Hey there! My mood this week has been a bit of a roller coaster! 🎢 

A lot of coding 🤩, but still no revenue 😭. But this made me reflect more on the next steps.

Table of Contents

• EchoWords ProductHunt launch outcome

  • Is it really a failure?

• Revamped boilerplate

• Something new in the hoven

  • A vision

  • What’s next then?

• Conclusion

• Appendix

  • Personal branding

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EchoWords ProductHunt launch outcome

Let’s get to the numbers of the launch:

• 14 upvotes

• 10 comments, but none of them seemed to come from potential customers

• 7 visits to the landing coming from ProductHunt

• 0 new customers

I’d say that overall we can say that it has been a shitshow. 🤣 

Maybe I’m not properly doing prep work? I just announced it on LinkedIn and X and sent emails to beta users a week before, but, indeed, I didn’t remind them on the day itself. 🤦‍♂️ 

But I think that’s only a minor thing, I think that if a product is good or interesting, it should get more attention from the audience. But it’s important to highlight that ProductHunt audience might not be the best stage for EchoWords.

Are newsletter creators consuming ProductHunt? Maybe not. That could explain the low interest compared to the awesome numbers I got during cold outreach.

Last week I already shared my thoughts on whether EchoWords is a vitamin or a painkiller. I’m aware that a failed ProductHunt launch means nothing if your audience is not hanging there, and again, the cold outreach numbers were great! But at the same time, the product was still offered for free which could have played a big part in it.

At this point, I have multiple signals some being more relevant than others:

• a failed launch on PH (low engagement),

• no beta users converted yet (even those who tried are not excited about it)

• me thinking that it’s actually a vitamin rather than a painkiller (see the past issue to see how I got to this conclusion)

But I’ll keep it up and running. In two weeks I’ll ping beta users about the special deal expiring and move from there. For now, I’m pausing its development.

Is it really a failure?

A few months ago I was having a call with a friend who now works at Canonical, and we ended up talking about my journey as a solopreneur. Of course, I also got to the point where I started sharing my frustration, and how I might end up in a year with just a bunch of failures and way less money in the bank. 😂 

He told me something that in retrospect was obvious, but at that moment I just couldn’t see it that way.

That’s very true, and that’s something that I always remind myself, especially during the bad moments.

In the 2.5 months that I worked on EchoWords:

• I invested in building a solid boilerplate that will be super useful for the next ideas,

• I experimented with capturing leads by launching on ProductHunt and using paid ads,

• I “enjoyed” doing cold outreach and discovered the dark world of cold email,

• I learned how to handle subscriptions with Stripe,

• I learned about the Italian invoicing compliance nightmare,

• I acted in a video ad (not gonna lie it still gives me some cringe vibes when I watch it 🤣),

• and thought and discussed a lot about business ideas and execution with a lot of smart and interesting people. ❤️ 

Don’t take me wrong! This doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t be happier if money were incoming! 🤣 

Revamped boilerplate

As mentioned last week, I worked on revamping my boilerplate because the previous stack was too heavy in terms of development experience and every iteration was a nightmare. 🤯 

I don’t wanna dig too much into the details right now, but it is still a monorepo with a directory for the API and another for the web part.

The API is mostly unchanged: Python with FastAPI and Postgres as a database. Since I got rid of the BFF, I needed to re-work the authentication part as the client now talks directly with the API. I added a script to populate Stripe with subscriptions that can be defined from a config file, and also another for automatically generating the stub of new API routers corresponding to CRUD operations for a given table.

The latter is a great time-saver! As soon as I have a new SQLAlchemy model, I also have the corresponding CRUD router. ✨

The web part changed way more. No Remix anymore and no BFF. It’s now a Vite React application with client-side routing and react-query for talking with the API and managing the data state. Getting rid of the BFF required changing completely the usage of the API, and I’m now also generating the Typescript types directly from the OpenAPI schema generated by the API.

On top of that, I also changed the UI by relying on shacdn and everything seems way more polished and professional. 🤩 

On the infra side, I’m still relying on Render. So far so good, the only annoying thing is that they do not have their own object storage, but not a big deal.

On the operations side, nothing changed: Clerck for auth, Mailerlite for marketing emails, and Stripe for payments.

Every time I touch the template, I wonder whether I should sell it as a product itself. 🤔 

Something new in the hoven

Now I have a product that seems doomed to fail and a revamped boilerplate. What’s the next step?

I’m not gonna lie, I already bought a new domain! 🤣🤦‍♂️ 

A vision

Ok, let me take a step back. 😅 

This week I wanted to follow up on my retrospective on EchoWords. I realized that first and foremost I needed to properly frame why I was doing what I was doing. 🤔 

I think that most of the indies, and actually most founders in general, build digital startups in the first place because they love building and crafting products.

Nailing distribution is key, many struggles, and an awesome product will unlikely succeed without great distribution. I’m pretty sure that everyone has seen this meme at least once.

EchoWords is actually already tackling it for a very specific niche, but when I started it I was not considering the bigger picture.

It might be a controversial thought, but in my vision, cold outreach shouldn’t exist. It’s annoying on both sides. It also often involves shady tactics like email warmups, etc. Just to be clear, what I consider as cold outreach is when the quality of leads is very low. If you’re “cold” outreaching someone that clearly shown interest in a topic that overlaps with what you’re selling, you’re actually doing that user a favor by letting him/her know your product. I’d consider them “warm” outreach probably. (BTW I never worked in sales, so I might be misusing terms here 🙏 )

I know, it’s a simplistic vision. What about if you’re selling a product that solves a problem that a customer is not even aware of? Yeah, it’s tricky, and tbh I don’t have an answer.

In the end, the reason why we do outreach it’s because it works and it’s the fastest way to have potential customers assuming a good amount of volume. But it doesn’t scale well, if you stop then results also stop, etc. I know that AI starts getting into that space as well, but I’m not sure about their performance and it would not delete the fact that it is still annoying for the outreached person (not always). 😅 

I would like customers to go do the best product, not the best-distributed product. How do I plan to solve this problem? By providing a way to ease the distribution. 😬 

Fair enough. 😂 

What I mean is that with the same “amount” of distribution, the best product should get customers. This doesn’t mean that there should be just one product for each necessity.

Every user has different needs, and this translates into making them customers of the best product specifically for their requirements.

Founders would be able to focus on building the product and iterating with the customers by being aware that the right leads will come as a consequence. Those who are annoyed by being cold outreached would be happy and founders will focus on what they're best at. ✨ 

Yeah, it might be naive, but this is how I’d like it to be.

It was interesting to realize that some successful products like Chatbase have been able to succeed without cold outreach.

What’s next then?

Ok, that’s enough chit-chat. 😂 

The problem I described is a big one, and I’m sure it’s a painkiller. I cannot solve it as a whole, I need to take it step-by-step. 🪜 

I bumped into some interesting products that are contributing to solving this problem which are niche enough, seemingly successful, and at the same time I think can better execute. So my idea is to directly compete with them. In the end, execution > idea, right? 😄 

I’m going to share more details next week, so stay tuned! 🚀 

Conclusion

I think this is one of the most interesting issues I wrote, at least it is for me. 😂 Writing down my vision of things rather than keeping it in my mind helped me better frame it.

I was inspired by the first chapters of “Start with Why“ by Simon Sinek.

Starting today I’ll be in a full immersion of drawing diagrams, coding, and experimenting! 🔥 

I feel a mix of excitement for this new product and also anxiety about not being financially stable yet. Indeed I’m not sleeping very well these nights as my brain keeps spinning, but it’s part of the journey and I just need to embrace it.

Let’s see if I can come up with a decent MVP in a week! 💪 😂 

If you’re interested in following my journey, make sure to subscribe or follow me on X/Twitter and LinkedIn! 

Appendix

Personal branding

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