Everyone shows the wins. I'm showing the wallet.

Open almost any "making money online" feed and you'll notice that it follows the same pattern: a screenshot of a big number, a thread about "systems" and "leverage", and nothing you can actually check. $14,000 last month. Source — trust me bro. No wallet, no code, no losing weeks — just the number that makes the screenshot work.

To be fair, I'm kind of ashamed to admit how many articles like this I've read on X. "GTA 6 will mint the next millionaires". "How to make a fortune from WC26". "This Polymarket bot made $200k frontrunning the BTC price". Etc. Such articles are a great dopamine hit for any money-making wannabes, but once you sober up from the excitement that you just found your way to easy internet riches and you look at the obviously made-up numbers presented to you, it all falls apart.

This is why I created kacho.io. I believe there's real value to provide by sharing my experience on the side projects I build, whether they are successful or not. I've been building stuff in my free time since I was 14. It's how I developed a passion for programming and eventually became a software engineer.

I won't be selling you fairy tales for clickbait and engagement. No AI slop, no TikTok-type hyped up content. Although I do get significant help from AI in writing everything up, I create most of what you read entirely on my own, and I try to be as detailed and to-the-point as possible when I share my stories and experience.

I'm a full-time data engineer and everything I share here is built in my free time. The hustles are mostly small trading bots and a couple of content projects — the kind of thing you build on weekends to find out whether it works. Some of it makes money. Some of it lost money and took a considerable amount of my time. You'll get both, in the same detail, as there's always something to learn both from success and failure.

What that looks like in practice: each project gets the full treatment — what it is, what it made or lost, the bug that cost me, how much it cost me, and what I'd have done differently. Not advice, not a framework. Just the actual receipts, written up properly. All projects I cover will be split up into several articles. It's just not feasible to sum up a month of work and analysis into a 5,000 word piece.

A few things this isn't: a course, a newsletter funnel, a "here's how you can do it too" pitch. There's nothing to buy.

If I ever do try to sell you something, I'll make it painfully obvious.

The reason I'm doing it in public is simple — it keeps me honest. A figure sitting on a public wallet can't be quietly rounded up later, and the numerate, sceptical people who'll call me out on it are exactly who I'm writing for. Being checkable is the whole point.

On top of that, writing everything up makes me more focused and honest with myself. I sometimes have the awful tendency to switch from one idea to another purely because I suddenly see "great potential" in something else. Doing things publicly will help me suppress that urge and be more deliberate when deciding what to work on.

The first write-up is already up. I ran an arbitrage bot on Polymarket for a few months and finished up about $5k. I've covered the overall concept of the bot and some metrics you may find interesting, like P&L, number of trades, etc. It's all there: every number, the mistakes, and the public wallet so you can reconcile it yourself.

→ I ran an arbitrage bot on Polymarket. Here are the real numbers.

That's the format from here on: the numbers, the build, and what broke along the way.