In April 2025 I wrote Apologizing for My Obsessiveness Over Punctuation, a post about my various organizational compulsions. Near the end, almost as an aside, I mentioned that I obsessively categorize expenses in Monarch, a personal finance app, linking it with my referral code. That post earned me exactly one referral in the nine months that followed.
Then, on January 15th, 2026, I wrote Serving Markdown for AI Agents. The idea is simple: for every post on this blog, there’s now a .md version at the same URL. AI agents can discover and fetch clean markdown instead of parsing HTML. I didn’t think much of it.
Exactly thirty days later - the length of Monarch’s free trial — I started getting a stream of referral conversion notifications without any change in SEO traffic.
Eighteen signups.
Twelve converted to paid. At $30/referral, that’s $360.
We live in the future.