I Made $213.14 in July. Here’s Every Dollar.

There are five people reading Real Numbers right now.

Welcome if you're new. The rule here is simple: the dashboard, not the highlight reel.

In June, my side projects earned $129.89.

In July, they earned $213.14—an increase of $83.25, or about 64%.

Here's every dollar.

The July breakdown

BourbonProof — $65.49

BourbonProof was the largest earner in July.

• Aged & Charred: $48.00 from four orders, 58 referrals, and $500.71 in referred sales

• Amazon Associates: $17.49 from 12 shipped items and $512.79 in shipped revenue

This is the project I'm most excited about right now. Search traffic is growing, I have real firsthand credibility in the niche, and a direct affiliate relationship is already producing better economics than Amazon.

But I still can't cleanly tell you which page, CTA, or source produced every order. Revenue without attribution is encouraging. It isn't yet a repeatable system.

PaddlersPick — $57.95

• Selkirk: $45.00 from one $300 paddle sale

• Amazon Associates: $12.95 net after $12.00 in returned earnings

The lesson here is straightforward: one high-value direct-program conversion can outperform a pile of small Amazon commissions.

That does not mean Amazon is useless. It means I need to learn which visitors are ready for a premium paddle, which page introduced them, and whether I can produce that outcome again.

One sale is evidence. Two or three from the same path would start to look like a channel.

The Real AI Side Hustle — $41.45

The book earned $41.45 in July, down from $60.64 during its June launch week.

That decline doesn't surprise me. A launch creates concentrated attention; the harder job is building a durable floor after the launch ends.

The book is still useful beyond its royalties. It gives me an accessible product, establishes what I believe about building with AI, and starts conversations that feed the rest of the portfolio.

But I'm not going to treat a launch spike as recurring revenue.

AvailSim — $39.29

AvailSim earned across several eSIM programs rather than one merchant:

• TravelPayouts / Saily: $4.45

• Impact.com programs: $32.34

• MobiMatter: $2.50

This is the messiest project to measure. The site is producing transactions, but the partner dashboards and my own analytics don't agree cleanly enough for me to calculate a conversion rate I trust.

The August job is not “publish more destinations.” It is identifying which destination, provider, and recommendation actually produces a booking.

FieldTestedGuides on Etsy — $8.96

Two digital-product sales produced $8.96.

The dollar amount is small, but the products are inexpensive, nearly margin-free to fulfill, and connected to BourbonProof's existing Bourbon Trail audience. That makes this worth a bounded distribution test—not an excuse to build ten more products from intuition.

The five projects that earned $0

• Start & Ship

• SupaPoints

• Real Numbers

• Outage Authority

• SimCosts

Some of those zeros are expected. Outage Authority and SimCosts launched late in the month. Real Numbers is currently an audience asset, not a product.

The Start & Ship zero matters more.

It launched July 20, and the landing page is no longer the obvious constraint. The next step is not another redesign. It's qualified conversations, walkthroughs, explicit offers, and learning exactly where trust or understanding breaks down.

SupaPoints is the longest-running zero. It gets search attention, but I still haven't proven that attention turns into product activation or cash revenue. More traffic alone will not answer that.

What actually changed in July

The websites collectively passed the book.

That sounds like the headline, but the more useful lesson is underneath it: direct affiliate programs created the two strongest individual outcomes.

A single Selkirk sale generated $45. Four Aged & Charred orders generated $48. Those results are materially better than the economics of most small Amazon purchases.

The problem is that I still have too many encouraging outcomes whose source I cannot reconstruct with confidence.

So August is less about adding projects and more about making the existing evidence repeatable:

1. Trace affiliate clicks and orders to a page, merchant, and source.

2. Put more time into BourbonProof, PaddlersPick, and AvailSim paths that already produced revenue.

3. Sell Start & Ship through real conversations instead of waiting for a launch post to do the work.

4. Keep the newest sites as bounded case studies rather than promoting all ten projects equally.

The decision I'm wrestling with

If these were your five earning projects, where would you put the next ten hours?

• $65.49 with accelerating search traffic and direct-program sales

• $57.95 with one high-value direct conversion

• $41.45 from a book after its launch spike

• $39.29 across several providers with messy attribution

• $8.96 from low-priced digital products

My current answer is BourbonProof first, then Start & Ship customer conversations, with PaddlersPick and AvailSim receiving smaller conversion-focused blocks.

But I'm curious where you'd disagree. Reply and tell me which one you'd double down on—and why.

— Charles