Day 1
The number: £34,454. Eight debts, four lenders, and £708 of every £1,352 I pay each month is interest. That is all I am going to say about the debt. It is the scoreboard, not the story.
The other number: 22. That is how many finished web projects I own. Apps, sites, tools, two of them real products with pricing pages and payment buttons. Combined income: £10 a month. I am a developer with a full time job. I build things in my own time and never sell them. This site is where that changes.
The experiment
£100 a day from side projects pays off £34,454 in 345 days. So the plan is not to build anything new. It is to sell what already exists, one project at a time, under rules I cannot wriggle out of:
- One project gets 30 days: concept to ten paying customers, or it gets parked.
- No advertising paid for on credit. No new features until someone has paid. No trading, no crypto, no shortcuts.
- Every day gets a short post: what I tried, what it cost in time, what it returned. Including the days it returns nothing.
Claude Code runs the loop with me: it pulls the search and sales numbers, drafts the posts, keeps the log and writes up each experiment as it closes. I do the selling, because that is the part I have been avoiding for years.
Experiment 1: PaidProper
Quoting and invoicing software for UK tradespeople: quotes from the van, card payment on the invoice, a client portal so you are not chasing people. It has been live at paidproper.co.uk for a couple of months at £49 a month. Customers: zero. Google impressions last month: 22. Time to tell people about it so it's actually looked at to decide product market fit.
Today a founding price went live, £29 a month for life for the first fifty, until 28 October, and I messaged ten tradespeople. The offer is not "try my app". It is "send me your last quote and I will set your account up tonight". We will see who replies.
The scoreboard
| Debt | Balance | APR |
|---|---|---|
| Lloyds overdraft | £1,000.00 | 35% |
| HSBC overdraft | £1,500.00 | 35% |
| Lloyds credit card | £7,904.75 | 30% |
| Halifax credit card | £837.53 | 30% |
| HSBC credit card | £4,627.36 | 30% |
| Updraft loan 2 | £9,688.08 | 22% |
| Updraft loan 1 | £2,736.18 | 18% |
| HSBC loan | £6,159.99 | 16% |
| Total | £34,453.89 |
Day 1. Generated revenue: £0. Monthly recurring revenue from the 22 projects: £10. Best day so far: £0. Days at £100 or more: 0.
What happens next
Day 2 tomorrow. Day 30 is the verdict on PaidProper, and then the next project goes through the same 30 days. The free debt planner on this site is the one I use to decide which debt every pound goes to; it will get the tools I build along the way.
This is my story and my numbers, not financial advice. If debt is keeping you up at night, StepChange (0800 138 1111) and National Debtline (0808 808 4000) are free, and talking to them does not affect your credit file.