It's 5am. My first paid product is live. I have not slept. There is a small green grid icon on my desktop that I have been trying to summon for about three hours.

Let me back up.

The pivot

Pure Mint was supposed to launch with a thing called Pure Mint Lower Thirds. A browser-based overlay generator for streamers and video producers. I spent a chunk of time on it. It works, but halfway through launch, I changed my mind and created something else, and that new thing captured my excitement!

The replacement product is Thumbnail Collage Maker, a little Windows tool that takes a group or folder of images and arranges them into a clean collage. It started as a thing I built for myself, the way most useful software does.

The licensing puzzle

If you sell downloadable software, you need a way to stop people from copying the file around freely once they've bought it. Lemon Squeezy has a licensing API: you issue a key on purchase, the app phones home on first launch to activate it, then phones home occasionally afterwards to make sure the key is still valid.

I plumbed this in across an evening. Felt good. Compiled the executable, and built the installer.

Then I looked at the installed app on my desktop.

The worm

The icon was the default placeholder.

Not what I want representing my first paid product.

So I made an icon. Pure Mint green, a 3x3 grid of rounded squares on a dark squircle background, in the Windows 11 style. Reads as "collage" at a glance. I generated it programmatically with Pillow so I could iterate fast: render, eyeball, adjust, render again. It came out alright.

I rebuilt the EXE with the icon embedded. The build logs confirmed it. The icon file itself was valid. And yet, the EXE on my desktop, when I looked at it in File Explorer, still showed the damned snek.

This is when I learned about the Windows Explorer icon cache.

Windows caches every icon it has ever displayed in a hidden database file. When you rebuild an EXE in place at the same path, Explorer goes "I already know what this file looks like, no thanks" and keeps showing the cached version. Forever. Or at least until you kill Explorer and delete the cache files and let it rebuild itself.

Software is like that sometimes. The hard bit is rarely the bit that looks hard, and some stuff that shouldn't trip you up, does.

The 5am email

By the time everything was working, the icon embedded, the installer rebuilt, the file uploaded, the product page filled in, the system requirements noted, the demo video edited, the YouTube channel verified (so the buy link would actually be clickable), and the description tweaked, it was 5am UK time.

I sent off a product launch email, hoping to get approved within a few days, and went to make a drink.

20 minutes later, the approval landed. My product is a reality!

Seven pounds

Thumbnail Collage Maker is $10 USD (or "Seven Pounds" where I am from). One-time payment. No subscription, no recurring fees, no telemetry, no nonsense. Runs offline once activated. Windows 10 or 11.

It was built by one person who needed it, on top of an artistic career that funds this whole operation, and with a decent amount of patience built in.

If you take photos, make videos, run a classroom, design things, write reports with images in them, manage a team's screenshots, or just need a fast way to put a bunch of images into a single shareable file, you can buy it here.

If you don't need it, that's fine. There'll be more.

I'm going to bed.