The Roblox Money I Almost Counted as Real
The notification came in on a Tuesday afternoon while I was in a standup. Somebody had spent Robux in our game. Not a lot — I could tell that much from the preview — but enough that I minimized the meeting window for a second and opened the developer dashboard like I was checking a stock that had just moved.
That was my first mistake. The second was screenshotting it and texting my oldest, who was at school, with three exclamation points. The number looked real in the notification. It looked like a number a person could spend. I had, in the space of about ninety seconds, already done the mental math on what that might be per month if it kept up, which it would not, and I knew it would not, and I did it anyway.
By the time I unmuted myself in the standup, I had already half-convinced myself that the Roblox thing was turning a corner. That feeling lasted until I actually converted the Robux to dollars in my head and got a number that would not cover a large pizza with one topping.
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How a Hobby Became a Line Item I Checked Too Seriously
The game started as a thing to do with the kids. That's the honest origin. My oldest had been watching Roblox dev tutorials on YouTube the way other kids watch cartoons, and one afternoon they showed me a half-built obby on the family laptop and I said something like, "okay, let's actually finish this." That was a while ago now.
What it became is documented better in the piece I wrote about the game itself — the short version is that we built something real, people played it, and the revenue has been aggressively modest. We're not complaining. The kids learned things. I learned things. The game exists and functions and has actual players who are not us or our cousins, which felt like a miracle the first time it happened.
But somewhere along the way I started checking the dashboard with the same energy I give to DoorDash earnings after a long Friday night shift. That's the part I can't fully explain. The dollar amounts aren't comparable. Not even close. I think I just needed another number to watch, and the Roblox dashboard was always there.
The Eleven Dollars and What I Did to Them in My Head
The actual payout, once I did the conversion properly, was somewhere in the range of eleven dollars. Maybe a little under. I don't remember the exact figure because I closed the tab faster than I'd like to admit.
My oldest got home from school and asked about the text. I showed them the dashboard. They looked at it for a long moment and said,
"That's not nothing, though."And they were right. It genuinely wasn't nothing. It was eleven dollars that didn't exist before we built the thing. But I had spent the previous three hours treating it like a signal, like a trend line, like evidence that the update we'd pushed two weeks ago had finally clicked — and the update story, for the record, did not go the way I hoped it would go.
The problem wasn't the eleven dollars. The problem was the story I had already built around it before I knew what it was. I had a whole narrative running — the game was gaining traction, the kids' work was paying off, maybe this was the month things compounded a little. I had that narrative completely constructed before I had confirmed the actual number. That's a specific kind of dumb that I apparently do on a schedule.
I've done a version of this with nearly every hustle I run. There was a month where I convinced myself the numbers were finally converging, and that one ended the same way this did — with a real but small figure that didn't deserve the weight I'd put on it.
What the Eleven Dollars Actually Cost, Counting Honestly
The eleven dollars cost nothing to earn, technically. The update was already done. The game was already live. We weren't actively working on it that week. In that sense it was the closest thing to found money I've seen from this project.
But I spent about forty-five minutes that afternoon in a low-grade distracted state — half in the standup, half doing Robux-to-dollar conversion math in a Notepad file like it was going to change — and that time came out of something else. I don't know exactly what. Probably the thing I was supposed to be debugging before the meeting started.
There's also a subtler cost that I'm still not sure how to name. When you start checking a hobby dashboard like it's a job, the hobby starts to feel like a job, and that's not what this one is supposed to be. The kids don't care about the dashboard. They care about the game. I'm the one who introduced a spreadsheet mentality into a thing that was working fine without one, and I can feel it occasionally when we're building — a small background hum of "is this going to perform" that wasn't there before. I put that there. That was me being cheap with my own attention.
The Rule I Made Up After Embarrassing Myself for Eleven Dollars
The rule is: Robux are not dollars until they are dollars. Not when the notification comes in, not when the dashboard updates, not when I'm doing mental math in a standup. They are a number in a system I do not fully control, subject to platform math I don't completely understand, and they become real money at a specific moment that is not the moment I get excited about them.
I know that sounds obvious. It is obvious. I still needed to make it a rule because I proved I would not follow it on instinct.
The broader version of the rule — and this is the one that's actually useful — is that I don't count any hustle money until it has cleared somewhere I can spend it. Not a pending balance. Not a projected payout. Not a "if this keeps up" number. Cleared. Available. Real. I've been bad at this across multiple things, not just Roblox, and the habit of getting excited about pending numbers has cost me more in wasted mental energy than any of the actual shortfalls have.
The kids are still building. I'm still checking the dashboard, because I'm not going to pretend I fixed myself completely. But I try to wait until I have an actual dollar figure before I let myself feel anything about it. Some months that means I feel nothing about it. That's probably correct.
The game got another small payout a few weeks later. I waited until it cleared before I told anyone. My oldest asked how much it was. I told them. They thought about it and said "cool" and went back to whatever they were building. That felt about right.
Note: Everyday Hustle Jeff is the written side of a digital series. These accounts are composite and dramatized. Any figures are what they were on the day, for one person, and are not a projection, a track record, or advice.