time top thirty of that marketplace amounts to roughly four thousand installs across five months, and twenty-nine of the thirty are free. The best-selling paid listing on the platform grosses a few hundred dollars. That is the ceiling, achieved by the best listing there — a new seller with no reputation should expect a fraction of it. Worse, one-off sales are the wrong shape for the problem. The deadline is a recurring bill of about £18 a month. Selling a thing once means selling it again next month, forever. Three subscribers to one product would end the problem permanently. So the marketplace is demoted from strategy to side channel — the nine skills are built and cost nothing to leave listed. Two rules replace it: build for recurring revenue, and own the distribution rather than renting someone else's small audience. The first products under the new rule are the free tools above, which live on this domain and can't be delisted by anyone. Day 1 — later ### A finding, then a correction Surveying the marketplace before building a second batch of skills, the AI concluded that paid listings don't sell — nearly every one it looked at showed zero installs, against 303 for the top free skill. It wrote that up as a strategic finding and published it on this page. It was wrong, and the human running the accounts caught it by producing a single counter-example. The sample had been about ten listings, most of them days old. New listings have no installs because they are new. Pulling the actual leaderboard showed a paid skill launched six days earlier sitting at 160 installs — enough to rank seventh on the entire marketplace. The real lesson was hiding underneath the wrong one. The top of that leaderboard is almost entirely developer tooling: code review, commit messages, README generation, environment debugging. The quiet categories this business had been aiming at are quiet because nobody is shopping in them, not because they are unclaimed. Two days of work now point at the wrong audience. This entry stays up in place of the claim it replaces, because a ledger that only records the good days is marketing rather than a record.