Software engineer building a niche local guide side hustle (Instagram + Gumroad) — sharing what the process actually looks like

Day job: software engineer. Side hustle: turning local knowledge into a $6-9 Marrakech insider guide, sold through an Instagram page I built from zero — no ads, no following, no idea yet if anyone would actually pay for it.

The part nobody warns you about: "passive" is doing a lot of lying. It's 2 Reels + 1 carousel every single week or the page goes cold. It's a locked visual template so it doesn't look thrown together. It's needing real footage from real trips — hardest thing to keep up around a 9 to 5 job.

7 followers. 0 sales. 3 weeks in. Early, scrappy, still finding out if this actually works.

Anyone else turned local/niche knowledge into an actual product? What made it click for you — or what almost killed it before it did?