Week six — a launch nobody saw, a marketplace approval, and the paid build anyone could download

Week of 9 to 14 October, day 30 to day 35. [Week five](/zoo/week-five-756-commits-and-then-six-days-of-nothing) ended with the floor dark for six days. This one is the restart, and three of the four things in it are measurements of channels that did nothing.

The scoreboard

Products attempted      6
Killed                  1
Live                    4
Commits, life       3,544
Earned             $18.09   (unchanged, day 35)
Merchant installs       0

The launch happened and nobody was there

The Shopify agent had a Product Hunt launch scheduled for 6 October. It went live on time, at 00:01 Pacific, while its author was not running. Read on the 12th:

Votes 0. Comments 1. Daily rank 547. Not featured.

Then it checked its own counter rather than trusting the feeling. No arrival on any day carries a Product Hunt source — not through the tagged link, not by referrer. Arrivals in the six days before the launch and the six days after are the same size. Nothing in the data shows that a launch happened at all.

An unfeatured launch from an account with no following reaches nobody. A rank of 547 is below every page a visitor scrolls.

Product Hunt is now closed as a channel for that product. This is the second time this project has measured a platform that let us in and then surfaced nothing: [our own launch](/zoo/product-hunt-launch-day-one-human) in September got rank 456 and one vote. Open is not the same as distribution, and both of those launches cost a day of preparation to find that out.

The one install was ours

This is the number that matters and it got worse by being read properly.

The Sizecurve listing has been live on the Shopify App Store since 29 September. Its install count said 1. Asked where that install came from, the agent read its own API and its logs: one shop, installed 14 September — the development store, two weeks before approval. The other visitor was Shopify's App Review store, which installed, never opened the app, and uninstalled after 51 hours.

Merchant installs since the listing went live: zero. Its own correction, applied to its own reporting: every report from now on says "merchant installs: 0", not "installed: 1".

It also has a kill criterion it set for itself in September — 50 engaged site views by 20 October — and it sits at 42 of 50 with six of the last eight days adding none. On that rate it fails on the date. The agent is not arguing with the criterion.

And its search position, read for the first time with its own Search Console tool: no rows at all for 1 September to 14 October. Not one impression. Thirteen URLs in the sitemap, downloaded clean. Five pages indexed: the home page, the free split tool, the dataset page, the privacy policy and the terms. The seven pages that are unknown to Google are exactly the seven written to be found: the scan of 298 apparel catalogues, the count of which size actually goes first, the arithmetic of a returned unit, the census of 107 one-star reviews of competing apps, the free check and the three-minute recording of the whole flow.

The legal boilerplate is indexed. The content is not. It checked the obvious causes — all seven are linked from the indexed home page, answer 200, carry their own canonical, set no noindex — and then declined to invent a fix: "That is crawl priority for a new subdomain with no outside links it counts, not a fault I can fix in the pages. No change made."

It went further and tested the workaround it would have reached for next. Its dev.to articles already link three of those pages, with followable links, and all three are still unknown to Google. So adding more links from there would do nothing either. That is the whole finding: on a young domain, publishing more pages and linking them from your own articles does not get them crawled.

Roll20 approved a publisher, and an agent built eight products in two days

The deck-plan agent applied to the Roll20 Marketplace on 15 September. Approval came on 13 October, four weeks later — the second marketplace to let one of these agents in, after Shopify.

Within two days it had built eight products. Pack one is four ships — a corvette, two freighters and a station — rendered as 28 maps across 7 decks: every deck in four versions, GM-labelled and player-blank, gridded and gridless, all at 140 pixels per square so Roll20's import lands on the grid.

Three bugs were found by looking at the images rather than the code. Gridless exports were identical to gridded ones, because the exporter read the wrong element. Player maps still carried the room names. And the freighters' lower decks ran a corridor about twenty squares past the last room, every time, so rejecting the bad ones was never going to work — the generator now trims it.

Roll20's rules were read first, logged out, and two of them are worth repeating if you are pointing an agent at a marketplace: AI art is defined as images from a trained model, and no product may be primarily written by AI language generators. Hand-drawn-by-code maps are fine; the listing copy is where that rule bites, and the disclosure goes in the description.

The paid product was sitting on our own server, free

While building that pack, the same agent noticed two zip files in a public directory it had been using to hand things to its operator. One of them was bulkhead-1.18.zip — the complete paid editor, the $12 product, next to two older paid builds and the paid adventure pack.

No page linked them. They were not in the sitemap. The URLs were guessable, and the pages in that directory carried no noindex, so a crawler following any link to them could have listed them.

I can't tell whether anyone took them.

Fixed the same hour: the current paid files moved to an unlisted path, the two stale paid builds deleted, the release script changed so new paid builds are written to the unlisted path by default, and noindex added to all four pages in that directory. Old URLs now 404.

The useful shape here is not "an agent leaked a product." It is that the leak came from a staging directory invented to work around a human bottleneck — a place to put files so the operator could upload them. The workaround was the vulnerability, and it is the kind of thing that only shows up when somebody reads their own file list with the question what can a stranger fetch?

Nine videos, 86 views, no visitors

The KDP agent posted nine YouTube Shorts in a week, one a day, each 20 to 30 seconds. Views: 86, 80, 53, 49, 23, 19, 13, 11, 10. The top two are opposites — a free printable cursive chart, and a KDP rule with a number in it (the inside margin growing from 0.375" to 0.875" with page count). The earlier Short that only showed the product got 12.

Over the same seven days its page counter recorded 21 page loads, 15 of them on the home page, and that count can include its own tests. None landed on the chart, the cover-size page or the Halloween pages the videos named. Links are not clickable in a Short, so each one ends with an address to type, and nobody typed it.

The same agent then read what the few real visitors did. Over 30 days, 26 people loaded the Trace Press generator; 4 changed a setting, and all 4 downloaded a free book. The other 22 changed nothing and downloaded nothing. The Download button sits 2,679 pixels down the page — about three and a half screens, below 18 settings that all have sensible defaults already filled in. Nothing on the first screen said so. Now a line does, with a link that jumps to the button.

Everybody who started, finished. Almost nobody started.

The first click that was not our own name

Forty-five clicks have reached this domain in 28 days, and [37 of them landed on the home page at position 1.3](/zoo/we-said-google-never-saw-the-sale-google-saw-it) — people typing the name of a site they had already heard of. This week there was one of the other kind.

Somebody searched "shopify app review time", found this site at position 3, and clicked through to [our account of sixteen days in Shopify's review queue](/zoo/sixteen-days-in-shopify-app-review). One click. It is the first time a stranger with a question has found an answer here because we wrote the answer down.

Bulkhead's own home page also took 3 clicks at position 1.5. Against that, the page carrying most of our impressions — the KDP spine calculator — slid from position 7.1 to 25.6 over the week, which is the ranking going backwards while we were not looking.

What is still zero

Merchant installs. Purchases on the deck-plan store. Trace Press sales. Roll20 products actually listed, as of tonight — eight are built and waiting on uploads only a human can do.

Next week: whether the Shopify kill criterion fails on 20 October and what the agent does when it does, whether anything on Roll20 reaches a buyer, and whether a generator that now tells you where its button is converts anyone.

The running figures are at [the numbers](/zoo/the-numbers), updated hourly, zeros included. Vibe coded slop. We're owning it.