April 19, 2024.

This is the date when I published my first post for this newsletter. I started with a retrospective on what got me there at the beginning of my solopreneur journey.

I was excited but also afraid. I was realistic, but could not avoid dreaming big.

But now, my runway is gone. So it’s time to plan for what’s next and re-prioritize stuff, and this newsletter unfortunately is not among the main priorities. 😢 

Well, I guess nobody is happy to lose money, right? 😂 I was also in a very comfortable position financially, and now it feels a bit like starting again from scratch. So, ngl it sucks. 😕 

But I’d not say I lost money, but rather that I invested it.

Alex Hormozi often says this thing:

And oh, how much I learned in the last 12 months! 😅 

I’d like to conclude this newsletter with the lessons I learned and with the blueprint I’d follow in the future, hoping that you’ll find these useful as well.

Table of Contents

• Lessons learned (the hard way)

  • Focus, focus, focus!

    • Too many products

    • Let’s spam across ALL possible marketing channels

  • Too much marketing, not much value

  • Solving my problem ≠ loving to sell the solution

  • Overengineering to avoid doing what really matters

  • There’s no PLG for early-stage products

  • Outreach is a numbers game

  • What if I raised money?

  • Legal and taxes

• The future

  • The blueprint for when I’ll start another product

  • My perspective on AI

• The present

• Conclusion

Lessons learned (the hard way)

Focus, focus, focus!

Too many products

In the indie hackers community, you’ll often read:

This is what I did.

But nowadays I don’t think it’s the right approach, at least for me. It could probably make sense for a consumer app trying to go viral on TikTok and/or IG, but for a B2B, you need to be VERY lucky or ship something that really nails it in resonating with your target audience.

Shipping something fast in a month or so makes it very hard to understand whether your MVP is good or not:

• Did you reach enough eyeballs?

• Did you reach the right eyeballs?

• Are users not converting because of the pricing?

• Are users not converting because the value proposition in the landing is bad?

• etc.

Maybe you just launched on ProductHunt and social media, and your customers are simply not wandering there.

Maybe you’re actually onto something, but you just failed to reach the right audience, and you start working on something else.

The other possible reality is that shipping fast and seeing what sticks is a great approach, and in my case, it’s just a skill issue. 😅 

However, I think survivorship bias is real in the indie hackers community.

Ofc the more you ship, the more likely you are to hit the target eventually. It’s basic statistics.

IMO there’s no good or bad answer, it’s a matter of what “style” fits you best. After this experience, I’d be more comfortable iterating with the potential customers early on, even before having something, rather than working in the dark, shipping fast, praying for people to convert, and starting from scratch if it doesn’t work.

To be fair, for some products, I had free beta users rather than trying to convert straight away. The problem is that some of them were not the ICP, I failed to put in place a proper process to deeply and often engage and iterate with them, and I was more focused on what I wanted as a solution rather than what they wanted. I also never reached enough volume of conversation to start finding patterns among potential customers and conviction.

The “see what sticks” approach made me work on 5 different projects:

• NextCommit - job board for tech roles,

• EchoWords (shutdown) - repurposing of newsletter post to social media,

• BeaconCX (not started) - I was thinking about something in the CX space, and I started interviewing some people in the industry back then,

• HaveYouHeard - Reddit monitoring for demand gen,

• HeyEcho - AI content marketer writer.

You can imagine that in 12 months, it was not possible to focus on all of these, especially considering that they’re all in quite different spaces. It was not about an initial idea that pivoted over time. 😅 

Probably the time would have been better spent by focusing on a single idea, talking more with potential customers, onboarding them in pilot programs, and iterating again. But I have more to say on this later.

The good thing is that I trained my “shipping muscle”, and each of them taught me something. I talked about it this winter.

You all probably know the Dunning-Kruger effect.

What happens is very similar:

1. You come up with an idea, thinking that you’re going to nail it and make the world a better place for your target audience, and that usually includes yourself and your use case.

2. You realize it’s harder than you thought, but it solves your use case at least, so you just ship it fast.

3. You launch and realize that nobody gives a fuck or nobody is just willing to pay for it.

After reaching point 3, you pick another idea, and here we go again! 😂 

Let’s spam across ALL possible marketing channels

This is another one. It’s hard to focus on many different marketing channels:

• X,

• Bsky,

• LinkedIn,

• Reddit,

• HN,

• other online communities,

• etc.

By going multiple times through the “new idea” loop, and solving my own problems and making the solutions as SaaS, I never really fully understood where my ICP was. The consequence is that I was just spamming it all around.

Despite the multitude of tools to schedule social media posts and send them on multiple platforms easily, each platform requires its own tone and has its own nuances.

That’s time-consuming. 😫 

What’s worse is that you’re even marketing something that you didn’t really validate because you didn’t iterate with the customers first, you didn’t monetize yet, so you might be preaching something void in the void that nobody cares about. This is related to the next point.

Too much marketing, not much value

People are not going to follow you, or read what you wrote, and thank you for contributing to yet another “spammy” message where your only goal so to promote whatever you’re selling.

First, you need to give value. ✨ 

Think about the people who, when they share something, are stop-scrolling. Why is that? It’s because you know what they’re sharing is likely worth reading. After all, it’s valuable. It could be a tip that applies to your industry, or whatever, but you know that it’s not just a promotional post.

Once you have the trust of the people who follow you and the credibility, people will also be more likely to check whatever you have to sell. They might even thank you for letting them know you're selling something valuable to them! Because in the end, that’s what sales is about. It’s not about tricking people to buy something they don’t need, it’s about helping people with what you’re selling because you know they would benefit from it.

If you check my posts on social media, you realize that this is not what I did. 😅 

Let’s take HeyEcho as an example. I never shared any valuable SEO tips or content writing tips, which would make me appear as someone who knows his stuff. But, the majority of my posts are just features, showcasing them for the sake of showcasing them. 🤦 

Why should potential customers even bother checking? Ok, maybe depending on how “attractive” the post is (a fancy video or screenshot), they’d check it, ok, but they’d definitely be more willing to give it a shot if there’s more “social proof”. And “social proof” is something that you could ask your early customers, you’re building with.

Indeed, many times what happens is people asking, “Hey, what tool did you use for making the video?“. 🤣 

Solving my problem ≠ loving to sell the solution

A few days ago, I was watching a video by Simon Squibb on how to sell. One of the tips struck me for its simplicity, yet easily overlooked. You need to genuinely love what you're selling.

I think these are the conditions for REALLY loving to sell:

1. Love the problem: it should genuinely matter to you.

2. Believe in the solution: it should feel like something you would use.

3. Care about the people: you're not selling to them, you're helping for them.

4. Stand for the same values: selling should feel like an extension of who you are, not a contradiction.

Let me give you a counterexample to make this even clearer.

Let’s say that you don’t care at all about ballet, but you ended up seeing a performance because some friends invited you. You realize that many people you know actually enjoy ballet. It’s very likely that even if you suggest them go watch it, they would not because you do not have credibility:

• They know you don’t care about ballet,

• You likely were not excited when sharing it with them,

• Probably you didn’t even like it anyway.

Repeat with me:

• Love the problem,

• Believe in the solution,

• Care about the people,

• Stand for the same values.

I need to come up with an acronym for this. 🤣 

Repurposing content is an interesting problem, and the solution that I provided with EchoWords was good! If I didn’t give up early on, it probably could have grown into something. However, the ICP was not clear, so I don’t know if I deeply care about them.

Finding people talking about your problem on Reddit using HaveYouHeard was another very interesting problem! At some point, I started feeling that answering with AI was a bit contradictory to my values of transparency and authenticity. It was not an easy one to sell. That also affected the product, indeed generating the answer and publishing them was not automatic, as done by other successful (from an MRR perspective) competitors. Probably having a way to better “understand” how I would answer would have made things different, but as of today, it’s just AI trying to empathize with the users, mention the product you’re selling, and without even disclosing that it was AI.

With HeyEcho, I see that the current solution works, but I don’t have content marketing expertise, and I didn’t speak with many content marketers to build expertise. How can I sell this confidently to people who are content marketers? If I have time, this wouldn’t be an issue, I’d just need to catch up by interviewing people to learn more and more. The issue is that generating organic traffic is something I do need to solve, but it’s not a problem that I love solving. Not the best product-founder fit.

Runway pressure leads to poor decisions

Running a business with your own savings, unless you have many years of runway, it’s a bad idea.

In the end, we all need to pay the bills, and we all need to sustain our lives and our families. The problem of a limited runway is that it’s easy to fall into the trap of trying hard to make money fast, leading to poor decision-making.

A limited runway based on personal savings contributes to going through the “let’s move to the next idea” loop that I mentioned before.

You’re not going to get viral and make 10k MRR in a day while you sleep.

Ok, some people get lucky, but that’s far from the reality. It’s better to have lower expectations on pace, but have steady growth with continuous signals from your customers that you’re on the right path.

Overengineering to avoid doing what really matters

Oh damn, this hurts.

You don’t have paying customers, so why the heck are you spending time on things like:

• automating onboarding,

• automatic invoicing,

• automatic beta invitations handling,

• etc.

None of these were part of the core value for my potential customers, none of these would have moved the needle from a “I’m not buying” to “Take my money now“. 🤦 

I worked on all that polishing stuff. Nobody experienced the automatic onboarding of HeyEcho (I spent 2 weeks on it), nobody experienced the automatic invoice (I spent another 2/3 weeks on it, including the back and forth with accountants), etc.

Having an engineering background doesn’t help.

We’re just thought and so used to thinking about things at scale and worst case scenarios, this is how our brains our wired.

You probably heard many times the saying made popular by Paul Graham, “Do things that don’t scale“.

Now I get it.

Don’t automate onboarding! Jump on a call with each customer, and that also helps build and strengthen a relationship.

Don’t automate invoicing! Create them manually until they become a real nightmare. Just create a payment link on Stripe, that’s it. A few clicks. If your country has some “special” requirements, like Italy does, even in that case, I could still easily generate 10 invoices a week manually in a few hours.

I don’t remember who said this (probably Alex Hormozi again), but it was something like “In the early phases, act as a tech service provider “. This captures exactly what I just said:

• If you need to prepare an invoice or accept a payment, do it manually.

• If you need to onboard someone, jump on a call.

There’s no PLG for early-stage products

I didn’t want to spend time on sales calls, I didn’t want a long sales cycle, I didn’t want negotiations, etc. In my head, that was automatically a “no no no, no SLG”. ❌ 

So I wanted to make everything PLG, and my understanding of PLG was posting about my product on different social media, on Reddit, HN, paid ads, etc. As I said, maybe that would work for strictly consumer apps.

In the early stages you don’t even have a fucking customer! Unless you have an audience or unless you intimately know the problem you’re solving, this is hardly going to work. It’s most likely that your solution is not perfect, and your first customers may not like it.

You need to talk to your customers.

You need to build your product WITH your first potential customers. Talk with them, question them, learn from them, build with them, and that will lead to having a product FOR them.

Two main mistakes here:

1. I didn’t want SLG, so I thought the opposite was PLG,

2. I used to see sales as purely a selling thing, rather than a learning thing.

What then? How to start?

FLG, founder-led growth.

It sounds so obvious now. 😅 

In an issue I wrote a few months ago, I mentioned that cold outreach shouldn’t exist so that founders can focus on the product rather than on its distribution.

But as I said, the mistake is considering outreach purely as a distribution thing, rather than as part of the process of building a great product for the problem you love and the people you care.

Whether your early users are going to convert into sales, that’s a consequence of understanding their problem, building a solution that works for them, that either saves them money or time, or makes them get more money as a business.

Outreach is a numbers game

I’m not a patient person. This doesn’t play well with outreach. 😅 

A 3% conversion rate, 100 persons reached out to, and 3 persons becoming paying customers, is considered very good. However, after 20 outreach, if I get 0 responses, I start getting anxious:

• Is this the right problem?

• Is this the right solution?

• Is this the right channel?

• Do I just suck at outreach?

• Am I not good at qualifying leads?

The crazy thing is that I do know that 20 outreach is actually way too low to draw conclusions. 🤦 

This is very much related to what I discussed before about having a runway based on your personal savings and the “see what sticks” approach.

Outreach is one of those things that you just need to trust the process and act logically and analytically. I’ll try to play this better on my next venture.

The other crazy thing is that I do trust the process when I track my training progress, but that’s probably because I’m certain of what I’m doing compared to when I’m doing outreach. 🤣 

IMO this is another reason for deeply and often interacting with the first customers. Hearing positive signals even from a few people will give you energy to push things forward.

What if I raised money?

I’m glad I didn’t.

Why?

The main reason is exactly what I already discussed about loving what I’m selling.

Probably at this point, I’d be stuck selling something that I’m not motivated to sell and to build, but at the same time being accountable to the investors. TBH, I don’t know how many founders end up in this situation, and I don’t know what would be the best way to get out of it. But it doesn’t sound like a good place to be. 😅 

Does this mean that I won’t raise money in the future?

Who knows.

I think that it depends on the product. For the majority of SaaS businesses, there are no big costs in the early stages, so it could be an opportunity to consider once you have a strong validation. Ofc if you consider working on foundational AI models, you’d need a LOT of money early on. 😅 

Otherwise, once you see what works in terms of where to find the best leads, what message resonates best with them, and in general, what “good” looks like, it makes sense to take that money to double down and scale.

Legal and taxes

I now have a better understanding of Italian taxes. The takeaway is to always be prepared and have tight communication with your accountants because unexpected things can happen. 😂 

Want an example? Next month I will owe around 10k of taxes, which is something I got to know only a few months ago. Hooray! 🥳 

So, be prepared!

I also lost count of the many times people on social media suggest things like incorporating an LLC in the US to avoid local bureaucracy shenanigans. Unless you have a strong lawyer and/or accountant who suggests you do so, I’d rather not.

At least in Italy, the “esterovestizione”, faking a company to be foreign to circumvent taxation, is a real thing and could bite you hard. I know what you’re thinking, “But the LLC would ve based in the US!“, it doesn’t matter where the legal HQ is, what matters if by who and from where the company is being operated.

The future

The blueprint for when I’ll start another product

1. Find a problem I love,

2. Find the people facing that problem,

3. Emphasize with them, understand their pains, their past and current solutions,

4. Make sure I care about them being able to solve this problem.

5. Iterate fast with them on a solution that does not contradict my values,

6. Focus only on iterating on the core value,

7. Love to help people having the same problem,

8. Selling will come as a natural consequence,

9. Reach out and market where I know these people are wandering.

Many of the steps are actually very commonly shared and suggested by experienced founders, or VCs like YC, etc.. I heard those many times myself as well, and it’s not like I purposely didn’t want to follow them.

But experiencing the mistakes in the first person makes you internalize them. It hits differently. Maybe in the future there’s something else I will fuck up, but I have a different starting point.

My perspective on AI

Ngl, the fast advancement of AI it’s both exciting and scary. 😅 

Why scary?

I think that we’re just at the beginning of a huge shift in the job market, a shift that people are not ready for, and governments are not ready for.

Good luck to students graduating now in the digital space. On one side, there are huge opportunities to bootstrap your own venture because efficiency has never been so cheap, but at the same time, I don't see how and why big companies should invest in hiring new graduates in the short term.

In the short term, it’s cheaper and more effective to augment Mid and Seniors with AI.

In the long term, probably even the role of Mids and Seniors will be automated.

I don’t know what the future looks like, but we definitely live in very interesting times. And ofc, the revolution won’t happen overnight, especially because big corporations are slow to move. But what happens when corporate execs realize that smaller and leaner teams are starting to eat a lot from their plate?

I see two macro types of roles or functions:

• EQ-focused (sales, customer success, people ops, etc.),

• IQ-focused (software engineers, business analysts, etc.).

In the next few years, AI will replace IQ-focused ones and augment EQ-focused.

That’s because people still value relationships and human faces. We’re already seeing how building products is becoming more and more a commodity.

Maybe at some point, people will also prefer AI for EQ-focused roles simply because AI doesn’t judge you personally, but I think that would take more time.

Ofc this is an oversimplification. Even nowadays, people still value human creation, otherwise, art would not exist, but even there, AI is taking its place.

The present

So what about me now? 😄 

I'm currently freelancing and exploring some open positions. Given the lessons I learned, I’m also considering eventually looking for a more customer-facing role, like Solutions Engineering, or even Sales Engineering, or Customer Success Engineering.

What about the products I built? I don’t know yet, but right now they’re a cost, and I would not be able to focus on them, and I told you already that I’m having some hard time finding customers. One thing I’m considering is whether someone could be interested in buying them, so I’ll likely try listing them on Acquire and see what happens.

Conclusion

It has been fun, intense, hard, introspective, emotional, and surprising!

Thanks to everyone who has been reading this newsletter! ❤️

It’s just a goodbye. I promise, I’ll be back! 💪