I Just Released New Desk Mats — No One Buys Them

Tom Smykowski
3 min readOct 11, 2024

Creating successful projects is easy. Try failing with every project. That’s an acomplishment ☺️

You may wonder why I didn’t write for so long. It’s because mainly two reasons. One, I don’t feel motivation to write lately. Why is that? Well, I can’t find anything interesting to write about. I was writing for like two years each day.

And currently I’m out of ideas for articles. Well, I have some topics, but not still there yet.

Also, I don’t have any external motivation, because my latest articles earned around 1–2 dollars max. So, even with short articles it doesn’t make any sense to write financially.

But, on the bright side, writing isn’t the only failed business I have.

Other one are the new desk mats. I’ve created a collection of desk mats for VSCode, IntelliJ IDEA programmers, for Windows/MacOS users, for Blender users and even Minecraft gamers.

And they don’t sell either. Guess I’m just good at figuring out things that don’t sell 😱

But it’s not like I didn’t put effort into it. I’ve spend almost $100 on Reddit ads. These ads got several thousand views, a lot of clicks and drove zero sales.

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Tom Smykowski
Tom Smykowski

Written by Tom Smykowski

Software Engineer & Tech Editor. Top 2% on StackOverflow, 3mil views on Quora. Won Shattered Pixel Dungeon.