May 2026 Builder Update
Revenue, Releases, and the People Who Made It Work
The sequel to the $30K weekend-loop essay.
👋 Hi — if you’re new here, I’m Finn: retired engineer, dog butler, building Substack tools for creators on weekends. StackContacts. Substack Pro Studio. Notes for Claude Desktop. I’m testing everything on Gumroad and Substack and pulling data into a StackContacts database to figure out repeatable insights for creators.
My goal: Help creators to grow their newsletters by shipping built-for-purpose tools and keeping them improving based on users’ feedback — without pretending I have unlimited time.
What happened: three essays, a wall of support emails, revenue up by 52%. Does anyone’s May look calm from the outside?
May at a glance
Gumroad revenue: $2,123.88
Gumroad sales1: 85 on the dashboard · 47 paid transactions in my data warehouse
vs April: +52.6% revenue · +7.6% sales (85 vs 79 on Gumroad)
YTD (Jan 1–Jun 1): 504 sales · $9,140.61 (Gumroad Analytics)
Lifetime: $32,156 (from data warehouse, all-time paid)
Spend: $744 (including $394 Gumroad affiliate/collab fees)
Rough net: ~$1,379 — before taxes
Notes: 86 published · 4 attributed free subs · median clicks: 0
What shipped (May releases)
Numbers and release dates come from my StackContacts data warehouse and shipping logs from GitHub.
StackContacts — the CRM data warehouse
👉 Pull from Substack + Gumroad into a local data warehouse you control. Use data + AI to decide what to create next, rather than guessing based on vanity metrics.
May shipped: 0.1.69 → 0.1.74 — Notes impressions fix · custom-domain login fix · incremental subscriber sync (huge if you have 1,000+ subs) · Recommendations sync (incoming, outgoing, suggested).
Uploaded 0.1.74 to the Gumroad store and emailed customers on 2026-05-31.
Business: 6 sales · $274 revenue.
Daria Cupareanu left this amazing product review on Gumroad
Support:
Kim Doyal wrote a fantastic, definitive article, “Your Open Rate Is Lying to You (And What to Actually Track in 2026),” and I contributed by providing my StackContacts playbook for email list cleanup. Kim did extensive research, so if you want to learn about email list maintenance, please read her article.
Yana G.Y. has been asking for incremental subscriber sync for several months now because it takes up to 36 hours to sync all 13K+ of her subscribers. With this incremental sync, the software will pull only the events and details for new subscribers since the last sync, significantly reducing the total sync time.
Substack Pro Studio — focus on reliability
👉 Schedule Notes on Substack’s server — Sync Drafts, CSV import, drip by theme, backup/restore.
May shipped: v1.1.6–v1.1.10 — Sync Drafts from Substack web · theme drip uses all available daily time slots · offline header fixes · v1.1.11 CSV time AM/PM format + Body column support · v1.1.12 (Jun 1) past vs future CSV rows + import progress indicator
Business: 4 sales · $276.50 (plus bundles) revenue.
Karen Cherry made my day leaving this wonderful product review:
Support: 🏆 MONTHLY TROOPER AWARDS 🏆
This month’s trooper awards go to the following:
Pamela Wang, PhD found the first manual-onboarding fallback bug in the last ninety days. I fixed it, and now she is back scheduling notes.
Mr. Baseball reached out with many product questions, bought the Claude bundle + Pro Studio, installed it in Opera on Windows, worked through CSV import issues, and provided great examples in his bug reports. I fixed multiple bugs, and he confirmed a working schedule - with a comment: “This will be a great time saver.”
Substack Notes for Claude AI + bundle deals — what everybody wants now
👉 Write, optimize, and schedule Substack Notes end-to-end from Claude Desktop
May shipped: rc.23 (Windows spawn-timeout + @mentions) · rc.24 (auth diagnostics + Claude startup fix).
Customer email: I sent customers an email about Your Substack feedback loop is probably too slow and got an amazing 59% open rate
Top Bundles:
CreativeTech Claude bundle — 14 sales / $671.50 - this collab product with Yana G.Y. is crushing all my previous records.
Claude AI Bundle — 7 sales / $343. - Ask Claude what’s working. Tell Claude to post more of it. All in one conversation.
Kay Phillips left this amazing product review on Gumroad. This is the first time anyone has ever made such a positive comment about the onboarding steps for my products. I’m still stoked ❤️ reading this - thank you!
Support: 🏆 MONTHLY TROOPER AWARDS 🏆
This month's trooper awards go to the following:
Linda Gumper - for testing Substack Notes for Claude Desktop and discovering a recent issue in the Windows version that required a hot-fix.
Kathleen Ahern - for troubleshooting and helping to fix another Windows-related Claude Desktop authentication issue. She started scheduling her Notes directly from Claude just a few days ago.
StackContacts Connect · Control Center (minor updates)
StackContacts Connect v0.3.1–0.3.2 — Responses auto-DM + campaign date filters · 6 sales · $112
Neela 🌶️ left this amazing product review
Support: I helped Dinah to debug subscriber segmentation SQL (advanced sync + DM workflow). She has created DM campaigns using the StackContacts SQL database.
Control Center v1.1.12 (May 5) — subscriber stats match Substack · richer CSV · 4 sales · $64.
Dr. Jane Bormeister left this fantastic product review
Posts & Notes (the marketing layer)
May 4 — Your Feed Is Lying About Your Notes · 564 views · 4 signups within 1 day
May 12 — Learning Too Slowly · 471 views · 2 signups
May 26 — $30K weekend-loop essay · 551 views · 2 signups
Notifications as growth signals · May 8 · 187 views.
86 Notes · 53 clicks · 4 attrib. free subs · 356 reactions.
Median clicks per Note: zero.
That’s not a typo. Reach is still the binding constraint. The Notes that converted were failure stories — subs “moving backward” (2) and a contrarian “10K prompt” take (1).
Revenue up. Reach flat. Different levers.
Spend Total: $744
Cursor Pro: $60 - I use Cursor mostly for software development and troubleshooting
Claude Pro: $20 - I use Claude Pro for testing and skills development
Gumroad fees: $288 - this includes 10% for Gumroad and 3% for Stripe
Gumroad affiliates / collabs: $394 - this includes affiliate fees and collab products with Yana G.Y.
Rough net: ~$1,379 on $2,124 gross — before taxes.
Not passive income. Not a lifestyle flex. A weekend business with real COGS and real support load.
Work Plan for June
1. Partner distribution beats praying for reach. Yana G.Y. ’s marketing genius brought a quarter of May sales. We’ve worked together for almost two years now. I need more collabs like that.
2. Notes → free subs — improve structure, not volume. Clone what already converted. Stop inventing eighty-six new angles.
I live mostly in DMs. The gap is memory: who did I riff with, who should I meet. StackContacts is creeping there slowly. This is not a launch announcement.
What I’ve been reading
Rebecca Spitzer - this update was inspired by Rebecca Spitzer’s monthly update — portfolio first, numbers second, people third. She thanked me for restacks and mentions; I’m returning the favor here.
Eva Keiffenheim MSc, MSc, made me think about the cognitive fatigue caused by shepherding AI agents through a complex codebase after reading her “Brain in the Clouds After Working With Claude Code.”
Lenny Rachitsky - I watched “A rational conversation on where AI is actually going | Benedict Evans.” and really enjoyed the historical perspective that Benedict Evans brought to the AI trends.
Jenny Ouyang and Timo Mason🤠 🤠 🤠 shared a great article on how to improve conversion rates through experiments that change one variable at a time.
Mack Collier is one of my favorite creators. I read his “Here's The Five Psychological Triggers That Stop the Scroll, and Start the Relationship” again - this article has some deep insights that I’ve been missing.
May - life outside of Substack
I installed a kayak hoist in the garage - finding that structural joist was the biggest challenge. Those electronic joist finders they sell at Home Depot are garbage.
My dog learned how to fetch - it’s now proven that an old dog (soon 7 years) can learn new tricks.
Our A/C unit is broken (again) - I’m waiting for spare part and hope it doesn’t take 8 months like previous time. In the meantime I’ve been playing with home assistant running on Raspberry Pi 400. Perhaps I can connect this with Claude?
Your turn: Last month, what moved more for you — reach (clicks, impressions) or revenue (sales, subs)? Pick one. Reply with the number you trust less.
— Finn
How Gumroad counts sales vs how I count paid in StackContacts: Gumroad’s 85 includes $0 bundle component lines and refunded rows still shown in the period (83 non-refund line items + 2 refunds). 47 is paid, non-refunded, revenue-bearing only — and that amounts to $2,123.88, which matches the Gumroad revenue total exactly.
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Will check out your gumroad store as stackcontacts sounds uber useful. I became a Bestseller this month so am looking to strategise even further!
What a wonderful income report/review post. Thanks for sharing. This is probably my favorite type of content (both as a reader and a writer).