Meet Piotr Kulpinski.

Piotr Kulpinski is 37 years old and from Kraków, Poland. He has been programming for over 15 years, starting in college while studying computer science. After a few years at a software house, he quit to go freelance.

Piotr always craved more freedom. Launching Dirstarter provided some of that freedom for him.

Piotr Kulpinski - Founder of Dirstarter

The story told by Piotr Kulpinski

My First Online Income

My first online income came from a WordPress theme for directory websites that I built with a co-founder. That experience shaped everything that followed. Since then, I've bounced between freelance work, failed SaaS attempts, and side projects. Some worked, most didn't.

The one that really took off was OpenAlternative, a directory of open source alternatives to proprietary software. I built it in 48 hours back in 2024, it went viral with 100K visitors in the first week, and eventually grew to over $6,500/month in revenue.

That directory became the foundation for my next product.

What is Dirstarter?

Dirstarter is a Next.js boilerplate for building profitable directory websites. It's the exact codebase I use to run OpenAlternative and my other directories, packaged up and sold as a premium template.

The Dirstarter homepage

It includes everything you need to launch a monetized directory from day one:

• Listings

• Categories

• Search

• Admin dashboard

• Stripe payments

• Ad placements

• Featured listings

• Affiliate link management

• SEO optimization

• AI content generation.

The idea is simple: instead of spending months building payment flows and admin panels, you can launch in days and focus on content and marketing.

How It Started

Here's the thing about OpenAlternative: it kept getting copied. The clean, simple design that users loved also made it trivially easy to clone. I'd see knockoffs on Reddit almost every week. Same layout, same concept, different name.

At first, it frustrated me. Then I realized something: code is not the moat anymore. With AI tools making development faster than ever, anyone can replicate a website in days. Fighting copycats was a losing battle.

So I flipped the script. If people were going to copy me anyway, why not make it easier for them and make some money in the process?

I decided to package my codebase into a sellable boilerplate.

Building the MVP (Minimum Viable Product)

Since Dirstarter was based on an already-working product, the MVP came together fast.

It took 2 days to clean up the codebase. I stripped out everything specific to OpenAlternative: repository details, comparison pages, and all the programmatic SEO stuff built specifically for open source software. What remained was the core directory functionality.

Then 5 more days for the landing page. The hardest part was actually writing the documentation, but AI helped me tremendously with that.

Total time: one week from decision to sellable product.

Dirstarter went live in February 2025.

Getting the First Customers

The first sales came surprisingly easy.

I didn't do a big launch. I just added a small "Built with Dirstarter" link on OpenAlternative, and sales started flowing on day one. It was like people had been waiting for it.

For months, people had been asking about my tech stack. "How did you build OpenAlternative?" "What tools do you use?" "Would you ever share the code?" When I finally offered it as a product, there was already pent-up demand.

Pricing evolution:

• Started at $97 (early bird)

• Raised to $147 after initial validation

• Now $159 / $199 (two tiers with AI features and private community)

The first 20-30 customers came almost entirely from OpenAlternative traffic. No marketing needed, just existing demand I didn't know was there.

The Struggle: Beyond OpenAlternative

Getting the first customers was easy. Widening the funnel beyond OpenAlternative was the real challenge.

I tried many channels. Most of them failed:

Reddit
I was hesitant to promote aggressively because I didn't want to be labeled as "the boilerplate guy." The few posts I made received very low engagement. This post on r/directorymakers is a good example. It basically flopped.

Paid blog posts
Didn't move the needle.

Directory submissions
Listed Dirstarter on various startup directories. Minimal results.

The problem was that my target audience (indie hackers and developers wanting to build directories) is pretty niche. Generic marketing channels just didn't reach them effectively.

What Actually Worked

Two things ended up driving sustainable growth:

Affiliate marketing
I set up a 30% commission for affiliates. Yes, that's a big cut. But affiliates who are well compensated actually promote your product. I invested time building a partner network, reaching out to newsletter writers and indie hackers with relevant audiences.

Now affiliates do the marketing for me. I only pay when they drive a sale. Best ROI channel I've found.

I use Affonso as the affiliate system provider. I considered building my own, but decided it wasn't worth it.

SEO (slow but steady)
I started investing in content. Blog posts targeting keywords like "directory boilerplate," "Next.js directory template," comparisons with competitors. It's a long game, but traffic is slowly picking up.

The Path to 100 Customers

It took roughly 6 months to hit 100 customers, around August 2025.

The first month or two were strong thanks to OpenAlternative traffic and pent-up demand. Then growth slowed as I exhausted that initial audience. Months 3-5 were slower, relying on occasional X posts and early affiliate sales.

Once the affiliate network started gaining momentum and SEO began contributing, sales picked up again.

Current Numbers (February 2026)

• Total customers: 183

• Revenue: ~$5,000/month

• Traffic: ~3,000 monthly visitors to Dirstarter

• Pricing: $159 (Standard) / $199 (Pro with AI + community)

• Team: Just me. Solo founder, no employees.

Some directories people have built with Dirstarter:

• awesome.tools

• steps.org

• agenturscout.ch

Full showcase at dirstarter.com/showcase

Key Lessons

Your existing projects can become new products
I didn't plan to sell a boilerplate. It emerged from something I was already running. If people keep asking how you built something, that's a signal.

Code is not the moat
If your business depends on people not being able to copy you, you don't have a business. I stopped fighting copycats and started selling to them instead.

Initial demand can be deceiving
The first sales came easy because of existing audience. The real work was finding channels beyond that. Don't mistake early traction for product-market fit with a broader market.

Most marketing channels will fail
Reddit flopped. Paid posts flopped. Directory submissions flopped. You just need to find the one or two things that work for your specific audience.

Affiliate marketing works if you're generous
30% commission sounds painful, but it aligns incentives. Affiliates who make real money actually promote your product.

Connect with Piotr Kulpinski

• X

• GitHub

• kulpinski.dev

Piotr’s Products

• Dirstarter – Next.js boilerplate for directory websites

• OpenAlternative – Open source alternatives directory

• EuroAlternative – European alternatives to Big Tech

Meet Sampson Ovuoba.

Sampson is a Software Engineer and Product Builder based in Lagos, Nigeria.

He has always enjoyed building developer tools, and is drawn to products that remove friction from developer workflows and make it easier to ship high-quality applications.

Right now Sampson is focused on Windframe. He is working full time on the project with a friend.

Sampson Ovuoba - Founder of Windframe

The story told by Sampson Ovuoba

Frustration

My current product came out of a frustration I kept running into while building user interfaces.

Tailwind CSS was still quite new at the time, and I enjoyed working with it. I loved its defaults and consistency, but I still felt there was an easier way to build these interfaces. Translating visual ideas into clean, repeatable code took too much time and mental effort.

I wanted a way to design visually without losing ownership of the code. Something that respected how developers already think and work.

That idea became Windframe.

What is Windframe?

Windframe is an AI visual builder for Tailwind CSS that generates clean, production-ready code. You design visually and keep full control of the output. It is aimed at developers and designers, whether they have little or extensive knowledge of Tailwind, who want to generate high-quality UIs quickly without getting too deep into the code.

The homepage of Windframe

Building Windframe Was Incredibly Hard

Windframe is an extremely hard product to build.

I started working on it in January 2021, and the first usable version took over seven months to ship.

I rebuilt large parts of the app multiple times because they did not work as expected. Along the way, I had to learn much more about how browsers work underneath and build a custom rendering engine to handle different types of code and design. It took many failed attempts to arrive at something stable.

I’ve seen many people try to build tools like this and give up after a few weeks or months. It’s easy to create a quick demo, but once real users start using the app in unexpected ways, the complexity becomes overwhelming. That’s when you realize how deep the problem really is. Getting from “this looks cool” to “developers trust this in production” is where most people stop.

Launch and Early Signals

I launched on Product Hunt on July 2021 and shared the release on Reddit as well. Within about two days, Windframe had reached its first 100 users. Conversion was low at first, but the signal was strong. Developers were interested!

I got the first paid customer on launch day from Product Hunt and I still remember seeing the first $16 monthly subscription come through on launch day. After months of work, someone had decided the product was valuable enough to pay for. That moment felt really incredible.

Product Hunt launch

Early Mistakes and Lessons

In 2021 when no code was blowing up, I let some of that influence Windframe and built for the wrong audience. I later removed most of those features.

As mentioned I posted about Windframe on the developers subreddit on Reddit and it went kind of viral. I got a lot of helpful feedback and even new paying customers from that post.

That was when I finally understood the main audience for Windframe was developers. I used a lot of the feedback from that thread to improve Windframe, and that still shapes what Windframe is today.

What Worked

Some things clearly compounded over time.

Product Hunt and Reddit at launch

Both Product Hunt and Reddit helped get Windframe in front of the right audience early and also get the first 100 users.

Direct user feedback
Emailing users (example below) early and asking for feedback exposed real pain points. Those conversations consistently revealed more than analytics ever could. I still do this today.

Email to Windframe user

SEO and developer-focused content
Features on the Svelte blog, Dev.to, and similar platforms created steady, long-term traffic.

Improving onboarding
Early onboarding dropped users into a blank canvas. Adding guidance (example below) significantly improved signups and conversion.

Guidance on Windframe

What Didn’t Work

Some efforts simply didn’t pay off.

Facebook groups
Most groups were spam-heavy and brought low-quality users who didn’t convert or stick around.

Post about Windframe in a Facebook group

Paid ads
Facebook ads were too expensive. I was acquiring users at roughly 1.8x their lifetime value, which is unsustainable for a bootstrapped product.

Building features without validation
Several features I thought users would love saw little usage and were eventually removed.

Wins and Where Windframe Is Today

Today, Windframe has over 16,000 users and receives around 9,000 visits per month. It’s used by developers across different teams and countries to build real production interfaces.

Windframe analytics

I’ve seen Windframe featured on several blogs and developer publications over the years. At some point, a firm even reached out with interest in investing, but I chose to keep Windframe fully bootstrapped.

I’ve had developers from companies like a16z (Andreessen Horowitz) use Windframe for internal tools, which was surreal to see.

Email from a16z team

There have been many smaller wins that meant a lot. Developers sharing Windframe in communities. People recommending it in threads when someone asks for Tailwind tools. Users sending emails about how much time it saves them. Returning customers who have been using it for years.

Windframe has grown slowly through word of mouth, community posts, SEO, and consistent iteration based on user feedback.

Looking Forward

AI can now generate UI faster than ever, but speed isn’t enough. The real challenge is creating high-quality, consistent, and polished interfaces.

Windframe doesn’t just generate layouts, it helps create stunning, visually consistent UIs. It combines AI with the visual editor to make building great designs faster and easier, with built-in guardrails that guide quality.

Connect with Sampson Ovuoba

• X

• LinkedIn

Please note that Sampson has also started Brandframe (beta), a spin-off from Windframe. I It uses an agentic harness to extract a company's design system from their URL and generate new components that align with their brand guidelines. You input a website, it analyzes the styles, then creates on-brand designs as needed.

Meet Xavier Berard.

Xavier is 22 years old and lives in Montreal, Canada 🍁 He dropped out of his Computer Science degree to build Rewebly, an AI tool for website redesigns.

Xavier Berard - Founder of Rewebly

The story told by Xavier Berard

The Problem I Couldn't Ignore

Picture this: You've built something meaningful, a business, a brand, a vision. But your website doesn't reflect the quality of your work. It's outdated, clunky, and you know it's costing you opportunities. You reach out for redesign quotes: $8,000. $15,000. Timeline? Two to three months, minimum.

For most people, that's simply not an option.

Everywhere I looked, I saw talented people with legitimate businesses held back by websites that didn't do them justice. Not because they didn't care about their online presence, but because the traditional redesign process had become inaccessible.

The costs were prohibitive. The timelines were unrealistic. And most importantly, the process often meant starting from scratch, losing the brand identity and content that made each site unique.

I kept thinking: there has to be a better way to modernize a website while preserving what makes it authentic.

The Solution

I left college in January 2025 because this idea wouldn't let me go.

I spent months building Rewebly with a clear mission: create an AI, powered platform that could take any existing website and transform it into something modern and professional, while keeping its brand identity, content, and unique character intact.

The Rewebly homepage

This wasn't about generic templates or cookie, cutter designs. It was about intelligent redesign, understanding what makes a site work and elevating it to meet current standards.

The development was intense. Solo work, entirely bootstrapped, testing across hundreds of different websites to ensure the technology actually delivered on the promise.

The Launch That Validated Everything

On November 18th 2025, I launched Rewebly on Product Hunt.

Within 24 hours, I had 500 registered users.

Even more meaningful: I ranked #20 out of over 500 products launched that day, competing directly with launches from OpenAI, Google, and other major tech companies with massive teams and resources.

For a solo founder with zero marketing budget, this was validation that the problem was real and the solution resonated.

The response from users confirmed what I'd hoped: people weren't just signing up, they were genuinely excited about what the platform could do. Comments rolled in about redesigns completed in minutes that would have taken weeks through traditional channels.

Who Rewebly Serves

The platform works for anyone who needs their website to reflect the quality of their work:

• Startup founders who need professional presence quickly

• Agencies managing multiple client redesigns

• Freelancers delivering results without extensive overhead

• Established businesses ready to modernize without losing their brand

The core promise remains: your content stays, your brand stays, your identity stays, but everything gets elevated to modern standards.

Marketing on Zero Budget

Being completely bootstrapped meant getting creative with growth.

What worked:

• Product Hunt. I prepared thoroughly, engaged authentically with every comment, and let the product speak for itself

• Organic word-of-mouth. When users see their website transform in real time while maintaining their identity, they naturally share it

The biggest challenge? Breaking through the noise in a crowded SaaS landscape without paid advertising. Success required building something genuinely valuable and letting quality drive discovery.

The Business Model

Rewebly operates on a premium subscription model.

Users can try the platform with one free redesign to experience the value firsthand. After that, continued use requires a paid subscription. Access to exported production-ready code is also part of the paid offering.

The model is designed to let users validate results instantly, then pay only once they see clear value.

Rewebly pricing plans

Visitor Stats

So far 500+ registered users on Firebase and 1,800+ visitors on Vercel.

Rewebly visitor stats (from Vercel)

Revenue

I have about 10 paying customers on premium subscriptions.

Revenue is early but real, and it validates both the pricing and the demand. The current focus is improving conversion and distribution rather than maximizing short-term revenue.

Stripe screenshot below for revenues.

Stripe screenshot

Operating Costs

Current operating costs are intentionally lean:

• Domain: ~$20/year

• Infrastructure per redesign: ~$0.80 per job (AI + compute)

• No payroll (solo founder)

The main upcoming cost driver is marketing and collaborations, which I’ve started investing in to gain traction and strengthen Rewebly’s online presence.

What's Next

As mentioned I’ve surpassed 500 users and the momentum continues to build. Every day brings new feedback that shapes the product's evolution.

What drives me is knowing that someone today will transform their website in minutes, preserving what they've built while finally having an online presence that matches their ambition.

This is just the beginning.

Connect with Rewebly and Xavier Berard

• Email Xavier

• Rewebly on X

• Product Hunt launch

Meet Prince.

16-year-old Prince is based in India. He is running FoundrList with his brother.

The two brothers would like to keep things private for now. So no photos or full names shared in this story.

Foundrlist is a product discovery and launch platform designed as a modern alternative to Product Hunt. It is specifically built for indie makers, SaaS builders, and early-stage startup founders to gain continuous visibility for their digital products.

FoundrList is just Prince and his brother. No team. A bootstrapped duo.

What Prince might look like when blurred 🙂

The story told by Prince

The Why

My brother and I built FoundrList because we were sick of being invisible nobodies in the startup world. No jobs, no network, no nothing just two kids coding after homework, desperate for one real founder to talk to. X was a circus. LinkedIn was fake. Discord? Dead.

So we made the thing we needed: a calm, no-BS platform for indie makers to launch products, get steady discovery (not that one-day Product Hunt BS), rank weekly by category, add profiles, and actually connect with other builders. Simple submissions, AI help, zero hype, basics free.

We quietly launched October 4, 2025. Ugly MVP, no logins, manual everything. Shipped it anyway.

The FoundrList homepage

Marketing on Reddit

Reddit gave us a hard time. They banned us over 100 times. Posts deleted. Accounts shadowbanned. The whole nightmare.

Every time we tried to share genuinely "Hey, check this out if you're a builder" - BAM, gone. It felt personal. Like Reddit hates young founders trying to hustle. Exhausting. Unfair. Infuriating.

What didn't work on Reddit? Everything at first. Broad posts, looking too promotional, ignoring the insane rules. We were ready to quit. But we learned the hard way: value-first, niche subs, real comments, strict compliance.

Now we have found ways to post on Reddit without instant death - like the post below:

• What are you building? Let’s self promote (Reddit)

Mostly we do replies though, not posts. That’s the key after 100+ bans.

Marketing on X

By far we’re getting the most leads from X. Personal outreach in the DMs wins.

X DM example:

"Hey [Name], loving [their product]! Running foundrlist.com. A calm spot for steady discovery & founder chats. Add yours free if fits? [link] 🚀"

We send 20-50 a day. High conversion rate.

We also do outreach in our replies on X - example below.

Twitter tweet

The Business Model

Users can browse and submit for free. We got paid features for boosted ranking, AI listing tools, and featured profiles.

The Numbers

We have run zero paid ads. 100% bootstrapped.

In just 3 months (early January 2026), we're at 950 users (founders listing, engaging, building momentum), heading straight to 1,000.

Already pulled in $1,000+ revenue from early paid features.

Revenue from 5 Dec, 2025 - 4 Jan, 2026

We got ~5k weekly visitors, mostly from X + organic.

FoundrList web analytics

Our Advice

Screw the gatekeepers. If two teenage indie makers can survive 100+ bans, ship fast, and hit real traction... You don't need permission. You don't need age. You just need to fix your own pain and keep going.

Screenshots of FoundrList

FoundrList - Chat

FoundrList - Feed

FoundrList - Launch

Connect with Prince

You can reach both Prince and his brother on this X account @foundrceo.

Meet Zain Shoaib.

Zain is a seasoned digital marketing consultant from Helsinki, Finland with over 8 years of experience helping enterprise customers and SMB’s improve their growth.

He started his career as a Drupal developer but quickly shifted focus to digital marketing and SEO.

Zain has seen all the struggles and pain points in the industry. Now he sees the same massive opportunity in AI search that he saw in SEO at the beginning of his career. To capture this, he launched SEO Agento, a SEO AI agent SaaS that helps founders and SMBs increase traffic and conversions from Google and ChatGPT.

SEO Agento is not Zain’s full-time job. He also runs his own agency.

Zain Shoaib - Founder of SEO Agento

The story told by Zain Shoaib

AEO, GEO, and AI Search

Everyone is talking about AEO (Answer Engine Optimization), GEO (Generative Engine Optimization), and AI search.

It is being discussed even more than SEO was during its rise in the last decade. Founders, Business Owners, CEOs, and Marketing Managers have all been experimenting with LLMs. They trust ChatGPT like their best friend, so getting recommended and mentioned by an LLM is the new gold standard.

The Problem: LLMs Hallucinate Data

Initially, I created a service to help large businesses get more AI search visibility.

I built internal tools to handle keyword research, topical models, content clustering and strategy. The first versions were rough.

Even the most advanced LLMs still hallucinate frequently, especially if you rely purely on their own training data. This was particularly true for SEO tasks. The top models synthesized fake keyword volumes, made up technical SEO issues, and suggested strategies that sounded good in theory but were inefficient when looked at closely.

The Solution: A Verified SEO AI Agent

To fix this, I built systems where verified, real-world data was gathered first and then fed to SEO AI agents. With the help of LLMs, these agents then accurately orchestrated keyword research, topical models, content plans, and technical SEO audits.

As these internal tools proved successful, I started experimenting with creating shippable products using Bolt, Lovable and Replit.

I shipped around 8 apps. Many failed in distribution, or simply attracted free users who weren't willing to pay.

Then I launched SEO Agento. That was in October 2025. I built the first version in only 3 days.

The homepage of SEO Agento

I didn’t want to build just another content creation and auto-publishing wrapper, as the market was already flooded with those.

I wanted to create a team of autonomous SEO AI agents that handle keyword research, content planning, optimization and technical SEO, and lead generation all in the same platform. While I included the popular features of calendar planning and auto-publishing, the core value was the agentic workflow.

Marketing

I chose a "paid marketing first" approach.

Since organic growth takes time, I needed immediate users to validate the product and to identify my Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). I focused on 3 primary channels: Google, Meta and TikTok.

Here are my learnings:

Meta

I launched a CBO (Campaign Budget Optimization) campaign and fed it around 10 to 15 creatives (example below) with different marketing angles, including both still images and video ads.

With CBO, you don’t worry about manual targeting. You let the creatives do the targeting work for you.

If a creative didn't generate a signup in 2 days, I swapped it for a new angle. SEO Agento got first signups hours after launch and first trial signup the next day.

Ad creative for SEO Agento

I validated that this was the right channel for traffic but was careful not to scale spend too early.

Google

I set up a Google PMax (Performance Max) campaign. It’s an AI-powered goal-based campaign type that lets advertisers run ads across all of Google’s channels (eg. YouTube and Gmail).

I skipped traditional search ads because the CPCs (Cost Per Click) were too expensive.

Since I already had a strong batch of creatives from Meta, I fed them into PMax. Although PMax usually has a longer learning phase, signups started rolling in after just one week.

Campaign stats from Google

TikTok

I also experimented with TikTok. While it drove high engagement, it didn’t convert to traffic and signups as efficiently as the other two channels.

Results and Next Steps

SEO Agento gained around 2.6k signups, 50 active trials and reached €500 MRR in the first month post-launch.

SEO Agento visitor stats from Google Analytics

Paid ads often get a bad rap. Many founders boast about reaching four or five-digit MRR without them, usually because they already had a large following or spent months building organic traffic.

However, paid marketing can be your best friend for validation. After all, the most successful dropshippers hit six or seven figures solely because they learned how to find the winning product using paid ads. With the same method, you can "vibe code" prototypes and ideas to find your winning product faster.

For me there is still room to grow, but I am now shifting focus from paid acquisition to customer feedback to improve the product and drive organic growth. I will be working on:

• SEO blog articles

• Enhancing domain authority with high quality backlinks

• Reddit mentions

• AI search optimization

• Influencer collabs

For H1/2026 my target is 10k MRR with some outsourcing but mostly as a solopreneur. I’m looking for good long-term partnerships for growth beyond 10k MRR.

Screenshots From SEO Agento

SEO Agento - Topical Model

SEO Agento

SEO Agento - Domain Analytics

Connect with Zain Shoaib

You can find him here:

• X

• LinkedIn

To ensure your website performs in the AI search era, check out Zain's consultancy agency, Virtual Waves AI.

Meet Michael Barinov.

Michael was born in Belarus and now lives in Poland, where he specializes in building plugins for WooCommerce.

He has been working with WordPress for more than 10 years. He started out by learning the basics and taking on simple freelance jobs.

Later, Michael created several WordPress themes but eventually switched to plugins. Design was never his strongest skill, and back then the plugin ecosystem felt far less crowded.

Today, running and selling two plugins - Advanced Woo Search and Advanced Woo Lables - is his full-time job.

Michael Barinov - Founder of Advanced Woo Search and Advanced Woo Labels

The story told by Michael Barinov

My products

Today, I have two main WordPress plugins that generate most of my income: Advanced Woo Search and Advanced Woo Labels

Advanced Woo Search is almost 10 years old, while the initial version of Advanced Woo Labels was released in 2020.

The idea for Advanced Woo Labels came when I wanted to create a small WooCommerce plugin and see how it would perform. I already had Advanced Woo Search, which brought a steady cash flow, and simply wanted to build something new. The development, however, took longer than expected - around 6 months - and the plugin finally launched in mid-2020.

Advanced Woo Labels comes in two versions: free and paid. Technically, they are two separate plugins. The paid version includes more advanced features missing from the free one. It’s subscription-based and renews yearly - a standard pricing model for WordPress plugins.

Advanced Woo Labels

Marketing and sales

My main distribution channel has always been wordpress.org, the largest repository of free WordPress plugins. Users can search for almost any type of plugin here and install it for free.

The free version of Advanced Woo Labels has been available since day one. It can be used without any limits forever. If a user needs more advanced features, they can upgrade to the paid version. The free plugin includes a few promotional sections that inform users about the paid version.

Today, Advanced Woo Labels has over 10,000+ active free installs.

Promo banner inside the free version of Advanced Woo Labels

My first 100 customers came entirely from the free version on wordpress.org. Reaching that first milestone took around 16 months. Yes, that sounds long - mostly because I didn’t use any additional marketing channels besides the plugin repository.

When your plugin is new, it’s hard to gain visibility in the beginning.

But things change over time. If the first 100 customers took 16 months, the next 100 came within just 7 months. Here is a chart of Advanced Woo Labels sales from 2020 showing how the numbers have been steadily growing month by month.

Sales of Advanced Woo Labels

Currently, Advanced Woo Labels shows the following numbers:

Active paid customers: 350
Average MRR: around $1,800
Average monthly revenue: around $1,700

November 2025 reached an all-time high with $3,500 in revenue. Not bad for a small WordPress plugin.

Both revenue and MRR fluctuate quite a bit from month to month, mostly because of the annual subscription model and the availability of a lifetime license option.

The main marketing channel remains the same as always - the wordpress.org repository, where the free version of the plugin brings most of the visibility and conversions.

The plugin website contributes another ~15% of sales. Outside of that, I don’t use any other marketing channels.

Advanced Woo Labels screenshots

Customize labels text

Labels and labels groups

Labels display conditions

Labels positions

Advanced Woo Search screenshots

Archive pages search

Customize search results view

Search everywhere

Smart search

Connect with Michael Barinov

You can find Michael on X.

Meet Sebastian Mattsson.

Sebastian is a 19-year-old founder from Sweden who discovered entrepreneurship early on and fell in love with building things on the internet.

After years of digital marketing, design, and experimenting with online businesses, he stumbled into SaaS, and built Launchli using an AI coding tool.

Within 30 days of launching, he reached his first 100 users, completely organically.

Sebastian Mattsson - Founder of Launchli

The story told by Sebastian Mattsson

Distribution is hard

I’ve always loved building things, but previosly I often hit the same wall over and over again: I could build a product, but I couldn’t get people to try it out.

My first SaaS, Entrives, was built entirely using Lovable, the AI coding tool that basically gave me the power to build real applications without being a coder.

Lovable genuinely changed everything for me. It removed every technical barrier I had, and even led to the Lovable team inviting me to their HQ in Stockholm so I could show them what I’d built.

That moment pushed me deeper into SaaS.

But Entrives revealed the real problem:
Building the product was never the hard part. Distributing it was.

If nobody sees what you're building, nothing else matters. And I quickly realized I wasn’t alone.

So I built the tool I wished I had, and that’s how Launchli was born.

What is Launchli?

Launchli is an AI that distributes your product everywhere automatically. It analyzes your website, your audience, and your tone of voice, then tells you what to post, writes it for you, schedules it, and even finds people online who already have the problem your product solves.

The Launchli homepage

It handles distribution so founders can focus on building.

Understanding the problem

Before writing a single line of code, I talked to a lot of founders.

I asked:
“What’s the thing you struggle with the most when growing your SaaS?”

Almost everyone said the same thing:
“I don’t know how to or have time to market my product.”

This was the pain I felt myself, and it became the pain I built the solution for.

Those early conversations became my first users, because I built exactly what they described.

Building and lauching

I started building Launchli October 2025, and I have only launched the public beta so far, not the actual official launch yet.

Launchli is my full-time job. I finished high school here in Sweden in the summer of 2025 and since then I've went full out in my entrepreneur journey.

I am working on this completely solo for now. Once I get in more revenue I will start looking for potential hires and a co founder.

The business model

Launchli runs on a simple subscription model. Customers will be paying monthly to have their distribution handled for them instead of doing it manually.

The core idea is predictable, recurring revenue in exchange for saving customers (founders) a ton of time on visibility, while they focus on building the product itself.

Users from Reddit

Most of my early users came from Reddit, not because I was promoting anything, but because I was showing up (examples below) where founders and builders already were.

• I just hit $146 MRR with a SaaS I made with Lovable (Reddit)

• I hit 100 users for my SaaS in 30 days... ask me anything (Reddit)

I shared progress updates, lessons I was learning, small case studies, and insights that could help other early-stage SaaS creators.

My posts always followed the same principle:
Give real value first. Mention the product only when it naturally made sense.

That alone created a simple but extremely powerful funnel:

People read something useful → got curious → clicked my profile → visited my website → signed up.

Reddit rewarded authenticity and detail. Every time I shared something genuinely helpful, traffic spiked.

Reddit became my number-one engine without spending a cent.

Users from X

X wasn’t about virality for me, it was about presence. I posted what I shipped that day, what I learned, what broke, what I fixed, small wins, and small demos of features I was adding.

I talked openly about building the product, figuring out distribution, and the mistakes I made along the way.

Example posts below:

Twitter tweet

Twitter tweet

People follow consistency more than perfection.

Many users told me they signed up after silently watching my progress for days or weeks.

X didn’t explode overnight, but it created steady trust, which leads to conversions.

Users from LinkedIn

On LinkedIn I shared insights about marketing, distribution, and building with AI.

Example post below:

What a crazy week. Launchli just hit 100 users. We hit our first $100 MRR. And on top of that... I got invited to the Lovable HQ in Stockholm to demo Launchli and give direct product feedback to… | Sebastian Mattsson

What a crazy week. Launchli just hit 100 users. We hit our first $100 MRR. And on top of that... I got invited to the Lovable HQ in Stockholm to demo Launchli and give direct product feedback to their team. Still doesn't feel real. A few months ago, Launchli was only an experiment. Something I built because I was personally struggling with distribution and content, but it quickly became it's own product after seeing other founders facing the same problems. Fast forward today, and I'm sitting in a room with a team building one of the fastest moving products in the world, talking about the future of how people build and launch things. Huge thanks to the Lovable team for the invitation and the conversations. And of course, thank you to everyone who signed up, gave feedback, upgraded, and sent ideas. Let's keep this going 🚀 

www.linkedin.com/posts/sebastian-mattsson-4a9b65246_what-a-crazy-week-launchli-just-hit-100-activity-7402721552397455360-wxut

LinkedIn brought steady traffic and high-quality users because the intent is strong.

Users from outreach

I also reached out (mainly on Reddit, X, and LinkedIn) to people manually, but never with a sales pitch. Instead, I asked about their workflow, tried to understand their pain, and offered help where I could.

When the conversation naturally led to the problem Launchli solved, then I mentioned it. I would ask follow-up questions like:

• “How are you handling distribution right now?”

• “Do you post consistently anywhere?”

• “What’s been the hardest part about getting attention?”

This approach works because people don’t want cold pitches. They want someone who understands their struggle. And when your product actually solves that struggle, the conversation takes care of itself.

The key thing: it’s a conversation, not a pitch. If you jump straight to selling, people shut down. If you lead with curiosity and value, introducing your product feels natural instead of spammy.

Many of my early users came from these simple, genuine conversations.

Talking to users, especially the ones who churned

This was one of the biggest unlocks.

Instead of only talking to happy users, I talked to people who:

• Signed up and never used it

• Cancelled

• Got confused

• Expected something else

I had connections with a few people on the platforms i target, so I usally spoke with them there. If they were people that I have never spoken to before, I usally communicate with them through email. I have a newsletter that they get added to as soon as they sign up, and one automated email that get sent out 2-3 days later is a feedback question.

Their feedback shaped the product more than anything else. It’s what turned Launchli from a content tool into a distribution engine.

Dogfooding

Eventually, Launchli became my own growth engine.

It wrote my posts, scheduled everything, analyzed what worked, found conversations I should join, and told me what to do next.

I was using the product to grow the product, and that feedback loop made everything faster.

The more I used it, the more I learned what needed to be improved, and the better it got.

Where I am now

So, I started out without an audience. I didn’t run ads. I didn’t have money for any marketing.

I focused on one thing:
Show up where my users already hang out.

Launchli now has 100+ users, entirely through organic distribution. So far $146 MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue). Not much at the moment but it's growing quickly.

And I’m just getting started, improving the product, learning distribution every day, and sharing everything publicly so others can benefit from it too.

Advice to founders

Don’t overfocus on features. Your product isn’t the problem. Your distribution is.

If you consistently show up where your users already hang out, give value, and talk to people, you will get users, even with no audience, no ads, and no budget.

Screenshots from Launchli

Screenshot from Launchli - Dashboard

Screenshot from Launchli - Create posts

Screenshot from Launchli - SEO keywords

Screenshot from Launchli - Scheduler

Connect with Sebastian Mattsson

You’ll find Sebastian on these social platforms.

• X

• LinkedIn

Meet Shruta Satam.

Shruta is based in Sydney, Australia 🦘 After 18+ years in global risk management, leading at big banks and organizations such as Deloitte and PwC across the US and Australia, Shruta left the corporate world with a desire to create something that truly reflected who she is.

That decision led to Pustakh - a venture shaped not by hustle and grind, but by metaphysics, intuition, and identity-shifting. The startup is built on one simple belief: wisdom means nothing until you act on it.

Shruta is the co-founder and CEO of Pustakh. It’s her full-time job.

Shruta Satam - Co-founder and CEO of Pustakh

The story told by Shruta Satam

My journey

My journey began with an inner sense of something amiss - a quiet but persistent feeling of unalignment.

On paper, I had it all: three advanced degrees (BE, MSc, MBA) and a thriving career. Yet something still felt off. So, I turned inward, once again reaching for self-help books that had guided me through past crossroads.

That path organically led me into the world of metaphysical studies and noetic sciences, which explore how our outer world mirrors our inner one - and how practices like identity-shifting and living from the end can profoundly reshape one’s reality.

Through deep subconscious inquiry, the idea for Pustakh emerged - naturally and almost effortlessly.

What is Pustakh?

Pustakh (Sanskrit for books) distills the world’s best self-help books into 15-minute summaries with actionable steps. Each summary bridges the gap between reading and real transformation.

The Pustakh homepage

Our mission is to raise collective consciousness through the power of books. We believe in the philosophy of less noise, more wisdom - and we’re the only EdTech startup today that combines summaries with practical steps to apply what you learn.

The platform currently hosts 700+ highly curated summaries (with new titles added weekly) across 15 life streams such as personal growth, mindset & psychology, finance & wealth, health & wellness and much more.

You’ll find both trending self-help titles and esoteric gems - all united by one thing: they’re life-changing.

The team

I built Pustakh with my co-founder, Aditya Shah, who also brings 18+ years of experience in technology, engineering, and product leadership leading engineering teams, building complex systems, and driving innovation within high-performing corporate environments.

At Pustakh, he leads the entire technical vision, ensuring the platform remains fast, intuitive, stable, and ready for global scale. Together, we bring more than 35 years of combined corporate leadership experience and blend strategic expertize and technical excellence to create a platform focused on helping people learn faster, apply smarter, and grow consistently.

We are also currently in the process of building a small offshore team based out of Mumbai, India.

The business model

We are a subscription based business offering monthly basic or premium plans. Further details on the plans including the FAQ's can be found here.

The struggles and surprises

Our biggest challenge has been visibility in a noisy digital world.

Building a product people love was one thing - getting them to discover it was another. Along the way, we’ve learned to blend organic storytelling with targeted paid marketing.

We’ve experimented with Facebook ads (example below), collaborations on Instagram and X, seasonal promotions, and word-of-mouth marketing through early adopters and friends.

Facebook ad for Pustakh

Not everything worked - early ad campaigns lacked precise targeting - but each misstep clarified who our true readers are.

Collaborations like our recent one shown below with Booktasters (with over 80,000 followers on X) have amplified our reach and creative confidence.

Collaboration with Booktasters on X

What’s working now

Right now, authenticity and alignment are our strongest growth engines. Intuition is our number one business tool.

I’m personally appearing on several upcoming podcasts to share how metaphysics has shaped my entrepreneurial journey due to the high interest that others have shown in this area.

For me, this journey isn’t about metrics - it’s about proving that alignment can outperform hustle when your business is built from the inside out.

As the co-founder and CEO, I want to build and run this company in a very unique manner. I am a keen noetic sciences enthusiast and this has the tools and techniques that I wanted to use to run Pustakh. So that implies relying more on intuition rather than just logic to make business decisions.

For example, I lean on my intuition to shape decisions about upcoming releases, near-term priorities, and the direction we take next.

Same is true for the alignment angle. Any decision that we make has to be "aligned" to our core purpose and mission which is raising collective consciousness via the power of books and reading.

What we are finding is that this mindset is making us stand out as authentic and unique with our readers and is what has been resonating.

The stats

Launched in the latter half of 2025, Pustakh is on an exciting journey toward reaching its first 100 paying users - a milestone that feels both surreal and deeply satisfying.

Below you’ll see visitor stats to our website for an average day.

Pustakh visitor stats

What’s next?

We have recently released select audio summaries so that you can now hear your favorite self-help books on the go. Our next release will be focused on AI-powered journeys designed to personalize each reader’s growth experience.

The new Pustakh audio feature

We’re also deeply committed to bringing Pustakh to readers around the world and are actively working on making it available in multiple languages.

And personally, as a way of giving back, I’m also beginning to teach the metaphysical and noetic science principles that helped me build and scale Pustakh - guiding other entrepreneurs who are ready to leave the 9-to-5 and create from alignment instead of exhaustion.

Because when you build from inner alignment, you don’t chase success - you become the frequency that attracts it.

Screenshots from Pustakh

Screenshot from Pustakh

Screenshot from Pustakh

Screenshot from Pustakh

Connect with Shruta Satam

• X

• LinkedIn

• Linktree

Meet Divyanshu Mhatre.

Divyanshu is based in Mumbai, India. He is only 15 years old and has been obsessed with AI since the age of 9 (2019) - before ChatGPT even existed.

Currently he is growing Megalo, an AI learning platform.

Divyanshu Mhatre - Founder of Megalo

The story told by Divyanshu Mhatre

Inspired by Elon Musk

I was super inspired by Elon Musk's story from a Bloomberg video (below) I saw back then, when not everyone knew him like we do now.

My journey

While most kids my age are playing games, I'm building full AI applications without spending a single penny. My journey started at 13 during the AI boom, and starting early was my best decision.

At 14, I co-founded Impic Tech Community with my 17-year-old partner Zaid. Impic was a tech community for people to share resources, experience and providing help.

We got 500+ members in three weeks with 5 team members.

Everyone was shocked that one of the co-founders was still in school while they were in college or working at top institutes 🙂 This experience taught me that age could be an advantage, not a limitation.

What is Megalo?

After learning from my community experiences, I started building Megalo solo in June 2025.

The Megalo homepage

Megalo is a dual-purpose AI learning platform:

The AI playground

One part is an AI playground where users create flashcards, generate note summaries, chat with AI, plus upload unlimited documents and images - all completely free.

The tool directory

The other part is a tool directory featuring 1,200+ curated tools (with AI-powered search).

The tech stack

I mainly used v0 and the Cursor AI IDE to build Megalo. I built and hosted the initial structure on v0, and used Cursor for subsequent code edits and generation.

I work on a really old 4GB RAM, no-GPU PC, so it is hard to deploy directly through my PC. I use the free Gemini API for the AI part and got the domain using the GitHub Student Developer Pack free for 1 year.

Everything built using only free resources without spending a single $, while managing school too.

The business model

Right now I am not monetizing the site - it’s free forever.

But I do collect users emails from users who use the app. I am planning to launch a newsletter off of it at some point. It’s going to focus on useful niche tools and their usecases.

Marketing

Something incredible happened when I started sharing my journey authentically online.

I began getting attention from major industry figures and influential tech leaders. David Holtz, founder of Midjourney even follows me on X. This taught me that being genuine about your story, regardless of age, resonates with people who matter.

The “young person privilege” was real, and sharing my learning process opened connections I never expected.

My biggest breakthrough: 100k+ collective views in my first 3 days on Reddit.

Since the launch of Megalo in Juni 2025, and in just 4-5 weeks of marketing through X (launch tweet below) and Reddit (launch post below), I achieved 3,000 total visitors and 170+ email signups.

Twitter tweet

A post on Reddit

As I always say, "Never stop believing in yourself and keep learning.”

Thank you for reading my story.

Connect with Divyanshu Mhatre

Divyanshu is active on X. Reach out to him.

Meet Jay Stockwell

Jay Stockwell is based in Queensland, Australia 🦘 He is a marketer, builder, and psychology geek who’s spent the last 20 years at the intersection of tech, behavioral science, and growth.

His thing has always been scaling businesses through smarter systems, not louder marketing.

He co-founded Beeline, a U.S. digital mortgage company that flipped the home-loan process on its head.

These days Jay focuses on MagicBlocks. He is the co-founder. MagicBlocks are building AI sales agents that actually sell. More on that below.

Jay Stockwell - Co-founder of MagicBlocks

The story told by Jay Stockwell

What is MagicBlocks?

MagicBlocks is a platform that lets builders and agencies create AI sales agents - a full-funnel revenue engine.

Instead of just answering questions, MagicBlocks agents engage, qualify, and convert leads across chat, SMS and, coming soon DMs, and voice. They respond in under five seconds, remember past interactions, and move prospects toward real outcomes like booked calls or closed deals.

It’s built for the people who build for others - automation agencies, CRM pros, and technical marketers who want control over logic, tone, and integrations.

The MagicBlocks homepage

Drop in your URL, and MagicBlocks builds an emotionally intelligent AI Agent that looks and sounds like your best sales rep: same tone, same pitch, same instinct to close. It handles objections, books calls, and turns website traffic into actual revenue while you sleep.

Under the hood, it’s powered by the $200M sales framework I’ve refined over two decades - a mix of psychology, persuasion, and automation that’s helped businesses capture more leads and close faster. The goal? Make AI feel human - the kind of tech that sells, not just talks.

Across every project I’ve been working on, my mission’s been the same: build tech that thinks like people - not the other way around. 

That’s what we’re doing with MagicBlocks: turning websites into living, breathing sales machines built on real behavioral science.

Watch a short MagicBlocks demo below.

Building and launching

I (now we’re 16 people in the team) started building MagicBlocks in early 2023 - out of pure frustration.

Every so-called “AI agent” I tried claimed to sell but couldn’t. They were glorified chat widgets - polite, robotic, and built to end conversations, not close them. Meanwhile, great businesses kept losing sales simply because nobody replied fast enough. A lead would ask a question… then wait. Silence.

So I asked: What if AI could actually sell?

By May 2023, we’d built the first working prototype - a mortgage AI agent that didn’t just answer rate questions, it converted. It handled objections, booked calls, and responded in under five seconds. The results were insane: 6× more qualified leads and 24/7 engagement.

We went live in August 2023, and it’s been scaling ever since.

The first 100 users

It took a few weeks to reach our first 100 users - but it wasn’t some viral spike or launch-day explosion. It was steady, intentional growth built through real conversations.

Most of those early users came from my network of founders and agency partners - people who’d seen what we were building and wanted in.

I also ran live product demos, showing exactly how an AI sales agent could qualify leads and book calls in real time. From there, word of mouth kicked in. Early adopters started sharing their results, and the momentum built naturally.

We even used MagicBlocks on our own site to capture users - it replied instantly, qualified visitors, and booked calls automatically.

Those first 100 users were proof the system worked.

Marketing struggles

My biggest struggle has been differentiation.

Everyone’s suddenly launching “AI agents,” but most of them are glorified chat widgets that answer FAQs and stop there.

Explaining that MagicBlocks was built to sell - to actually engage, qualify, and convert - took real storytelling. Once people saw it in action, they understood instantly, but getting them to that moment of clarity took work.

Traditional SaaS tactics fell flat. Launch pages, paid funnels, and feature lists didn’t resonate with our audience.

Our users are builders and agencies - they don’t want hype, they want to see the use case and proof. Once I shifted from polished marketing to raw demos, real conversations, and behind-the-scenes content, growth started compounding.

The numbers

Right now, MagicBlocks is powering a growing community of 473 active users - from solo founders to full-scale agencies.

What’s exciting is how diverse that group has become. We’ve got mortgage lenders, real estate teams, marketing agencies, and service-based businesses all using MagicBlocks to turn traffic into conversations and conversations into booked calls.

The business model

MagicBlocks uses a simple SaaS monthly subscription structure where businesses choose a plan based on how many conversations, agents, and channels they need.

Every plan gives access to our AI sales agents that remember leads, personalise conversations, and drive conversions 24/7.

The MagicBlocks Partner Program

I would like to end my story with a bit of promotion for our partner program. It’s designed for agencies, builders, and automation experts who want to offer AI Sales Agents as part of their client services.

Instead of just using MagicBlocks for your own business, the MagicBlocks partner program lets you build and sell fully branded AI agents across multiple clients - with revenue share built in.

Partners get access to private training, early product releases, and our full library of sales frameworks, so they can scale faster without reinventing the wheel.

It’s become one of the fastest-growing parts of MagicBlocks because it gives agencies real leverage - they can launch AI-powered sales systems for clients in hours instead of weeks, and grow recurring revenue while doing it.

MagicBlocks screenshots

MagicBlocks screenshot: Agent builder

MagicBlocks screenshot: Multi-promt sales journey

MagicBlocks screenshot: Lead transfer to email or CRM

MagicBlocks screenshot: Knowledge base

MagicBlocks screenshot: Sales playbook

Connect with Jay Stockwell

If you want to connect, collaborate, or see how MagicBlocks can power your next campaign, please reach out to Jay anytime.

You can email MagicBlocks, or connect with Jay directly on LinkedIn.  He is always up for talking about growth, automation, and what’s next in AI sales.

Meet Jack Fiallos.

Jack is a computer science engineer specialized in software development.

He was born in Nicaragua, lived most of his adult life in Mexico, and eventually moved to Ireland, where he now lives with his family.

Jack spent over 20 years building software: backend systems, architecture, databases, security, mobile apps, microservices, and leading engineering teams as a CTO. He used to play basketball and rugby, but after a few injuries he decided to pause competitive sports and focus fully on his craft.

These days Jack is focused on Deeditt, a tool to document your life experiences and build journeys that matter.

Jack Fiallos - Founder of Deeditt
(for some reason, playing with tape on his nose)

The story told by Jack Fiallos

Before Deeditt

Before Deeditt, I built multiple products. The most notable being LeventoCRM (sold) and Offertame (no longer live). Both had real potential, but I eventually abandoned them after one or two years because I felt I hadn’t found the right niche or traction.

Strangely, months or years later, I watched similar products succeed with only slight changes, but with much better distribution.

That taught me a hard truth: I didn’t fail because of engineering. I failed because of marketing and patience (or lack of it).

I built great products but didn’t know how to get them into people’s hands. I wasn’t searching the right channels, and I didn’t yet understand the power of consistency and distribution.

This time, with Deeditt, I promised myself I wouldn’t make the same mistake.

Deeditt started as a side project I built every morning from 4–6 AM, right after the gym and before my full-time job. After more than a year of balancing both, I decided to quit my job a few months ago and make Deeditt my main focus (while still helping part-time with previous commitments).

What is Deeditt?

Deeditt is a story-driven social journaling platform where users document their real experiences through:

• Deeds → small reflections, moments, lessons

• Journeys → collections of deeds forming a narrative (like microblogging)

It sits between a private journal and a calm social network:

• Fully private entries

• Community-only posts

• Optional public storytelling

• A 5-year private journal blended with bullet journaling

• Zero algorithms, no manipulations

• Strong SEO for discoverability

• Membership-based, no ads, no investors

Deeditt is a quiet digital home for honest stories in an increasingly artificial internet.

The Deeditt homepage

The big why

The idea came from observing the same problem everywhere:

People speaking confidently about things they’ve never lived.
People giving advice without any real experience.
People fabricating stories because online there’s no way to validate truth anymore.

Then AI exploded - making it even easier to generate synthetic photos, synthetic texts, synthetic identities. I felt like the internet was slowly losing its humanity.

I wanted a place where truth still mattered.
Where experiences - not polished performances - were preserved.
Where memories didn’t vanish into the algorithmic noise.

I’ve always been deeply curious about how people actually face challenges, overcome problems, and achieve real success - the parts nobody shows. I wanted a place where you could learn from true stories, understand different perspectives, and see the angles that usually stay hidden.

And just as importantly, a place that encourages people to be emotionally healthy by writing, expressing themselves, and making sense of their experiences.

Deeditt is my attempt to rescue the human side of the internet.

Building

I started building Deeditt late 2023. I spent about a full year building it while employed, coding every morning. I built the backend, microservices, notifications, mobile app, and eventually the full web platform.

React Native evolves constantly, so part of the work is keeping everything updated and stable.

Launching

I launched the app early 2024 but it was only used by close friends and family who helped me to test it. By the end of 2024 I was ready to face the public and that’s when the real challenge started.

The first 100 users

It took me almost a year to get to the first 100 users.

Reaching my first 100 users has been one of the hardest challenges I’ve ever faced. Building the platform was easy compared to:

• Marketing

• Distribution

• Persuading people to try something new

• Keeping users engaged and innovating while maintaining everything running

This challenge taught me more about myself than any engineering job ever did.

A key insight: People crave honesty but fear being judged for it.

The private journal (5-year timeline + bullet journaling) is becoming one of the most appreciated features.

The numbers

• Under 200 registered users

• 1,941 unique visitors on the main website in the last 90 days

• 1,747+ blog visitors in the same period

• Combined: ~3,600+ website/blog visitors every 3 months

• SEO slowly improving (Domain Rating 4, 56 referring domains)

• Mobile installs are modest (50+ on Play Store, similar on iOS), but most users prefer the web

• Session duration remains high - users read deeply

• Most users write privately, driven by fear of judgment

Deeditt numbers

Marketing

I’m completely bootstrapped, zero paid ads. I now believe avoiding paid ads early on may have slowed growth, something I may revisit soon.

What did NOT work?

“Building in public” posts and talking to the wrong people has been a major issue.

At first I used social networks to talk about authenticity - but those platforms are increasingly automated, AI-filled, and optimized for superficial engagement. I was promoting depth inside places built for noise. I quit socials for a while. And predictably, traffic dropped.

Same thing with Medium, the algorithm buried my posts. I wrote 51 articles. Some reached 100+ claps or more, others stayed at 0. I never found a consistent niche or voice on Medium.

My ego didn’t like that, so I quit, but recently I understood:

It’s not about applause. It’s about visibility and presence.

This shifted my entire mindset about distribution. Deeditt was never meant to be viral - and that’s okay. I don’t expect reflective people (like my audience) to behave like typical social-media users.

I still have a Deeditt profile on the following social platforms though:

• X

• Threads

• Mastodon

• Bsky

• Instagram

Additionally, I didn’t have much luck with launch announcements and promoting free plans (users didn’t take it seriously).

What DID work?

Now I focus on slow-growth channels, that align with Deeditt’s philosophy. This requires a strict weekly writing discipline on my part 🙂

I do a lot of blogging and SEO work - like the Deeditt blog.

I provide content to journaling communities - like these:

• I Don’t Want Virality, I Want Truth (Startup Stash)

• Success Online Is Changing: What Actually Matters When Everything Can Be Automated (Indie Hackers)

On Reddit I’m active mostly in journaling, writing, and self-improvement subreddits.

Other than that I take part in micro-niche communities:

• Journaling circles

• Writing accountability groups

• Slow-living communities

• Indie-maker spaces

• Private Discord writing groups

These brought meaningful conversations, even if not large-scale traffic.

Platform/audience learnings

Working with the Deeditt platform and getting feedback from the users has taught me the importance of focusing on:

• Long-form storytelling

• Consistent blogging

• Strong SEO structure

• Offering a private, safe journaling space

• 1:1 conversations with early adopters

• Membership pricing

• Slow, steady compounding

Users stay because the environment feels calm, safe, and sincere.

Deeditt recently introduced a subscription membership, but the platform is still largely free to use.

Most of the core experience like writing deeds, building journeys, sharing journeys, reading stories, commenting and using the web version, remains free. The membership unlocks advanced features and helps support the long-term sustainability of the product.

Adding an optional membership helped increase user commitment while still keeping the platform accessible to anyone who wants to write or reflect.

Jack and his wife Eury

Lessons learned in 2025

Building is easy; selling is emotional
20 years of engineering didn’t prepare me for distribution.

Ego kills visibility
Medium humbled me. Social networks humbled me, both became teachers.

Every digital footprint matters
Even a post with zero likes improves discoverability.

Free is not valued
Users take things more seriously when they pay.

The internet is becoming synthetic... humans still crave truth
This is the mission of Deeditt.

Slow growth ≠ failure
I’m building a foundation, not chasing spikes.

Running everything for under $200/month is my engineering advantage
It lets me survive long enough to iterate.

Connect with Jack Fiallos

Reach out to Jack. He is a nice guy.

• Email

• X

• jackfiallos.com (personal website)

Meet Eliana Jordan.

Eliana Jordan is a dive instructor who learned to code. She worked for a bit as a developer but quickly ran to build her own products.

She lives around the world in hot places where she can scuba dive or kitesurf.

The last two years she has spent coding, bootstrapping her products, and experimenting with building things fast.

Eliana Jordan

The story told by Eliana Jordan

Starting out

My journey started from frustration: overpriced tools, repeated boilerplate setups, and the endless hunt for diving courses. That frustration turned into a series of products that solve my problems (and hopefully others’ too).

My products

I currently focus on the three products below. They all went live in 2025.

SEOZast

SEOZast is built to simplify SEO for founders tired of expensive, clunky tools.

SEOZast homepage

PeerQuik

PeerQuik is a next.js boilerplate to launch SaaS quickly, ready for both C2C and B2C setups. Perfect for solo founders who want to ship fast.

PeerQuik homepage

Be Underwater

Be Underwater is a platform for divers to explore, learn, and book experiences without wasting hours searching for dive courses.

Be Underwater homepage

SEOZast was built in 10 days in May 2025. PeerQuik took a few weeks. Be Underwater, my biggest project, took a year of development.

My approach is simple: I build things I would use myself. This means I skip long market research - if I’m the target user, I already know the problems that need solving.

Marketing

SEOZast

For SEOZast, I got the first paying users within a week promoting on X. Example post below.

Twitter tweet

It is growing quickly. My free keyword generator tool has around 5,000 monthly visitors and almost 300 users (paid and free).

PeerQuik

PeerQuik is built on the PeerQuik boilerplate.

It filled a real gap in the market. There were almost no B2C-ready boilerplates when I launched it, and founders wanted something they could use to build fast without starting from scratch.

Consistent visibility also helped growth. Every time I published a YouTube tutorial, I showcased PeerQuik in action, and the addition of the B2B boilerplate brought even more organic interest from builders looking for a complete setup.

Be Underwater

Be Underwater managed to onboard 100 dive centers just from cold emails.

I scraped public websites to collect dive center information (watch my YouTube tutorial). I used AI to craft clear and friendly emails, and responded as a fellow instructor, which created trust.

I also included short videos demonstrating how the platform worked, making the signup process extremely simple and lowering friction for busy dive centers.

Since it’s a niche market, the best channels were Instagram and TikTok. Example posts below.

Instagram post

All three platform combined

Additionally my social media (X, YouTube, newsletter) has grown steadily, adding another stream of revenue and feedback.

Example of one of my YouTube videos below.

I grew my X audience from 0 to 15k in 10 months. Being on X also taught me to launch fast, iterate publicly, and avoid overthinking perfection.

My marketing in general has been completely organic - no paid ads.

My MRR is still low, around $200 from my SaaS business.

Challenges

Marketing solo is hard, especially as a developer. Building an audience while building the product has been key.

What’s next

On SEOZast I’m working on adding more free tools, automations, and improving long-tail keyword features.

On Be Underwater I’m expanding into liveaboards and dive travel experiences.

Also - I’m creating some new apps 🙂

My advice

My advice to fellow founders: launch fast, build what you would use, and document your journey. Grow an audience.

Momentum compounds, and building in public creates your first customers while you’re still coding.

Connect with Eliana Jordan

You’ll find Eliana on a lot of social platforms.

• X

• TikTok

• YouTube

• Instagram

Meet Arif Hossain.

Arif is a software developer (and indie hacker) from Bangladesh.

Learn how he has grown RetroUI, a NeoBrutalism styled React + TailwindCSS UI library.

Arif Hossain - Founder of RetroUI

The story told by Arif Hossain

Starting out

At the beginning of 2024, I started my indie hacking journey - building side projects and documenting them on YouTube, where I shared the technical side of what I was working on.

As I kept experimenting, I wanted to create unique UIs for my projects. I started looking into different design systems, and that’s when I stumbled upon neo-brutalism and fell in love with it.

I wanted to build my websites in that style, but couldn’t find any library that matched what I had in mind. So, I decided to build my own.

In September 2024, I made my first commit to what would later become RetroUI. I had no plans to monetize it! It was just an open-source side project I was passionate about. A month later, in October, I announced it publicly and shared it on my YouTube channel.

The response surprised me. The project quickly hit around 100 GitHub stars in the first couple of weeks. Nothing crazy, but it felt validating that people were into it.

After that, I kept adding new components here and there, and RetroUI slowly kept growing. By early 2025, it had passed 300+ GitHub stars.

The RetroUI homepage

Launching RetroUI Pro

As more and more people started using the open-source version, I wanted to see if anyone was willing to pay for this. So in April 2025, I launched RetroUI Pro, starting with just 30 premium UI blocks, priced at a $99 lifetime fee.

At the time, I had zero expectations. But to my surprise, I got one sale in the first month… and three more in the second. That validated the product!

But the problem was, at that time, I was still juggling other projects and not putting much effort into RetroUI. So, as the launch hype wore off, the next month’s sales dropped to zero.

Meanwhile, my other projects weren’t going anywhere either. So I made the call to scrap everything else and go all in on RetroUI.

I publicly challenged myself to reach $100K in revenue with RetroUI and to post a weekly YouTube video documenting the journey.

Twitter tweet

Once I started putting all my focus on RetroUI, things started to accelerate. I started shipping more, posting more, and talking about RetroUI wherever I could - on YouTube, X, and Reddit (examples below). And slowly, sales started coming back.

Twitter tweet

Twitter tweet

• RetroUI - a shadcn based component library, inspired by neo brutalism (Reddit link)

• I took your feedback and made the best React admin template! (Reddit link)

As of October 2025, RetroUI has grown to around 1,000 GitHub stars and 28 Pro customers, generating about $2.7K in total sales.

Below is my visitor stats for the RetroUI of the past 12 months.

Visitor stats for RetroUI

Marketing and growth

I’ve done zero paid marketing so far. Everything has been completely organic.

Here are a few things that worked for me:

Being open source

All the core RetroUI components are free and open-source. People are much more likely to try, share, and even contribute to open projects - and that’s how RetroUI got its early users.

Those who are happy using just the core components stay on the OSS version, while people who need extra UI blocks, templates, and Figma kit upgrade to RetroUI Pro.

RetroUI Pro

Making content

As mentioned, I have been posting tech content on YouTube. Over the past 1.5 years, I posted 100+ videos!

Every now and then, I make a video (example below) on my channel where I can feature/talk about RetroUI.

Building in public

When I started the $100K challenge, I decided to post one video every week, sharing everything I’m doing to reach the goal.

Check out my YouTube playlist.

A lot of people discover me through these videos, and some of them check out my product and become users.

Being active in tech communities

I try to be active on X tech communities, as that’s where many of my target customers are.

So whenever I’d find a discussion related to UI Libraries, I’d just engage there, and if there’s an opportunity, I’d just include my product link (example below).

My product link in a post

Keep shipping!

Entrepreneurship is HARD, and it takes time!

It took me 8 months to make my first dollar from RetroUI, and another 6 months after that to cross $2.5K+ in total sales.

There were plenty of moments where it felt like nothing was working, but every small update, every video, and every post slowly added up. And even now, when I get fewer sales, it stresses me out. And I keep telling myself:

Keep shipping. The momentum always catches up eventually.

Connect with Arif Hossain

• X

• YouTube

Meet Sanjay Singh.

Sanjay is a 27-year-old Indian national currently residing in Dubai, UAE.

Previously he built Xpired and scaled it to about $500k in domain inventory.

Currently he is focused on Radarkit, an AI visibility tracker.

Sanjay Singh - Founder of Radarkit

The story told by Sanjay Singh

What is Radarkit?

Radarkit shows how your brand or pages appear in large language models and AI tools.

It tracks visibility and ranks across LLMs (Large Language Models). Think of it as rank tracking after SEO, AEO (Answer Engine Optimization), and GEO (Generative Engine Optimization).

You can study the replies and citation data to learn why your brand is missing. You can then use our content and keyword tools to make content that ranks better in LLMs.

The homepage of Radarkit

Starting out

I started Radarkit with my brother, Shubham Singh, in August 2025. Not my full time job. I have other software and services projects going on.

We launched in September 2025.

In two months we reached 100 users. Most came from one trip to Shenzhen SEO Conference. We talked to many SEO folks, gave free trials, and asked them to try the product. That helped fast.

From the Shenzhen SEO Conference
From left to right, Sharoz, Sanjay (me), Aditya , Shubham (my brother), Abhishek

Marketing that worked

In terms of marketing the Shenzhen trip has been the single biggest win. Meeting people in person and getting them to test the tool gave fast feedback - and real users.

We also had some success running this YouTube channel and posting on LinkedIn.

Additionally we have gotten some traffic from public talks. Cannot provide links to them as they were mostly over Zoom.

Marketing that didn’t work

Our biggest marketing struggle has been getting people to actually try the product after signup. Many people sign up and then do not use the tool. Turning signups into active users is my main focus right now.

We also haven’t had much luck with sending personal DMs. Cold messages in inboxes rarely led to a trial or any real engagement. I have a feeling it usually went into spam.

The numbers

So far we’ve had 150 plus signups. About 20 paying users. Growth is steady - but early.

Below you’ll see web traffic for the Radarkit website.

Web traffic for Radarkit

Radarkit screenshots

Radarkit screenshot

Radarkit screenshot

Radarkit screenshot

Radarkit screenshot

Contact Sanjay Singh

Reach out to Sanjay on these channels:

• LinkedIn

• Email

Interested in trying out Radarkit? Sanjay is offering af 90% off coupon code for Fake Mayo readers.

Use this code: FAKEMAYO90

Meet Louis Lesavre.

Louis is 35, based in the south of France 🍷, working remotely for a few years while raising his two girls.

He has spent over 15 years in tech across the U.S. and France with roles at companies such as Nissan, Toyota, and Renault in autonomous vehicle technology and later at Ledger in crypto.

Louis is passionate about user experience, and as a skateboarder at heart, he has always been driven to carve his own path.

He did just that building StackNinja and AI Leads.

Louis Lesavre - Founder of StackNina og AI Leads

The story told by Louis Lesavre

These days I’m focused on building a portfolio of apps that let me move around with my family, push my limits, and shape my own future. I work alone. Doing everything myself.

I want to share how I arrived here, how I taught myself to code, built StackNinja and Ai Leads, and even turned down a $1,500,000 valuation offer after only three months in.

The turning point

After years in big tech and crypto, I realized something important: building great tech is only half the battle. The other half is getting it into the hands of people who need it.

I’d seen countless projects stall, features die, and brilliant solutions vanish because of poor marketing or weak user connection.

When I left the corporate world, I wanted to build something where I could apply both my tech experience and my growth mindset. I wanted to help businesses and individuals with tools I genuinely believed in while working remotely, spending time with my kids, enjoying life in the south of France, and keeping that skateboarder mentality: agile, fearless, and always learning new tricks.

StackNinja, a personal wellness vision

My first product, StackNinja, was born out of frustration with the chaos of the wellness and supplement industry. Too many generic claims, too little personalization.

StackNinja is an AI-driven personal wellness platform that empowers individuals to build customized supplement and lifestyle stacks based on their blood biomarker data, health goals, and scientific research.

Homepage of StackNinja

It integrates lab results and provides precise, evidence-based recommendations for nutrition, sleep, stress, recovery, and longevity.

I started building StackNinja from scratch in May 2025 with zero professional coding experience. I learned JavaScript, brushed up on DevOps, and began iterating fast.

StackNinja went live on August 25th, 2025, and got its first three paying users on launch day.

Then growth plateaued. Despite product improvements, traction slowed. A great product isn’t enough. You also need a system to reach your audience.

Learning growth the hard way

I should have known better, but I made the classic indie hacker mistake: thinking “the product is great, people will come”.

They didn’t.

I posted a few times on social media (examples below) but got little traction.

I was posting to people I knew, who were indie hackers themselves and the impact was absolutely null.

Twitter tweet

Twitter tweet

What I was missing was small business lead generation, lead enrichment, and a proper lead generation pipeline.

That’s when I discovered the power of niche communities on Reddit (example post below), Facebook Groups, and LinkedIn forums.

Which of these supplements is worth actually having for better erection strength / lower refractory / higher libido? (Reddit)

Real people, real discussions, real opportunities. I learned how to sell on Reddit, not by spamming, but by adding value first, answering questions, and subtly positioning my product.

I realized Reddit marketing, Facebook group marketing, and B2B lead generation on LinkedIn weren’t just tactics. They were scalable ways to build trust and reach real users.

That’s how the idea for Ai Leads was born.

How I automated lead generation

Ai Leads, my second product launched on November 1st, 2025.

Ai Leads is an AI-powered inbound lead generation platform that turns niche communities into customers. It automates Reddit marketing, Facebook group marketing, and B2B lead generation on LinkedIn to build a powerful lead generation pipeline.

Homepage of AI Leads

It gives users a content roadmap, human-like AI posts, and real-time lead enrichment while boosting visibility across AI-powered search engines. It streamlines digital marketing and lead generation, competes with top lead generation companies, and offers lead generation automation and outsourcing-style power at a fraction of the cost.

When I tested Ai Leads to promote StackNinja, the results blew me away.

Without spending a cent on ads, I got five paid trials and inbound interest from several mid-sized companies asking when the Pro plan would launch.

Ai Leads saw 300 visitors on day one, all organic.

I knew I had built something real.

Inside AI Leads

Why these products exist together

From autonomous vehicles to crypto, I learned two key lessons.

1. Build for the user because great UX is everything.

2. Growth must be designed in, because even the best product dies in silence.

StackNinja embodies the first lesson with intuitive design, transparent science, and a human touch. Ai Leads embodies the second with automation, visibility, and scalability.

Together, they form my ecosystem and a self-reinforcing growth engine.

More marketing

I’m bootstrapping both products, focusing on SEO, community marketing, and automation rather than ads.

In terms of search engine optimization I’m heavily invested in programmatic SEO. I have a script running that posts a new blog post every day around my keywords.

I am also planning to build free tools and I am positioning content all over niche social media platforms (using AI Leads) which is the heart of my GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) strategy.

As mentioned Reddit became my secret weapon. Now I’m doubling down on Medium, Substack, and soon YouTube to share the journey.

I am at the start on Medium and Substack. I still need to automate content creation on these plateforms with AI Leads.

Currently I am writting manual blog posts.

The numbers so far

Below is a PostHog graph of the last 90 days traffic for StackNinja.

The spike is for my launch on TinyLaunch, then the trough and plateau until I started using AI Leads to advertise on Reddit (mostly).

Landing page traffic for StackNinja

Below is my DataFast graph of my prelaunch performance with AI Leads.

Very limited marketing so far and still got $49 in revenue, traffic, many signups, and a lot of feedback. Looks very promising 🙂

Performance of AI Leads

I’ve also seen solid DR (Domain Rating) progress for AI Leads. It went from 0 to 26 in about a week's time, which is amazing (to circle back to my focus on SEO).

DR and health score for AI Leads

Saying “No” to VC money and why

Something unexpected happened recently: my little startup was valued at $1,500,000.

A VC reached out with a pre-seed offer, and I said no.

Here’s why:

• I ventured into indie hacking to have full ownership of my products. After 15 years building software for others, I’m betting entirely on myself now.

• Any pre-seed deal will undervalue what your project could become if you’re driven. That’s normal since VCs take on high risk early. But if you don’t need capital to start, it’s wise to refuse. Leave ego aside.

• My goal is to build a diversified portfolio of apps, not pour everything into one bet. Raising funds means being accountable for someone else’s time, and I value freedom more than speed.

• StackNinja is already on track to be worth over 1.5 million dollars, and I’m embracing bootstrapping to experience the journey fully.

• I’m now developing Ai Leads, a B2B app designed to automate the sales of StackNinja by leveraging niche communities like Reddit, Facebook Groups, LinkedIn, and others.

Saying no to the VC round doesn’t mean I’ll never raise funds, but for now, staying free feels right.

Me being a dad and an entrepreneur

That’s the beauty of indie hacking. You choose your path.

Connect with Louis Lesavre

You can connect with Louis on X, or subscribe to his YouTube channel. He is sharing the full indie hacker journey, bootstrapping, experimenting, automating, failing, learning, and building freedom.

Meet Sergio Pulido.

Sergio is from Spain. He founded his first company almost a decade ago (2015’ish) and hasn’t stopped building since.

He has created projects as different as an online English academy (sold), a digital advertising agency (sold), and most recently a platform for newsletter creators called LetterBucket (the focus of this story).

Today Sergio is fully focused on the creator economy. A movement that, as he puts it, is completely transforming the way people get informed, learn, and connect.

“Individual creators are now capturing more attention, trust, and credibility than traditional media. It’s a massive wave… and it’s worth surfing.”, Pulido says.

LetterBucket was born right at that intersection, where technology meets creative independence. Sergio’s goal isn’t to build the biggest platform, but the simplest one.

Sergio Pulido - Founder of LetterBucket

The story told by Sergio Pulido

The vision

Before building LetterBucket, I spent several years working side by side with all kinds of content creators, writers, financial analysts, speech therapists, teachers… people with so much to share, but without the right tools to do it. During that time, I kept hearing the same complaint: “I want to make a living from my knowledge, but every platform just makes things harder.”

I remember, for example, an economist who wanted to send his market insights to his audience every week. He ended up spending more time configuring domains and templates than actually writing. Or a language teacher who wanted to share her lessons by email, but got lost among integrations, embed codes, and analytics dashboards that made no sense.

That’s when it became crystal clear to me: sending a newsletter had become way harder than it should be.

Setting up DNS, connecting forms, customizing templates, interpreting metrics… it had all turned into a trap for people who simply wanted to write and reach their audience.

That’s how LetterBucket was born. Not as a grand idea, but as a reaction to unnecessary complexity.

The LetterBucket homepage

Day one: A minimal product and a lot of drive

We started coding LetterBucket in September 2024 and honestly it turned out to be a bigger challenge than we expected. The plan was to launch a super lean MVP, but we were stepping into an industry that has been solid for years.

You can’t show up to the prom in shorts and a ripped shirt. People notice!

So we had to polish the product a lot, bring in early users little by little, listen to everything they said and keep raising the quality until it felt right.

We started with one clear idea: if creating a newsletter takes more than five minutes, something’s wrong. So we focused on building only what truly mattered. A clean editor, a distraction-free interface, and instant setup.

We didn’t want to be another platform with a thousand buttons. We wanted someone to open LetterBucket, write, hit send, and forget about the rest.

We did our official public launch on June 25.

During the first few weeks, the product was so bare-bones it was almost embarrassing. But it worked. And the best part was that people understood it instantly. That was our first big lesson: when something is genuinely simple, it doesn’t need an explanation.

Inside LetterBucket

The first users: Conversations, not campaigns

Starting out we didn’t run ads. There was no budget and honestly, no reason to. Instead, I decided to write personally to creators I already admired. I sent them a short, honest message:

“Hey, I’m building a newsletter platform. It’s simple, distraction-free, and free up to 1,000 subscribers. It might actually fit you better than what you’re using now.”

That’s how the first users arrived. Some came from Substack, others from Beehiiv or Kit.

Many stayed mostly for one reason: they felt heard. Every piece of feedback became an improvement. Every suggestion turned into a discussion. LetterBucket literally grew one conversation at a time.

More marketing

Early-stage attribution was… painful. We tried a lot of guerrilla stuff and collected plenty of bans along the way. Some things worked, some didn’t, so here’s the honest breakdown.

Affiliates

We launched a very aggressive referral program. For a couple of months it worked great, but it turned out to be more expensive than other channels. We were giving 60% for 12 months which is objectively insane. Still, it helped us get early volume fast, so no regrets.

Reddit

We’ve been Redditors forever and yes, the platform has gone downhill since going public, but it’s still a goldmine for learning and conversations.

We joined every newsletter thread we could find and at one point someone posted about LetterBucket in a huge subreddit. The spike in traffic was so wild we didn’t even make the connection until the post got deleted by moderators.

LinkedIn

Mixed feelings.

We’ve had good leads and solid conversations, but as a channel it’s not something we’re prioritizing now. It’s a bit too slow for the stage we’re in.

Newsletters

This one will shock absolutely no one.

We reached out to newsletters we thought were a good fit for ads, and it worked surprisingly well from day one. I’d call this one of the key drivers because the users coming through newsletters are now referring others.

Referrals

This is the main channel and the one that consistently performs.

Nothing beats your friend telling you “Hey, use this, it actually works”. I wish we could double down on this one even more.

How we’re different

From day one, we were very clear about what we didn’t want to be:

• A bloated suite packed with unnecessary options.

• A pricing model that punished growth.

• A tool only people with marketing backgrounds could actually use.

And what we did want was simple:

• A clean, intuitive design that anyone could understand.

• The ability to send a newsletter in under five minutes.

• To listen to creators and deliver real value week after week.

The business model

The business model is pretty simple and it comes from two places.

The first one is the classic mailing SaaS model. You pay a monthly fee based on how many subscribers you have. Our biggest cost is sending emails at scale, so that fee covers the sending costs and leaves us a margin to run the company.

The second stream, which isn’t live yet, will come from advertising. Sponsors will be able to promote their products inside newsletters that choose to run ads. We handle the workflow and take a small commission.

We had a few ideas for add ons and other fancy monetization tricks, but in the end it only adds complexity and doesn’t match what we want to build. Our goal is to give users a tool that makes their newsletter genuinely better and charge a clear flat fee for it.

The Mistakes (because there were plenty)

I could say everything was part of the plan, but that would be a lie.

Along the way, we tested ideas that simply didn’t work. We focused on ICPs (Ideal Customer Profiles) that didn’t really align with us, built automations that looked clever but lacked soul, and even spent nearly two months developing two integrations… that no one ever used.

But each misstep strengthened something more valuable than any feature: judgment.

Build slow, but build right.

We also learned that the biggest threat to a good product isn’t competition, it’s impatience. When you get obsessed with shipping faster or trying to impress everyone, you stop listening to the users who already trust you.

One of the toughest mistakes we made was purely technical. We onboarded two creators with large audiences (tens of thousands of subscribers) far too early, before our IPs were properly warmed up for that kind of sending volume. The result: emails landing in spam folders or getting blocked by Gmail and Outlook filters.

We had to learn the hard way what proper IP warm-up really means, how to manage domain reputation, how SendGrid rate limits behave under heavy load, and how to interpret delivery and bounce events to protect the overall deliverability of the platform.

We also ran into bugs that only appear in production: duplicate webhook events, false opens triggered by Apple and Google proxy crawlers, and automations inflating metrics in unpredictable ways.

Each technical failure became a product lesson. Understanding that scaling isn’t growth; it’s surviving without breaking.

Today, we know that a great SaaS isn’t the one that ships the fastest, it’s the one that can send a million emails and still remain reliable, stable, and trusted.

The numbers

Since we’re always in conversations with VCs I’m a bit limited on what I can share, but I can give some numbers that don’t break any NDA.

We’re close to hitting 1k registered users (around 200 active). Altogether, they reach over a million subscribers, and we send millions of emails every month.

Each user can run up to two newsletters (most run one) so the total number of newsletters on the platform is higher than 200. Activity varies (some send just one post a month), but roughly 200 newsletters are actively publishing.

If you want a good proxy of real usage, here’s the honest one. If we push an update and something breaks, we get a wave of messages in the chat and in the inbox within the first couple of hours. That’s when you know people are really using the product.

Btw, it’s the perfect moment to say sorry to all of them publicly and thank them for their patience whenever things go wrong! They’ve been incredibly supportive while we keep moving fast and pushing updates.

Most of our traffic comes from the USA, which is exactly what we expected. After that it’s Canada and the UK. Spain held the fourth spot for a while but it just got overtaken by… Singapore.

Fun fact. We onboarded a big creator from Singapore and with his first couple of sends he instantly pushed the country ahead of almost everyone else. It was a funny spike to watch in real time.

What we learned along the way

If I had to sum up what this project has taught us:

• There’s no growth without simplicity. Removing is just as important as adding.

• Direct feedback is worth more than any metric.

• Building a product isn’t about launching an app, it’s about building trust.

Looking ahead

Today, LetterBucket has a solid foundation and a community that grows every day.

We’re still obsessed with the same goal to be the most useful platform for creators. Yes, we keep adding new features, but under one simple rule:

“If it doesn’t improve the creator’s experience, it doesn’t make it in.”

My goal with LetterBucket is to build a space where creators can write without worrying about the technical side where they don’t need to be marketers to grow, or developers to edit.

A tool that simply works.

The team

I’ve been building things with my brother and a close friend since the beginning. We were all obsessed with the internet, tech, and business when we were kids, so teaming up and launching projects together felt completely natural.

Over the years the team has grown. Right now we have five people working for us full time. Still very much a pizza-size team, which means everything moves fast and there are zero bottlenecks.

Connect with Sergio Pulido

• LinkedIn

• letterbucket.com

Meet Jason Levin.

Jason is 27 and the founder of Memelord.

Memelord is his life’s work, and he has accidentally been working on it since he was 7. Yes, seriously.

Jason Levin - Founder of Memelord

The story told by Jason Levin

No code - no problem

See, here’s the first thing to know about me.

Unlike probably most of the founders in this newsletter, I have no idea how to code. Instead of writing lines of code at a young age, I spent most of teenage years making “content”. Everything from crazy Photoshop art to silly YouTube videos.

13-year-old Jason making people laugh

16-year-old Jason making people laugh

26-year-old Jason making people laugh

All of this was practice for blowing up the internet.

Building an audience

When I turned 23, I started taking building my audience more seriously (so I wouldn’t have to work in corporate America).

I went hard on Twitter (now X), growing my audience with threads about marketing and books and whatever I was reading about. I just followed my curiosity and sent DMs and got on the phone with people I thought seemed cool. This led to me meeting new internet friends and working for a ton of startups as a ghostwriter.

While I was freelancing for startups, I had 2 big realizations that changed my life:

First realization 💡

With the rise of ChatGPT, being funny will be more important than ever. The internet is full of boring slop. The best way to stand out is to be funny.

This led to me writing my book Memes Make Millions about how memelords make money.

Memes make millions

This book changed my life and put me on the trajectory to launch a startup. But I didn’t know that at the time. I still thought I was too dumb to build a startup.

Second realization 💡

What I realized was most startup founders are pretty stupid. Which is great because I’m stupid too. So I could probably figure out how to build software.

You don’t need to be Zuck to build a startup (and Zuck’s sister literally invested in my company). YOU NEED TO BE SCRAPPY!!!

So in June 2024, I started building Memelord.

Building Memelord

Since I didn’t know how to build software, I started Memelord with a simple daily newsletter of the newest trending memes called Meme Alerts for $6.9/mo.

The idea was to help keep marketers on top of meme trends as easy as possible. I launched the newsletter on X (see below) and saw signups come flying in.

Twitter tweet

I probably hit 100 customers within the first few week or two. (You’ve gotta remember I spent 5 years tweeting and building distribution every single day).

When Meme Alerts hit ~$1k/mo, I realized shit maybe I’m onto something. So I started watching YouTube videos on how to build no-code software. I drank more Red Bull than I’m proud to admit and screamed more expletives at 2 AM than I’d like to admit as well.

But in 3 weeks, I built the MVP for Memelord Technologies.

The Memelord homepage

Then I launched it and shit went crazy.

Twitter tweet

Growing Memelords

Over the next 9 months, I grew Memelord Technologies by any memes necessary:

• I posted viral memes and plugged Memelord underneath them

• I wrote guest posts for the SEO traffic

• I posted about every new feature

• I wrote about my adventures in my newsletter

I didn’t spend $1 on paid ads.

(I suck at paid ads, I didn’t have cash to spend, and my product was too cheap)

So I leaned into my strengths (organic social) and did anything I could.

And the scrappiness worked.

Within 9 months, Memelord Technologies hit $100k ARR.

Raising 💲3M

Then 3 months later, I raised $3M to build Memelord version 2.

Twitter tweet

You’d think raising $3M solves every problem.

But it also creates new ones.

Now that I have money and engineers, this took away the problem of trying to be an engineer and marketer at the same time, but it also presented new problems like how the f*ck do I manage engineers and how the f*ck do I spend $3M to return as much capital as possible?

So that’s where I’m at now.

It’s a good problem of course.

We’re getting signups all the time. We have 1000s of marketers using us at brands like beehiiv, Morning Brew, Coinbase and more.

And our software velocity is MOVING FAST.

Twitter tweet

3 things on my mind

Right now all I’m thinking about is 3 things:

1. Build a better product
   

2. Build better systems
   The systems you need to bootstrap are very different than VC. After raising $3M all my systems are broken. So how do I build good systems? There’s an order of operations in startups and you’ve gotta follow it sometimes.
   

3. I genuinely have no idea how to do paid ads
   I’ve done scrappy organic marketing for so long that I have no clue how to do paid ads! I never needed to or had the cash to. Now I have $3M and don’t know how to spend on paid ads. Good problem to have, but honestly kinda weird lol.

I hope this shows you a few things:

1. You don’t need to know how to code to build a product people love and go raise money. You can literally start with a $6.90/mo newsletter like me. All the “rules” are fake bro.
   

2. Build distribution (yesterday).
   

3. Even when you’ve got the money and customers flying in, there’s always challenges! 1 of the things Zuck’s sister told me about Zuck was he thought it would get easier when Facebook got bigger. Instead it got harder. There’s always new bigger challenges. But as David Senra from Founders Podcast says, “The work is the reward!”

Like I said, Memelord is my life’s work.

And I am beyond grateful for the challenges: to wake up everyday and be a goofball on the internet and make millions doing it!

Wanna reach out to Jason Levin? You can find him on X and LinkedIn.

Meet Siddhant Daigavane.

Siddhant is a solo indie developer from India.

Earlier this year (2025) he set himself an ambitious challenge: ship a new iOS app every month for six months. He wanted to learn quickly what resonates with people, so he took a “spray‑and‑pray” approach to distribution and marketing.

Instead of spending months building a single product, he rapidly launched five different apps, each with a different value proposition, and shared them across every relevant platform he could find.

Below is the story told by Siddhant - with a focus on one of his apps called UpRight.

Siddhant Daigavane - Founder of UpRight

The story told by Siddhant Daigavane

Start out small

At the start of this journey I read a few essays that had a profound impact on my mindset.

One argued that new founders shouldn’t dive straight into a complex SaaS; software projects are slow, expensive and risky, and it’s better to start with tiny, easy‑to‑ship products that let you rack up small wins.

Another reminded me that ideas matter as much as execution, and that most profitable ideas aren’t unique or sexy, they solve boring but painful problems. That encouragement to aim small and useful, rather than original and grand, shaped my decision to build a simple habit‑forming app rather than chase a single big vision.

These are the essays that shaped my approach:

• When Should You Start a SaaS?

• Anatomy of a Launch

• Wordle. the Word Game, Is a Love Story (paywall)

What I built and why

I didn’t try to dream up the next big unicorn, nor did I stress about being totally original. Instead, I kept a journal of everyday annoyances, asked friends about their problems, and watched for patterns in forums and communities, a nod to the suggestion to contribute to communities and listen to what people complain about.

When an idea seemed useful and achievable within a month, I built it.

LockIn Daily - Track Time

In March 2025 I released LockIn Daily, a minimalist habit‑tracker and time‑blocking tool. It performed the best of my early projects and gave me my first meaningful revenue.

LockIn Daily in the Apple App Store

NetCal - AI Calorie Tracker

In May I launched NetCal - AI Calorie Tracker.

NetCal in the Apple App Store

UpRight - Posture Coach

July saw the release of UpRight, an AirPods‑powered posture coach that uses the motion sensors in your AirPods to monitor your head and neck alignment in real time and gently reminds you to straighten up.

I’ll be going into more detail on how I grew UpRight later on in this story.

UpRight in the Apple App Store

StrideGate - Walk to Unlock

August brought StrideGate, which gamifies walking by unlocking apps after you hit a step goal.

StrideGate in the Apple App Store

Dozzi - Nightly App Block

September rounded out the sprint with Dozzi, a nightly app‑blocker.

Dozzi in the Apple App Store

Each app was built in under a month and shipped to the App Store.

Zooming in on the UpRight app

Without a marketing budget, I leaned heavily on App Store optimization and organic channels.

Launch platforms

When UpRight was ready I launched simultaneously on these platforms:

• Product Hunt

• Huzzler

• SoloPush

• PeerPush

• Uneed

I also posted on X (my launch post below), Reddit, and various indie communities. This shotgun approach helped me validate ideas quickly.

Twitter tweet

I used a single boosted X post to promote UpRight; otherwise, every download was acquired organically.

Lessons learned

The biggest lesson was that distribution matters as much as code.

Shipping to multiple directories and communities at once helped me find early adopters, but building a sustainable audience takes time.

I’m okay with that; the goal of this sprint (launching the five apps) was to iterate quickly, learn from the data and build momentum.

The UpRight business model

UpRight is a freemium model with in-app subscription.

• Annual: $24.99 (3-day free trial)

• Weekly: $4.99

UpRight downloads and revenue

The app was launched July 25th, 2025. So the following numbers cover July 25th, 2025 to October 15th, 2025.

• App first-time installs: 381

• Subscription starts: 76 ( 75 annual, 1 weekly )

• Revenue: Annual plan: $188

• Revenue: Weekly plan: $6.64

• Mix: Annual = 98.7% of starts (75/76) and 96.6% of sales ($188/$194).

Visible spike in late July (launch week), then a long tail.

What’s next?

Looking forward, I plan to slow down and focus on the most promising concepts/apps, deepen user research and explore paid growth channels.

Contact Siddhant Daigavane

Feel free to reach out to Siddhant on X. He is always happy to connect with fellow builders and share what he has learned.

Meet Krzysztof Cichy.

You might remember Krzsztof from Fake Mayo back in May 2025, where he shared his journey about his first app, BoomHabits.

He built it with the help of AI, and to his surprise it reached 200 users in just three days.

That moment changed everything for him. It showed him how powerful creating can be, and since then he has kept building and launching. What started as one experiment quickly turned into a journey that he doesn’t see ending anytime soon.

This story is about Krzysztof’s most recent project - Launch Directories.

Krzysztof Cichy - Founder of Launch Directories

The story told by Krzysztof Cichy

The idea

The idea for Launch Directories came from something simple.

A few months ago, I posted a plain Excel sheet on Reddit with 52 directories where people could promote their products. Within a couple of days, the post had over 400 upvotes. I didn’t expect it, but the response was loud and clear: founders were hungry for this kind of resource.

Posting my Excel sheet on reddit

When I first posted that Excel sheet on Reddit, I honestly didn’t plan anything. It was just 52 directories I had collected, I shared it, and somehow it blew up 400 upvotes in a few days. People were commenting, asking for more, thanking me. And I… did nothing. I left it. I thought: “cool, they liked it,” and moved on.

Building

Three weeks after my Reddit post, I couldn’t sleep. It was the middle of the night, around 3 a.m. I sat down at my desk and thought, okay, maybe it’s time to build something real out of this.

I started coding. No plan, no design, just raw energy. By 7 in the morning, Launch Directories was online. It was buggy, it was basic, but it was there.

The Launch Directories homepage

I posted about it on X.

Launching on X

Marketing

My little “night hack” quickly started to grow.

Today Launch Directories has around 80 curated directories on the site, and in some months traffic even reached 13 thousand visitors.

Launch Directories visitor stats

People use it to check where to launch, which directories give a do-follow link (good for SEO), whether a listing is free or paid, and compare DR (Domain Rating, basically a score that shows how strong a site is in Google’s eyes).

Later on, I added something new - the ability for directories listed on my site to generate a badge showing their DR. It was a simple idea, but it became a way for them to display trust and credibility on their own websites.

What surprised me the most is how the project started to live its own life. Other directories actually use these badges to show their live DR score. Founders keep messaging me, saying this was exactly the kind of tool they had been missing. Step by step, what began as “just a list” slowly turned into a recognizable brand.

Submission service

I also introduced something new: a submission service.

Not everyone wants to spend hours clicking through each directory, creating accounts, filling out forms, and repeating the process over and over. So I decided to do it for them. Manually. With care. And with the experience I’ve built up by doing this many times myself.

Feedback

What makes me happiest is the feedback I’ve been getting. Real entrepreneurs, not just random users, wrote to say how much it helped them.

People like Nelson Ryan, CEO of an amazing tool for building job boards called Job Boardly. Or Marcin Teodoru, a serial entrepreneur and creator with over 400k followers on TikTok.

Hearing from people like that that what I built actually saves them time and brings them results that’s the kind of thing that keeps me pushing forward.

And honestly, I still feel like Launch Directories is just one stop along the way. There are so many builders out there who are more talented than me, with bigger visions and better skills. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that even a simple spreadsheet, a late-night hack, or a rough idea can grow into something meaningful.

Just build

If my story does anything, I hope it reminds someone that you don’t have to wait for the “perfect” idea or the “perfect” timing. Just build. Start small. Share it. See what happens. That’s exactly how Launch Directories was born and who knows where the next little spark might lead.

So yeah maybe Launch Directories isn’t the “big one.” But if sharing this story makes even one person think, ok, maybe I should just try building my thing too, then it was worth it.

If you wanna get in contact with Krzysztof Cichy, you can find him on X.

See you next time.

Thanks,
Jakob Jelling

I’m on X. Come out and play.

Meet Malith Gamage.

Malith is from the Netherlands. He has been developing software for over 15 years and loves kickboxing and Muay Thai.

Currently he is busy building and promoting ZapDigits, a no-code business intelligence platform.

Founder of ZapDigits, Malith Gamage, and his fiancée Mandy

The story told by Malith Gamage

Founder breakup

I’ve been founding, and working as the CTO, on one of the fastest growing AI products (called Videco) in the Netherlands. But this ended up shutting down because of the founders breaking up.

Lessons learned from that project:

• Don’t quit your full time job before getting any customers

• Don’t pivot your product too often

• Don’t offer 50% of the company to the co-founder (if you can avoid it)

• Don’t block your vision by a fancy title

New idea

I took a little break after the breakup and started working on a new idea. I’ve built around 8 indie SaaS products in the past, and every time I ended up using different platforms for payments, auth, analytics, and so on.

I didn’t mind using all these tools, but I always wanted to see the data from them in one place. Most BI (Business Intelligence) tools are built for bigger companies, but smaller teams and solo builders still need insight into their data.

What usually happened was I'd write a custom script to pull the data and create a simple dashboard. It worked, but it took a lot of time and felt like reinventing the wheel every time.

After thinking about it, I decided to build a BI tool where you can just connect the tools you already use and start reading the data without all the hassle.

What is ZapDigits?

ZapDigits helps startups and founders create dashboards without writing code.

Screenshot from ZapDigits

You can connect tools like Stripe, GitHub, and Supabase to see your business data in one place. It’s easy to use, fast to set up, and built for small teams who want clear insights without dealing with complex tools.

ZapDigits is great for tracking revenue, product activity, and team progress. All in a clean and simple layout.

Building an MVP

I pitched the idea to my fiancée Mandy, and to my surprise, she actually liked it and decided to join me in building it. Over the last 3–4 months (starting out in April 2025), we built an MVP (Minimum Viable Product).

The ZapDigits homepage

I’m not going all in ZapDigits for now. I’m working 70% of my time for another company and ZapDigits takes the remaining 30% of my time. My goal is to go full-time on ZapDigits at one point though.

Mandy and I decided to do a soft launch first and keep improving it before going for a proper launch. The plan is to add a few more data sources like Notion, Google Sheets, and YouTube before we go live on Product Hunt (August 1st 2025).

The soft-launch

3-4 weeks ago (early Juli 2025), we quietly launched the product on Fazier. We weren’t expecting much, just wanted to get some early feedback and see how people responded. To our surprise, we ended up becoming Product of the Day.

ZapDigits became Product of the Day on Fazier

That alone felt like a big win for such an early version. But then, a week later, we found out we were ranked as the #2 Product of the Week. That gave us a huge boost of motivation and confirmed that we’re on to something people actually want.

This was a great surprise and gave us a good boost of traffic (see below).

Fazier traffic boost

I’ve also been using my own X profile to give the project at small push - example posts below:

Twitter tweet

Twitter tweet

Twitter tweet

The business model

ZapDigits operates on a flat‑rate monthly subscription model with tiered plans:

Creator plan
$15/month - Supports unlimited data sources, 1 project, 5 users, email support, manual data refresh.

Startup plan
$65/month - Includes everything above plus 10 projects, daily refreshes, chat support, and watermark‑free embedding.

Agency plan
$120/month - Unlimited users/projects, refreshes every minute, and full chat support.

Current status

From the beta launch we got 20 users on the free trial. No paying customers yet.

Below are the zapdigits.com visitor stats from the day the website was published. Still early - so the stats are not impressive, yet.

Visitor stats from zapdigits.com

What’s next?

Right now, our main focus is getting the most essential data sources up and running.

We want to make sure the core integrations are solid before anything else. The goal is to keep things simple, useful, and reliable and hopefully get our first 100 paying customers along the way.

We are looking for launching partners. Anyone who is interested in using a dashboard tool like ZapDigits. We would like to work together with you until you are satisfied with the dashboard.

We are building in public. Our roadmap is public too.

Where to find Malith Gamage online:

• zapdigits.com

• X

• LinkedIn