I did not believe in my own fundraiser
I launched a fundraiser on 19 September, wrote it off in under two weeks, and had already decided I was paying the money myself. At half past six this morning somebody I have never spoken to closed the whole thing in one payment, and I still have not managed to thank him.
Eleven days, and I had already given up
Steam charges one hundred dollars, once, per game, before anything else happens. On 19 September I put a small counter on this site and a supporter tier on GitHub, and then I told my partner, out loud, that it would do nothing.
I meant it. I was not being modest. I had already worked out which week in October I would pay it out of taxi money, and I had made my peace with that, and part of me preferred it that way because then nobody owed me anything and I owed nobody anything back.
The counter sat at zero. I stopped opening it after about the fourth day.
Eleven days. That is how long it took me to write off my own fundraiser.
This morning at 6:30, sitting on the toilet trying to wake up for a twelve hour shift, I opened my email and found that one person had covered the entire amount in a single payment.
The shop that failed before any of this
To explain why I was so sure it would fail, I have to go back further than most people who read this have seen.
Before PC Workman there was a shop. It was called HuckHub, it existed in the first months of 2025, three or four months before the first line of the program, and there is no public trace of it left anywhere.
The idea was not stupid. It was going to carry very few products, and everything had to pass a filter before it went on the site: does this actually work, can I put my name next to it with a clear conscience. I made a lot of graphics for it. I made considerably more plans.
It died because I found something out about myself that I have not been able to unlearn since. Marketing patter is not for me. Writing copy designed to talk somebody into something exhausted me more than any other part of the work, and I was bad at it, because I did not believe myself while I was typing.
What I wanted instead was narrow and it has not changed: build a tool that solves a specific problem for a specific person, give it away, and talk about it honestly rather than advertising it.
That is why everything since has been free. It is also, as it turns out, exactly why I could not picture anybody paying for any of it.
A year of giving things away
PC Workman went into the Microsoft Store after about a year of evenings. Twenty seven versions, from 1.0.0 on 27 October 2025 to 1.8.7 on 8 August 2026. It passed the automated checks, it passed a human review, and at no point in that year did I charge anybody anything.
The community turned up for that, and not with money, because there was nothing to pay for. They turned up with ideas. With bug reports. With people telling me plainly that something looked bad, which is a kindness that costs the person nothing and is worth more than almost anything else you can be given. I still get those messages and they are still the most useful thing that arrives in my inbox.
So by the middle of this year I had a complete, working model of how this goes. You build, people help you make it better, nobody pays, everybody wins. I believed in the community entirely. I simply believed in it for ideas.
The first wall that money could fix
Then the game hit something the program never did.
Scaling Laws is a simulation about running an AI lab from 2022 onward, built in Unity in the same evenings. Every obstacle in it until now has been technical, and a technical obstacle is one you can solve by sitting down and not going to bed. That is a fight I know how to have.
Steam is not that. Steam charges a hundred dollars per title and there is no version of working harder that produces a hundred dollars.
The number is small and I want to say so plainly rather than dress it up. Counting everything that went into PC Workman across the year, the hardware and the tools and the rest, it passed a hundred dollars a long time ago. But those were costs I chose one at a time and absorbed quietly, on my own terms. This one was a gate with a price written on it, and it was the first of those this project has ever had.
So I built the supporter tier, put up the counter, and privately gave it no chance at all.
What was shipping while I was not looking
Here is the engineering, and it is the honest answer to what has actually been getting better rather than a list of features.
Scaling Laws has 1,602 automated tests behind it, 1,521 EditMode and 81 PlayMode, all green. And the last stretch of releases has been almost entirely one category of problem, which is the most uncomfortable thing I have learned building this alone:
Three real examples out of the current build. All mine, all checkable in a public repository.
A contract that took $1.2M and did nothing for 270 days. A distribution licence in the game costs over a million to arrange and runs for most of a year. For the entire term it changed nothing whatsoever. The line that was supposed to widen your audience had no caller anywhere in the game. The line that was supposed to charge the partner their thirty per cent was named only inside its own catalogue. Both halves had been designed, written down and committed. Neither was connected to anything.
A button cut in half by the bottom of the window. The control that adds a fan to a server cabinet was there, styled, working, and drawn half off the screen. It was reported twice as fans being impossible to add, which is exactly what it looks like from the player's chair.
A text cursor drawn almost black on a dark field. Right shape, right position, right blink rate, completely invisible. It had been that way since the field was written.
Not one of those could have been caught by 1,602 tests, and not one of the tests is wrong to have missed them. They drive the simulation directly. They prove the rule works. They cannot prove a person can reach it.
Every single one was found by a human clicking. Most of them by my partner Samanta, who is not a programmer, who sits down with the game and uses it properly, and who hands me pages of notes that are regularly longer than the release they were written about.
If you build alone and you take one thing away from this, take that one. Get somebody who is not you to use your thing for twenty minutes. Not to review it. To use it.
An hour, an email, and a licence nobody filled in
I spent about an hour this morning trying to work out how to say thank you.
His GitHub profile has no email, no bio and no links. Four repositories, two of them forks. I eventually dug an address out of the commit metadata of his own project, wrote a careful message, and sent it.
It bounced. The address does not exist.
So at the time of writing, a stranger has paid my publisher fee and I have no way to reach him. My favourite detail in all of this: the licence files in his repositories still say <year> <name of author>, unfilled, exactly as the template ships. I have never been more certain that a person is real, or less able to contact him.
What actually changed
The money goes to Steam and nowhere else. The game is free to download until it is on the store. PC Workman has always been free and stays that way.
What changed is smaller than the hundred dollars and harder to write down. For a year I had a model of this that worked, and I was the thing that was incomplete about it, because I never once seriously entertained the possibility that somebody reading along would decide it was worth their own money.
One person decided that. At half past six in the morning. For a Polish taxi driver he has never spoken to.
If you are building something alone and nobody has noticed yet: keep the receipts public, keep the numbers checkable, and say plainly what does not work yet. Somebody is reading, and every so often one of them turns out to be reading very carefully indeed.