Put More Buy Buttons on the Internet

If you forget everything else here, just keep the title. Put more buy buttons on the internet. Then go do it.

I've been building products for about six years now. Around 25 of them shipped, roughly $330k ARR, and MagicSlides crossed 1M users. I never raised a rupee for any of it. Pretty much everything I figured out along the way comes back to that one line, so this is me writing it down.

Prefer the slides? Here's the full deck from the talk:

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The only signal that matters is whether people pay

Every product you put out is a way for people to tell you they care. But only one signal actually counts: will they pay for it?

Most people ship something for free, get a few users, ask their friends, and their friends say "yeah, it's great, you should totally build this." That's not a signal. You can have hundreds of thousands of free users and still watch the company die.

I know because my entire first year made zero. I'd dropped out after 12th and told my dad, a government employee, that college wasn't happening. Moved to Delhi, taught myself to code off the internet in two months. Then I made the classic mistake: fell in love with an idea, kept piling on features, and never once checked whether anyone would pay. A full year later I was still at zero rupees, and I had to move back home.

If people won't pay, it isn't validation. Doesn't matter how many of them there are.

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More buy buttons = more surface area for luck

More buy buttons out there means more surface area for luck to land on.

MagicSlides, my biggest product, wasn't some grand plan. I was building SheetAI, a Google Sheets add-on doing about $2k MRR, when someone messaged me: "Hey, can you build me a pitch deck?" I don't even enjoy making decks. But I got curious about whether AI could structure one. This was three-plus years ago, when the models could barely return clean structured output, so I had to chain three or four calls just to get a title and some bullet points to line up. Gave it a week, built it, launched on Reddit. That one random DM turned into the product that now makes most of my money. It touched ~$29k MRR, sits around $19k today, and it's all public on TrustMRR.

That request could have landed with anyone. It found me because I already had a button out there. Same reason I ran my own version of Peter Levels' "12 startups in 12 months." The more you ship, the more shots luck gets at you.

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Go where people already pay for work, not where everyone else is

Most people think there are only two places to ship: the Play Store and the App Store. Those are the two most crowded corners of the internet, and mobile is the last place anyone reaches for their wallet.

The channels almost nobody bothers with are the ones where people are already doing work and already paying to save time:

If someone's in a spreadsheet trying to get work done and you save them 30 minutes a day, they'll pay you without blinking. Games are where people play. Work tools are where people pay.

Open a new channel today, even with something tiny, so you're ready the moment an idea shows up. Wait until the idea arrives and the friction of learning a whole new platform will just kill it.

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Keep a count: how many buy buttons do you have?

Sit with this for a second. Right now, how many buy buttons do you actually have on the internet?

People tell me "I'm trying to make money online and it's just not working." I always ask the same thing back: do you even have a way for someone to pay you? For a whole year, even if God himself wanted to send me money, he couldn't have. I had no payment page, no option, nothing. You have to give luck a door to walk through.

So keep a running count in your head. Any time it feels like the money isn't coming in, the fix is simple: push that number up.

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Get your first buy button today

If you don't have one yet, build it today. Seriously:

1. Take something you already know. Summarize a lesson with Claude, or record a quick Loom.
2. Put a tiny price on it. ₹99. Even ₹9. The point isn't the money yet, it's that the button exists.
3. Ship it.

My first product that ever made money was a Chrome extension for Facebook group owners. Under 100 lines of code, and all it did was scrape signup answers into a Google Sheet. I didn't know HTML. My landing page was an embedded video and a PayPal button, that was the whole thing. No webhooks, no signup, nothing. I recorded a short video and DM'd people in a niche Facebook group: "Hey, saw you're growing a community, I made this, interested?" One lady replied yes. That was my first $7.

your-first-product.com

The tool that saves you 30 minutes a day

Buy — $7 lifetime

No signup. No webhooks. Just an embedded video and a PayPal button. That was my actual first landing page.

That's it. That's the whole bar.

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Don't be shy to charge

For years my problem was never that I didn't get monetization. It's that I was too shy to charge.

I put out 6-hour coding courses on YouTube for free while other people sold 2-hour ones. I made nothing from it. No ads, no sales, zero. Here's the trap nobody warns you about: anything you don't monetize, you won't prioritize. You've got a life and bills, so the unpaid stuff quietly sinks to the bottom of the list and dies there. If I'd charged even a little back then, I'd have reached more people, not fewer.

Value your time. Put the buy button on it.

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Serve demand that already exists, don't try to create it

Don't try to change how people behave. That's a Zepto-level game, thousands of crores just to get people to do something new. As a bootstrapped solo builder you have neither the money nor the time to manufacture demand.

So find demand that already exists and serve it better. When I built that Facebook group extension, the competitors were charging $19 a month for the same job. I charged $7 once, lifetime. Put yourself in the buyer's head: if my scrappy little tool flops, they're out less than half a month of what the other guy costs. If it works, they save hundreds a year. Easy call.

Price itself can be the feature. Make the decision a no-brainer.

This is also why AppSumo is a cheat code. Think Amazon, but for software, packed with buyers who are genuinely addicted to lifetime deals. I've seen single reviewers who've bought 150+ of them. One of my products has sat there for years without a single zero-revenue month, and I haven't touched the code. If you're stuck on what to build, find something people already pay monthly for, ship it as a lifetime deal, and let the platform's hype sell it for you.

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The only thing limiting you is you

The hardest lesson: pay attention only to what's in your control.

Followers were never in my control. Neither were views. Posting was. When I stopped obsessing over the follower count and just posted for the sake of posting (Gary Vee's "document, don't create"), I went from 300 to 50k+ on Instagram, 20k of that in a single month. Then the numbers got in my head. I got self-conscious, froze, stopped posting, and it cost me. So now I only look at the input I actually control: shipping and posting.

I went from a guy who just wanted to sit and write code, to a humiliating call center night shift, to filming myself with no setup, no team, no lighting, cold-messaging strangers in Facebook groups. None of it felt comfortable. But confidence never shows up before you act. It shows up after you jump. Nobody can stop you from shipping a product or posting a video. The only one in your way is you.

So stop hiding. Serve demand that's already real, charge for it, and keep putting more buy buttons on the internet.

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FAQ

What does "put more buy buttons on the internet" mean? Any product, page, or offer where someone can actually pay you is a "buy button." The more of them you have live across different platforms, the more chances there are for luck and revenue to find you. If money isn't coming in, the fix is usually more buy buttons, not endlessly polishing the one you already have.

Why is charging money the only real validation? Free users, nice comments, and big reach are all false signals. A product can have hundreds of thousands of free users and still die. The only thing that reliably predicts a real business is whether people will actually pay.

Where should I launch if not the mobile app stores? Go where people already do paid work: Google Workspace Marketplace (Sheets/Slides add-ons), Chrome extensions, webhook-based tools (Slack/Discord/SMS), Shopify apps, and AppSumo. These are far less saturated than the Play Store or App Store, and the people there already pay for tools that save them time.

How do I create my first buy button? Take something you already know, summarize it (Claude or a quick Loom both work), put a small price on it, even ₹99, and ship. Your first landing page can be just an embedded video and a PayPal button. Done beats perfect.

Who is Sanskar Tiwari? I'm the founder and CEO of IndianAppGuy Tech Pvt Ltd. I've bootstrapped 25+ products to around $330k ARR, including MagicSlides, which now serves over 1M users, all without raising any funding.