A few weeks ago, I realized something uncomfortable. I hadn’t opened the BlackTwist dashboard in days.

Not because the product was broken. Because I built something that made the dashboard unnecessary. For me, the founder.

Let me back up.

BlackTwist is a Threads scheduling and analytics tool. The dashboard is the product. You open it, write a post, pick a time, and schedule it. You check your analytics, see what worked, and plan the next batch. Standard stuff. I’ve been building and refining that dashboard for over a year.

Then MCP happened.

MCP stands for Model Context Protocol. It’s a way for AI assistants like Claude to connect to external tools. Think of it like giving Claude hands. Instead of just writing text, Claude can reach into other apps and do things. Schedule a post. Pull analytics. Set up automations.

I built an MCP Server for BlackTwist. The idea was simple. Let people manage their Threads account from inside Claude instead of switching tabs to the dashboard.

I tested it myself first. Obviously.

And I never went back to the dashboard.

The first day I used it, I was brainstorming a post in Claude. I had the angle, the hook, the text. Normally, I’d copy the text, open BlackTwist, paste it, pick a time slot, click schedule, switch back to Claude. Thirty seconds of friction that kills your momentum.

Instead, I typed: “Schedule this for tomorrow at 9 am on Threads.”

Claude checked my connected accounts. Checked my time slots. Checked for conflicts. Asked me to confirm. I said yes. Done. Never left the conversation.

That was week one.

By week two, I was planning my entire week from Claude. 21 posts. Three per day. Morning, midday, evening. Claude pulled my recent posts to match my voice, drafted everything in one document, and scheduled the full batch after I approved it. That workflow used to take me 3 hours on a Sunday. It now takes 12 minutes.

By week three, I was running weekly analytics reviews from Claude. It pulled my engagement data, built me an HTML dashboard as an artifact, and proposed content pillars for the next week based on what actually performed. One conversation. Five minutes. I got a chart showing my engagement dropped every Thursday through Sunday. I checked and realized I was posting personal stories early in the week and how to content late in the week. Personal stories were outperforming by 2x. I’d been running this account for a year and never noticed because I always looked at weekly totals.

Claude spotted it in one conversation because it was reading the data fresh.

Here’s what made me uncomfortable. I’m the founder. The dashboard is my product. And I stopped using it.

That’s a strange position to be in.

My first reaction was defensive. Maybe I’m just lazy. Maybe I’m too close to the AI hype. Maybe real users still need the dashboard.

But then I thought about it more honestly. I stopped using the dashboard because the new workflow is genuinely better. Not because the dashboard is bad. Because writing, scheduling, analyzing, and planning all happen in the same conversation. There’s no context switching. Claude already knows what I’m working on, what angle I’m exploring, what I rejected two drafts ago. The dashboard can’t know any of that.

And that realization changed how I thought about the product.

I had a decision to make. How do I tell people about this?

I could write a changelog post. “New feature: MCP Server. Connect Claude to BlackTwist.” That’s what most SaaS founders do. List the features, add some screenshots, publish, and move on.

But nobody reads changelogs. Especially not for a feature this abstract. “Model Context Protocol” means nothing to a Threads creator who just wants more followers.

So I did something different. I wrote about how I actually use it.

I ended up writing a 4-part series.

Post 1 covers connecting Claude to BlackTwist and scheduling your first post through a conversation. The 30-second setup.

Post 2 shows how to plan and schedule a full week. 21 posts, batched in one sitting, each in a specific format.

Post 3 is about automated follow-up replies. You schedule the post and the follow-up together. When the post hits a certain number of likes, BlackTwist fires the reply automatically. Whether you’re online or asleep.

Post 4 is the weekly analytics review. Claude pulls your data, builds a custom dashboard, and proposes content pillars based on what performed.

None of these posts mentions “MCP Server” in the title. They’re all framed as workflows. Problems solved, time saved, things you can actually do.

That was intentional. The feature is the MCP Server. The story is what it lets you do.

I’ve been building products for years, and I keep running into the same thing. The best marketing doesn’t feel like marketing. It feels like someone showing you how they solved a problem you also have.

I didn’t plan for the MCP Server to become a content series. I built it, used it, and the usage itself became the story. The documentation of my own workflow became the marketing.

That’s the loop I think every indie maker should look for.

If you’re building a product and struggling with marketing, stop thinking about marketing for a second. Ask yourself: do I use my own product? If yes, document that usage. Write it down. Every workflow, every shortcut, every moment where you thought “huh, that was easier than expected.”

That document is your marketing.

If you don’t use your own product, that’s a different problem. Fix that first.

If you’re curious about the actual workflows, here’s the full series:

1. Schedule Threads posts from Claude without touching a dashboard

2. Plan and schedule a full week of content from one conversation

3. Set up automated follow-up replies on your posts

4. Run a weekly analytics review with a custom dashboard

Each one is a standalone walkthrough. You can read them in order or jump to whichever problem you want to solve first.

And if you just want to try the MCP Server, blacktwist.app/mcp

See you next week.

Luca

Hey friends,

Luca here.

I recently decided to change my approach to my SaaS, BlackTwist.

For the past year, Mattia and I have been heads down building features, shipping updates, and growing the user base. And that worked for a while. But the numbers started telling a different story. Signups were steady. Revenue was flat. Something in the middle was broken.

So I stopped building new things and started reading the data. I wanted to understand where users were getting stuck, which steps they were skipping, and what I could actually fix to move the numbers that matter.

What I found changed how I think about our product.

A few weeks ago, I opened PostHog and looked at a number I’d been avoiding.

312 people signed up for BlackTwist in the last 30 days. 64 of them created their first post. That’s 20%.

Eighty percent of new users signed up, looked around, and left.

I knew activation was a problem. I just didn’t know where the wall was. So I sat down, built funnels, watched session recordings, and let Claude Code inspect our onboarding page through the DevTools MCP. What I found was uncomfortable. And useful.

Let me walk you through it.

The first thing I did was build a funnel in PostHog. From signing up to the social account connected to the first post created. The results told me everything.

312 signups. 129 connected their Threads account. 64 created a post.

The biggest drop was from step one to step two. 59% of users never connected their social account. They signed up, saw the onboarding, and bounced before doing the one thing that makes the product work.

I dug deeper. I built a second funnel just for the onboarding flow itself. Goal selection, posting goal, reply goal, reminders, done. 348 users started it. 318 finished. 91% completion rate. The onboarding flow was fine. People were clicking through in about 10 seconds per step.

The problem was what came after.

After completing onboarding, users needed to connect their Threads account. That’s where 59% disappeared. The flow asked too much too fast. “Give us access to your account” right after you just met the product.

So the onboarding was easy to complete but it was doing nothing useful. People were answering questions about their goals and setting reminders before they ever connected a social account or scheduled a single post. The flow felt productive. It was actually a dead end.

Here’s where it gets interesting. I pointed Claude Code at our onboarding page using the Chrome DevTools MCP. Claude could see the actual page, the DOM, the layout, the buttons. I asked it to analyze the flow and tell me what a new user would struggle with.

It confirmed what the data already showed. Too many steps before the first moment of value. The user sets goals and reminders before connecting their account. By the time they reach the connection step, they’ve spent their patience on steps that feel like paperwork.

I rebuilt the onboarding.

Fewer steps. I cut the flow down so users get to the important part faster. The “connect your Threads account” step now happens earlier, when motivation is still high.

Then I added post templates. After connecting, users see templates they can use for their first scheduled post. Instead of staring at a blank text box, they pick a template, edit it, and schedule it. The friction from “I signed up” to “I just scheduled my first post” dropped significantly.

After publishing, I added a celebration modal. A small moment that says “you did it.” It sounds silly. It works. Then the modal sends them to the calendar view where they set up their time slots. So by the end of their first session, they have a connected account, a scheduled post, and configured time slots.

The old onboarding was completed in 91% of cases and produced nothing. The new onboarding has more resistance in it, but every step produces something real.

I haven’t been running this long enough to share before/after conversion numbers. That’s a future newsletter. What I can share is the process, because it applies to any product.

Open your analytics. Build a funnel from signup to the one action that makes your product useful. Find the step where people disappear. That’s your wall. Everything else is a distraction.

I used PostHog for the funnels and session recordings. I used Claude Code with the DevTools MCP to get a second pair of eyes on the actual page. The combination of data and AI review caught things I missed after staring at the same onboarding for months.

If you’re building something and your activation rate is low, the answer is probably in your data already. You just have to look.

Still here, still building.

Luca

Cover photo by Oleksii Rozanov on Unsplash

Hey friends,

It’s been seven months since I last wrote here.

I didn’t plan to disappear. I just got so deep into building that writing about building fell off the list.

But I missed this. And I have a lot to share.

So let me catch you up.

🎂 Turning 40

Let’s start with the personal stuff.

I turned 40.

I know — I don’t feel it either. But the number is there, and honestly? It’s been a good reset.

I started snowboarding this winter. At 40. With zero experience. The kind of thing where you spend the first few days falling on your ass and wondering why you didn’t start at 20.

But there’s something about learning a new thing from scratch, at an age where you’re “supposed” to have it all figured out, that reminds you why you build stuff in the first place.

You don’t need permission. You just need to start.

(Turns out that applies to SaaS too.)

📊 BlackTwist: The Honest Update

When I last wrote, BlackTwist had just crossed $1.5k MRR.

Today, we’re at around $2k MRR.

Let me be real: that’s not the hockey stick growth you see in Twitter threads.

In seven months, we added about $500 in monthly revenue. That’s roughly $70/month of growth. Slow. Sometimes it felt like nothing was moving at all.

There were months where we’d gain a few customers and lose a few. Net zero. Plateau.

And if I’m being honest, that messes with your head.

You start questioning everything. The product. The market. Yourself.

🤔 What Plateau Taught Me

But here’s what I’ve learned about plateaus: they’re not the same as failure.

A plateau means people are paying. Every month. They find enough value to stay.

The problem isn’t the product — it’s the funnel.

We dug into the data and found our biggest bottleneck: only 25% of people who sign up ever make their first post.

That’s it. That’s the leak.

People sign up, look around, and leave before they experience the thing that makes them stay.

So we shifted our entire focus. Not more features. Not more marketing.

Better activation.

We rebuilt the onboarding from scratch — a guided 12-step flow that helps you pick your niche, set posting goals, configure your timezone, and actually publish something in your first session.

We added daily reminders (users who enable them post 31% more than those who don’t).

It’s not sexy work. But I think it’s the right work.

🔢 The Numbers Behind the Scenes

Some context on where BlackTwist stands today:

• 3,100+ users signed up

• 250,000+ posts scheduled through the platform

• ~$2k MRR with a freemium model

• Still bootstrapped. Still just me and Mattia.

• Still building nights and weekends alongside a full-time job.

That last part is important.

I’m still at my 9-5. BlackTwist isn’t paying the bills yet, and I’m okay with that.

If you’ve been reading this newsletter long enough, you know I’ve done the “quit my job to go full-time indie” thing before. It didn’t end well. I burned through my runway and had to go back to employment.

This time I’m being patient. The job gives me stability. BlackTwist gives me purpose. And I get to build without the pressure of “this has to work or I can’t pay rent.”

Some weeks, that balance is easy. Other weeks, I wish I had 40 more hours.

But it’s working. Slowly. Steadily.

🧭 What’s Next

I’m writing again. That’s the first thing.

I want to share more of the behind-the-scenes, not just milestones, but the actual decisions, tools, and experiments we’re running.

In the next few issues, I’ll go deeper on:

• How we’re fixing retention — the specific changes we made to onboarding and what the data says so far

• How I use AI to build faster — I’ve been using Claude Code heavily, and it’s changed how I ship as a solo dev with a full-time job

But for now, I’m just glad to be back.

💬 Final Thoughts

Seven months is a long time to go quiet.

But I think the best newsletters aren’t the ones that publish on schedule every week. They’re the ones that show up when there’s something real to say.

And right now, I have a lot to say.

If you’re building something and the growth feels painfully slow — I get it. $70/month of MRR growth is not the stuff of viral Twitter threads.

But it’s real. And it compounds.

Thanks for still being here.

Talk soon,

Luca

P.S. You can find me on Threads now (@luca.restagno.dev), and feel free to DM me or reply to this email. I’m not using Twitter/X much, let’s stay in touch!

Exactly one year ago, Mattia and I started building a small idea on the side.

We didn’t have a team.

We didn’t have an audience.

Just an itch — and the belief that Threads would need its own ecosystem of tools.

Today, BlackTwist just passed $1.5k MRR.

It’s still early. But it feels real.

So I wanted to share a few things from behind the scenes — not just the wins, but the messy parts too.

🚀 The beginning

We started from scratch.

Zero followers. Zero traffic. Zero hype.

Our only “unfair advantage” was that we had been power users of Twitter/X schedulers for years.

So when Threads launched, I knew exactly what I wanted as a creator — and no one had built it yet.

So we did.

🛠 Building and balancing

I handled the tech.

Mattia handled the marketing.

At least… that’s what we tried to do.

The reality is: we both love building, and sometimes that leads to blurred roles, duplicate work, or missed communication.

Some weeks it works great.

Other weeks it creates tension.

We’re constantly learning how to work together better — how to trust, delegate, and stay in sync without losing the joy of creating.

📈 The growth (slow, then suddenly)

We launched fast.

Added scheduling, calendar view, carousels, auto-reposting, analytics.

We also launched a #Threads100 challenge — post for 100 days straight, with a leaderboard and streak tracking.

It was hard to measure the ROI directly, but it definitely brought attention.

Brand awareness matters, even when it doesn’t “convert” immediately.

Then we got our first paying users.

Then more.

Now, creators are writing about BlackTwist in their guides.

They tag us.

They share wins using our tools.

They recommend us — not because we asked, but because it actually helps them grow.

💸 The business model (and how creators help us grow)

One of the best decisions we made was launching an affiliate program.

We wanted creators to feel like real partners — not just users.

So we made it easy:

• Creators use BlackTwist to schedule content, build streaks, and stay consistent

• They include us in their growth guides, newsletters, and tool stacks

• When someone signs up through them, they get paid

No weird requirements. No gatekeeping.

Just a way for people to earn by sharing something they genuinely use.

And it’s working.

We’re seeing more creators mention BlackTwist in their:

• Growth strategy threads

• “Tools I use” posts

• YouTube videos

• Notion templates

• Even paid courses

What makes it special is: they’re not doing exclusively for the money.

They do it because the tool helps them — and then the affiliate link becomes a bonus.

This organic love has been one of the biggest drivers of momentum recently.

It’s not explosive, but it’s steady.

And it’s real.

The win-win dynamic keeps us focused on making the product genuinely valuable — not just “marketable.”

🧭 What’s next

We’re just getting started. Here’s what we’re focused on now:

• Keep building what creators ask for

• Double down on SEO

• Release more free tools (like our Text Carousel Generator or Fake Threads Post Generator)

• Listen, iterate, repeat

💬 Final thoughts

If you’re building something right now and it feels slow — keep going.

We didn’t go viral. We didn’t launch on Product Hunt.

We just showed up every week, fixed bugs, improved the product, and listened to users.

Momentum is often invisible at the start.

Thanks for reading — and for supporting our journey.

Talk soon,

Luca

When I sold my SaaS Userdesk in March, I needed a new SaaS product.

It is unusual for me not to have one, at least since 2022.

Shipped.club, my Next.js SaaS Boilerplate, is an amazing product, but it’s not like serving your customers daily and generating recurrent revenues.

As you may know, I am active on Twitter / X daily. I love to talk to people and there’s an amazing community of indie hackers, very supportive and friendly.

When you start publishing content, every social platform begins to show its limitations.

You need to plan your content and schedule it.

You need productivity tools to engage more efficiently.

You need to repurpose your content and check the performance with advanced analytics.

After the acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk, it is not more an open platform like it was before.

The access to the Twitter / X API now costs an exaggerated amount of money (from $5k/month to $42k/month), which makes it impossible for indie makers to build products for the platform. It’s a shame, I loved those old days (I built two SaaS for Twitter in the past).

But there’s a new platform, launched in July 2023 called Threads.

I started using Threads a couple of months ago, and I like the vibe. More and more people are using and enjoying it. It looks like the old Twitter—I like it.

You might hate Meta for various reasons (I don’t to be honest) but it’s undeniable that it’s a good opportunity for me.

Why? Because I know the domain, I know the features the customers need (because I am a user of social content schedulers myself), and I know how to market it (because I’ve observed many similar products growing on Twitter).

I don’t know what are your impressions, but it looks like the perfect situation to start working on a new SaaS.

And, for this occasion, I have a co-founder. I met Mattia Righetti on Twitter, he’s a former marketer (while I’m a tech guy), and he knows social platforms as well.

I already started building the SaaS product, and it’s coming so nicely—I’m pumped.

The product is called BlackTwist, and it will be publicly available at the end of June.

If you want to grow on a new promising social platform, I recommend you to join our waitlist, because we have some special news for the early adopters.

But how can you be in a similar situation?

These are the main ingredients that can improve the chance of success.

You know the problem to solve—you’ve used similar tools in the past and you know which problems to solve.

The problem is already validated by the market—when a founder starts a product with an idea not present in the market yet, there are two possibilities:

1. the founder is a genius visionary

2. or the product doesn’t have a market because it doesn’t solve a painful problem

Which one of the two options is more probable in your opinion? (spoiler alert, the second).

If your product idea has these characteristics, you can start building on auto-pilot, and make a great SaaS product.
If not, it doesn’t mean that you can’t succeed, but you’re taking more risks.

Now, let’s talk about product design skills.

There are three things that helped me improve my skills:

1. I worked with a strong product designer for 1.5 years

2. I read the book Refactoring UI

3. I observe and use great products, and take inspiration from them

Shipped.club updates

Talking about my other product, Shipped.club, I’m celebrating the $25k total revenues in May.

The revenues, month over month, are dropping, and that was expected since I started a full-time job in April, and I can’t focus on marketing like before (remember, marketing is everything).

So far I’m excited about this product, and I’ll keep supporting it in the long term.

Since I have a new stable income, the revenues of Shipped.club represent a nice side income, that I’m going to reinvest in different ways— ads for the product, and personal long-term investments, like ETFs.

Whenever you are ready, I can help you with your indie hacking journey in a couple of ways.

Learn how to Build and Launch your Micro SaaS with my free email course.
7 lessons in 7 days in your inbox, 650+ developers already joined, start learning today.

Shipped.club is the Next.js SaaS Boilerplate that allows you to build, ship, and make money with your product quickly.

210 indie makers are already using it, and are shipping together in the private Discord community.

Shipped now comes with Parity Purchasing (extra discount) depending on your country, discover your discount on the landing page!

That’s all for today.

As always, let me know which topics you’d like me to talk about in the next issue.

See you next Sunday 🙌
Luca

If you have read my articles for long enough, you know that in the past I tried to find a co-founder for the latest product I have sold, Userdesk.io.

When I did that, I quickly realized that you can’t find a co-founder just because you are looking for one (it’s pretty rare, even if it can happen).

But this time, it’s different.

I met Mattia on Twitter, a couple of years ago.

I think he has a unique style and he knows how to write personal content that resonates.

He has previously worked as a marketer for a famous Italian lifestyle influencer.

We met in real life last year, at a pizza dinner in Milan—you need these soft touch points to know another person.

After that, we kept writing to each other via WhatsApp, sharing our indie hacking journey, thoughts, and so on.

A few months ago I had an idea.

We’ve both been active on social media platforms for years.

I have been using Twitter (X) daily since 2021, I used Instagram for a while—but it was too time-consuming to create images every day—and LinkedIn for a while as well—in the last 8 months.

As you may know, Twitter applied a crazy high pricing to their APIs ($5,000+) which makes it hard for any bootstrapped founder to build applications for that platform (goodbye X-SaaS).

But last year Meta launched a new platform, called Threads—which is very similar to Twitter, but simpler.

I started being active on Threads in March 2024, and I like it.

I think there’s an opportunity to create and grow an audience there and to be one of the first to do it.

So, here’s the idea and why I think it is the right one for us.

A scheduler and engagement tool for Threads.

It’s not sexy, and it’s not original, but I think it’s right.

Through the years I’ve seen many social media tools pop up, grow, and have success.

For sure it is less easy than it looks like, but there’s potential.

Do you need a few examples?

TweetHunter made $2k in a couple of weeks after launch.

Pallyy after 5 years is generating $83k of MRR.

FeedHive grew $10k month over month since its launch in 2021.

We know these tools solve a painful problem.

Businesses want to be present on social media, to create an audience and monetize it.

And the fact that we’ve been creators on the platforms, puts us in the situation to know exactly what we need to build, and how to market it (we observed the marketing tactics of all these products through the years).

We know the domain, and we have the audience. It’s time to build!

I’m excited, and this week we launched our waitlist.

https://threads-power-tool.vercel.app/

We don’t have a name, and we don’t have a domain, but it is important to test the traction as soon as possible.

So far we have announced it on Twitter and Threads, with one post on each platform, and we have started collecting interested people.

Only the future will tell us if we made the right decision.

Whenever you are ready, I can help you with your indie hacking journey in a couple of ways.

Learn how to Build and Launch your Micro SaaS with my free email course.
7 lessons in 7 days in your inbox, 650+ developers already joined, start learning today.

Shipped.club is the Next.js SaaS Boilerplate that allows you to build, ship, and make money with your product quickly.

197 indie makers are already using it, and are shipping together in the private Discord community.

Shipped now comes with Parity Purchasing (extra discount) depending on your country, discover your discount on the landing page!

That’s all for today.
See you next Sunday 🙌
Luca

Since I started my journey as a solopreneur on the side of a 9-5 job, I had in mind to replace it with my online business income.

But lately, I started looking at my journey from a new perspective.

Having businesses that generate a side income, is interesting for some reasons.

If you have been in the career path “game” long enough, you know that salaries don’t increase often.

If you are lucky you get a moderate increase every year, or you have performance bonuses.

You can live a comfortable life with that, and even save a bit if you’re good at reducing expenses.

But in the modern world—at least in the part of the world I live in, Italy—this amount of money is not enough to guarantee a comfortable future.

Our generation lives in a slightly different world compared to our parents.

They lived through the economic boom after the Second World War. It was hard for them, but new job opportunities were present, the pension system was not yet completely screwed up, new infrastructures were built, and so on.

Today, the landscape has changed. The salaries are just enough to sustain our expenses, inflation is draining purchase power every day, and our pension system will not guarantee a peaceful old age 20 years from now.

That’s why long-term investments are more and more important.

And your solopreneurial journey on the side can help you with that.

Let’s say that you have a good fixed salary, you can pay the bills, travel a couple of times per year, and live a comfortable life. Brilliant.

Now, if you could have an extra 2 or 3 thousand dollars every month (or even more), set aside the amount to pay the taxes, and the rest is yours.

I would use it to increase the amount of money I can invest long-term, increase my capital over time, and avoid devaluating the money caused by inflation in the long term.

So, if you think about side hustling this way, you’ll see how good it is compared to full-time entrepreneurship.

Working full-time on your things is risky. New big competitors could take our space in the mid-term, platforms can change the rules and destroy our products (it happened to me with Twitter), Google might change the algorithm and your effort in SEO won’t generate traffic, and your mind will always go to the products, even when you want to chill, because they are such an important part of your life, and so on.

Let’s be clear, a full-time job is not a guarantee of stability. Layoffs happen more and more often, and you might not enjoy it for any reason, but side incomes are a very good compromise.

As a consequence, you enable yourself to new opportunities like, selling the SaaS product for a good amount of money, or if the product takes off, and it can cover your bills and more, you can decide to go full time.

But the intermediate situation has some benefits.

Of course, this is my personal view of the world I experience, it’s not advice to invest (study and inform yourself before taking any important decisions) and what I’m describing might not apply to your specific case, but what I want to highlight is that having a side income has benefits, and as long as you can work on it, a tiny bit every day, without burning out, it’s a superpower for your finance stability.

Whenever you are ready, I can help you with your indie hacking journey in some ways.

Learn how to Build and Launch your Micro SaaS with my free email course.
7 lessons in 7 days in your inbox, 600+ developers already joined, start learning today.

Shipped.club is the Next.js SaaS Boilerplate that allows you to build, ship, and make money with your product quickly.
196 indie makers are already using it, and are shipping together in the private Discord community.
Shipped now comes with Parity Purchasing (extra discount) depending on your country, discover your discount on the landing page!

That’s all for today.
See you next Sunday 🙌
Luca

If you read my newsletter, you’re probably an indie maker or an aspiring one.

You have a product idea, maybe you even build it (or even better, validate it first as I suggest doing here).

But the first question you’ll ask yourself will be, and now how do I market it?

Everybody keeps saying that marketing is more important than building, but what is exactly marketing?

I asked those questions myself, and the super generic answer is

Marketing is the act of satisfying and retaining customers.

Very useful, right?

In this issue, I want to show you some tactics and strategies I’ve put in place, or noticed other successful indie hackers put in place to succeed.

Are you ready? Go!

1. Have in mind who are your customers

Ok, this is not marketing, but without this, you’ll struggle a lot.

An example, Podsqueeze was able to grow from 0 to $10k MRR in 5 months because they targeted podcasters, and they solve a problem for them. They started doing cold outreach and it worked amazingly well. If you have a clear idea of who your target users are and where to find them, you’re in a very good spot.

The point here is not to do cold outreach, but to know who your customers are.

2. Launch on Product Hunt

This is a small piece of the whole cake, a tiny one. But it’s still useful to give some visibility to your product and get a good backlink with a Domain Rate of 91.

Don’t expect a huge success (it might happen, but it’s unlikely) especially if you don’t have an audience on social platforms or a newsletter, but it’s still worth it in my opinion.

I have a free guide that explains how to do it effectively.

3. Submit your product to Directories

As soon as you have your product landing page ready, buy a service to submit your product to many directories (as many as possible), this will boost a little bit your SEO game.

When I launched Userdesk.io (now acquired) I kicked my Domain Rate to 30 in a short time.

4. Make giveaways (on Twitter/X)

The right giveaway can give you a lot of visibility.
In a giveaway, you give something for free, in exchange for some interactions with your tweet.

It can be a free Notion page, an ebook, a template, whatever, but it must provide value.
I suggest using Gumroad, because you can collect the email of the participants and retarget them later.

5. Launch free tools

This is my favorite because if you are a builder, you will have fun creating them.
Build free tools useful to the target users of your product, and publish them on your product website.

This will boost your organic traffic, and create backlinks.

Of course, just building them is not enough, you need to market them. How? Post the link on Reddit (pay attention to the subreddit rules), LinkedIn, Twitter, Meta, Hacker News, Indie Hackers, Facebook Groups. Everywhere.

Especially in the places where there are interested people.

I launched a Password and ID Generator, a Timezone Checker for Meetings, and a Blog Post Image Resizer as free tools for Shipped.club. And I plan to launch more!

6. Create a blog

Write articles on the blog of your product. Use Google Keyword Planner to find the best topics. You want to target keywords that are relevant to your audience, with a good amount of traffic, and low competition.

Pro tip: when you publish a new blog post, post it also on other platforms (Medium, HashNode, and others relevant to your content), but set the canonical URL to your original blog post.

Follow this free blogging course of ahrefs to learn more about this topic.

Do you see what they (ahrefs) did? They created a free video course on a topic specific to their niche (SEO), and people link the course on the web, generating more backlinks. I just created a new backlink for them, this is how it works (you can do it too!—the free course I mean).

7. Press coverage

An article on a good news website can help you both with SEO, brand awareness, and give more visibility to your product or yourself as a maker.

If you have an interesting backstory, there’s a chance an author might be interested in it. Use a service like PressPulse to easily find press opportunities.

8. Use F5 Bot — get an email when a word is mentioned on Reddit

This free service is a very goldmine.

It’s called F5Bot and it keeps monitoring Reddit for specific keywords that you define.

For instance, for Shipped.club I’m interested in MicroSaaS, Boilerplate, and Next.js discussions. Whenever this keyword is mentioned, I receive an email with the link to the thread, so that I can jump into the discussion and add value to it.

Someone might notice the product I’m working on from my bio, and browse to it.

9. Start a YouTube Channel

Ok, this might look overwhelming, because recording and editing videos is time consuming, but depending on the topic, the quality of the video doesn’t have to be incredible.

I’ve recently started posting more web dev content on my YouTube channel. I share my screen and show what I’m doing. It doesn’t need an equipped studio or pro editing skills.

The nice thing about YouTube is that it has SEO, people might find your content even after many months since it was published.

i.e. I posted a live-streaming video 2 years ago, and it has 16k views! 😱 And as you can see, the quality is pretty poor 😅

As you can imagine, nothing is simple with marketing.

It requires time, consistency, trial and error. Don’t expect an overnight success, it is quite unlikely to happen.

And if you see posts of very successful people, you are missing all the previous years of struggles to get there.

Whenever you are ready, I can help you with your indie hacking journey in a couple of ways.

Learn how to Build and Launch your Micro SaaS with my free email course.
7 lessons in 7 days, 500+ developers already joined, start learning today.

Shipped.club is the Next.js SaaS Boilerplate that allows you to build, ship, and make money with your product quickly.
200 indie makers are already using it, and are shipping together in the private Discord community.
Shipped now comes with Parity Purchasing (extra discount) depending on your country, discover your discount on the landing page!

That’s all for today.
See you next Sunday 🙌
Luca

I always liked making videos.

At the time, I was taking a video-making course at the university.

After Effects, Adobe Premier, Blender, and so on.

And still, at that time, I played guitar in a band, and we recorded an album.

I am not new to video and audio recording, and I enjoyed it so much.

But this was a lifetime ago.

After that, I started my career as a web software engineer and never turned back.

A couple of years ago (time flies!) I made a live stream on YouTube. I spent a whole day building a Fullstack React app using Next.js, NextAuth, ChakraUI, Prisma, and PostgreSQL — and yes, it’s still the tech stack I use today.

2 years later, the video has 16k views! That’s pretty mind-blowing if you think about it.

You publish a piece of content, and it gets consumed for a long time.

That’s the beauty of YouTube. It’s not like Twitter, where a post is old after 24/48 hours.

The content lives on YouTube for a lot of time. There’s SEO involved. People search for content, and if yours is relevant, it gets shown and consumed.

Lately, I started consuming more content on YouTube. Any kind of content. Interviews, F1 analysis, coding, politics, everything.

So why not move from consumer to producer? (you should know I like to produce content now 😅)

So here we go.
I’m publishing a series of videos to teach you how to become comfortable with the tech stack I use.

Each video is a tutorial for beginners with all you need to get started with that topic.

The final goal is that you know how to build and launch a SaaS product, quickly and easily.

Here’s what I published so far and what will come next:

• React Tutorial for Beginners (2024)

• Web Layouts with ChakraUI (Beginner Tutorial 2024)

• Use Prisma and forget SQL (Beginner Tutorial)

• How to manage payments with Lemon Squeezy

• PostgreSQL the best SQL database in the world

• How to build a backend using Next.js

• 3 web products in 2 weeks — my tech stack explained (2024)

• Handwritten underlined text effect for your React app

I started publishing on the 9th of April, so I didn’t expect amazing results. But here are the analytic numbers, and it doesn’t look bad.

Getting out of the comfort zone is a necessary step to improve and try something new—I’m hyped.

The real challenge would be to organize my time to record and produce this content.

As you know from one of my previous articles, my system with a 9-5 job consists of spending 1/1.5 hours in the morning doing my Twitter routine, plus developing a product.

And it already takes all of that time.

When would I record the videos? Nights and weekends.

Whenever you are ready, I can help you with your indie hacking journey.

Shipped.club is the Next.js Micro SaaS Boilerplate that allows you to build, ship, and make money with your product quickly.
181 indie makers are already using it, and are shipping together in the private Discord community.
Shipped now comes with Parity Purchasing (extra discount) depending on your country, discover your discount on the landing page!

That’s all for today.
See you next Sunday 🙌
Luca

I know what you’re thinking about, but weren’t you already on the side of a 9-5 job?
Well, not really.

Since I started my journey as a solopreneur, I’ve always been on the side of a 9-5, but not since September 2023. At that time, I was part of a round of layoffs at the startup I was working for.

I didn’t decide to quit my job, the job quit me.

When it happened, I decided to try full-time indie hacking, which had been my dream for the last two years.

I had some uncertainties. I didn’t know how exactly was my runaway. This is due to the taxation system in Italy, which is paid in advance, with down payments on the next year, but I decided to give it a go anyway.

At that time, I had one active SaaS product, Userdesk, generating $1k MRR, $750 revenues net of the costs.

Working full-time on my products

I have to admit that this was amazing on one side, but very stressful, especially when you’re not able to cover all your expenses, and therefore burn your savings.

It’s amazing because it’s the lifestyle I strive for. No meetings, no constraints, do what you love the most: building and marketing your products.

On the other side, not generating enough money puts you in a mental state of constant pressure.

A lesson I learned is that having more time doesn’t automatically translate into efficiently using all that time.

I passed from spending an hour a day, to having a whole day dedicated to me.
I don’t think I wasted time, at all, but you might lose the laser focus you previously had.

Also, spending more time on your products doesn’t mean that your revenues will grow linearly with the amount of time you spend. The reason is simple, the revenues grow according to the amount of traffic you can generate, and the match between your product and the people exposed to it.

And doing marketing means making experiments based on assumptions.

The default outcome of a marketing effort is usually a bad result. So you need to make several experiments, measure the results, improve them, and repeat the process.

But it was in January that I finally studied the Italian taxation system (it’s quite complicated), I analyzed my expenses, and I made all the calculations to estimate my runaway.

Bad news: I had in my bank account the exact amount of the taxes I have to pay in 2024, with €3k of monthly expenses, and €2.5k average revenues generated with Shipped.club (non-recurrent, it’s a one-time purchase product).

I immediately entered into the survivor mode (aka big anxiety, plus finding the solution to exit from that situation).

I had only a few options to improve the situation:

1. finding a well-paid 9-5 job

2. sell Userdesk

3. make more revenues

The third option was very uncertain and not fixable in a short amount of time.

I immediately listed Userdesk on Acquire, to see if I would get any offers, and started contacting my network of software engineers to see if any companies had open job positions.

In short, I sold Userdesk (I completed the assets transfer this week) and I found a 9-5 job (I start next Monday). And I’m completely convinced about this choice, there are no other ways to sustain my expenses.

I’ll return to side hustling, as I did between January 2022 and August 2023.

Is it sad? Maybe. Is it the right thing to do? For sure.

Free tools for marketing

Last week I did a marketing experiment, that involved building.

I already talked about using free tools as a marketing channel. This time I built a very simple Chrome Extension, using Shipped.club as the boilerplate to speed up the development.

It’s a Timezone Checker for Remote Workers.

I’ve worked in a company with people all around the world (India, Europe, USA), and it was quite uncomfortable to understand if a meeting I was creating, was inside the working hours of the whole team.

I built the solution in a couple of days (landing page + Chrome extension) submitted it to the Chrome Web Store and… I launched it on Product Hunt last Friday getting to the third place! 🥉

The response from the community was great, and even people outside of my bubble found it useful. It seems it solves a common problem. I’ll keep listening to the users to see if I can make it even more useful.

So far I had fun, but it didn’t bring huge traffic to the landing page of Shipped.club. But it’s a long-term game, right? I’ll keep you posted on future updates and results.

Revenues update

March was the most performing month for Shipped.club since its launch in December.

If you wonder what caused this spike, the reason is quite simple, a popular YouTuber, Simon Høiberg, mentioned Shipped.club in a video titled 5 SaaS Starters.

That’s all for today.
See you next Sunday with more exciting updates!

Luca

Whenever you are ready, I have something to help you.

Free Email Course on How to Build and Launch your Startup in 7 Days and Make Money, you’ll get seven lesson emails, once per day for seven days. I’ve put all my learnings in it.

Shipped.club is the Next.js SaaS & Chrome Extension Boilerplate for busy developers, that allows you to build, ship, and make money with your product quickly.
174 makers are already shipping with it 🔥
Check it out.

The name purchasing power parity comes from the idea that, with the right exchange rate, consumers in every location will have the same purchasing power. 
— Wikipedia

Since the launch of my SaaS and Chrome Extension Boilerplate Shipped.club in December, I wanted to apply the concept of PPP (Purchase Power Parity) to its price.

The reason is that my main goal with Shipped.club is to empower indie makers, solopreneurs, and software engineers (maybe on the side of a 9-5 job), to launch their products as effortlessly as possible.

To do so, a fixed price would have been a barrier for those countries with a lower purchase power compared to others, making the product less accessible.

This is what I did. I used a service called Parity Deals, which is very simple, yet effective.

It integrates with my favorite Merchant of Record and payment processor, Lemon Squeezy — but also with many other payment services — and it creates a set of discount codes with different percentages, according to the purchasing power of the countries.

Then, I had to include a JavaScript code snippet into the landing page of Shipped.club.

When a person lands on the website, if they come from a country eligible for the discount, a banner is shown at the bottom of the page.

Yes, this system is not perfect of course, but still, in my opinion, it gives the possibility to more people to take advantage of the product.

And the data seems to confirm that. The discounts have been used 107 times on a total of 167 orders!

So far I’m very happy about this experiment, and to be able to empower more and more developers.

What do you think?

See you next Sunday with more updates.

Luca

Whenever you are ready, I have something to help you.

Shipped.club is the Next.js Startup & Chrome Extension Boilerplate for busy developers, that allows you to build, ship, and make money with your product quickly
167 makers are already shipping like a machine 🔥

Last week I launched a quick landing page with a waitlist.

I had a product idea, but I was not very convinced, so I tried to validate it.

A website is publicly available, and for the waitlist, I added an endpoint (public) to collect the emails of the people interested.

To collect potentially interested people, I launched the landing page on my usual channels, Twitter / X and Reddit, but after a couple of days, I noticed this 👇

18.000 events in a few seconds. I was clearly under attack.

It’s important to notice that these events could always happen, regardless of how famous is your website. Someone decided to make a bad joke with a website, for the pure sake of it.

My website is not a product yet, there are no users, subscriptions, or anything, it’s just a landing page with a waitlist.

The first thought when this happens is, how do I fix this as fast as possible?

You have different options.

First of all, I disabled the waitlist endpoint to avoid consuming the whole quota of the external services I use.

Secondly, I needed to add a bot protection. You can do this in different ways. The most popular is to add CloudFlare DDoS protection, which is available for free. I never used it before, and I suppose you need to configure at least the DNS of your website.

But I use Vercel to host my websites, and thankfully they have this option.

I enabled the Attack Challenge Mode, and the problem was mitigated.

But this mode adds an extra page in front of your website, which is fine for a public, non-profit website, but not for your product that needs to be fast and quickly accessible to potential users.

Two seconds of delay can determine if a user will close the browser tab or land on your website.

So, how do you prevent malicious usage without a pre-check stage?

There are two other techniques.

Captcha, and rate limiting.

The captchas are those tools that were particularly used years ago (and they still are) that ask you to solve a puzzle before proceeding with an action. Like, select all the images with a panda inside (I wish it was a panda, but it’s usually a bike, ship, or traffic light).

But the latest version of the most famous captcha service, reCAPTCHA by Google, is smarter. It performs some checks on your browser, and if you look authoritative, there’s no challenge. Exactly, no annoying clicks on blurry images.

If the automatic checks detect something suspicious instead, the challenge is required, and the bot is blocked. Pretty smart 😏

Rate limiting is a technique that counts the number of requests to a specific resource from the same source, in a specific time frame. After X requests, the resource returns an error. For instance, you can allow 10 requests every 60 seconds.

It’s a bit harder to implement because it involves coding or some sort of solution, but modern web services usually provide this functionality out of the box.

I went a bit technical, but this article should give you a brief overview of how to protect your websites and your business.

I hope this helps.

Personal updates

Last week I launched that landing page with a waitlist to validate a product idea (the website that was under attack 👆).

Sometimes I feel the need to write down the changes I apply to my product (copy, new sections, features, and so on) so that I can aggregate it with other metrics like conversions, churn, and so on.

It’ll be very difficult to convert this fuzzy idea into a profitable product, but I still wanted to collect feedback.

And the risk was very low for me, I spent 2 hours building it, thanks to Shipped.club, so it was a no-brainer decision.

I’ll keep you updated on the results of the validation.

See you next Sunday with more exciting updates!

Luca

Whenever you are ready, I have something to help you.

Shipped.club is the Next.js Startup & Chrome Extension Boilerplate for busy developers, that allows you to build, ship, and make money with your product quickly
152 makers are already shipping like a machine 🔥

I have great news, I sold my 4th SaaS product!

Last week I sold my SaaS product, Userdesk.

It’s an AI Chatbot platform for businesses I launched in June 2023 with a pre-launch and a subscription-based model a few weeks later.

This is my 4th exit since 2021.

• 2021 — I sold iterspace.com pre-revenues (quite unusual, but it happened)

• 2023 — I sold Hivoe and Inboxs, two Twitter-related SaaS

• 2024 — I sold Userdesk

Each time, the context and the reasons to sell were completely different, as well as the process. Let’s see the context and the lessons learned with each one (so you can learn from them too).

iterspace

I started working on Iterspace in 2019 with one of my former colleagues (designer). I built it on the side of my full-time job at that time, as a team lead / senior software engineer. We worked on it for a couple of years, more or less. During the COVID, I was working from home and the time I saved from commuting, was dedicated to it.

At the beginning of 2021, we launched on Product Hunt, we got 70 upvotes (not that much but we didn’t have any distribution channel at that time), but Giulio Michelon noticed it, he wanted to meet us (two Italians launching a cool SaaS? it’s quite unusual), and he connected us with the final buyer.

I have to say that we didn’t set clear goals since the beginning. I wanted to make a living out of my businesses, but for my co-founder that was not realistic.

So when the possibility of selling arrived, he was completely convinced of the decision.

That was my first exit ever, and the amount of money was astonishing for a product with no revenues, so I accepted the deal.

The product hand-off was quite painful, as I created all the cloud resources on AWS with my personal account, and it was not possible to migrate them to another account (weird). So they had to re-create the whole infrastructure with their AWS account, and it took some time.

From the next SaaS on, I learned to create accounts with dedicated email, so the hand-off takes as long as sending the credentials to the buyer. And that’s it.

Hivoe & Inboxs

Very quickly, I had to sell these two Twitter-related products, due to the crazy new Twitter API pricing (from 0 to $42k/month). Thankfully, I was able to sell them to HypeFury, because the alternative was to shut down both of them—not a great deal.

The journey has been amazing, because since 2021 I started being active on Twitter daily, and that’s how I discovered some pain points related to DM management. The products were growing quite well (up to $4k MRR). It was shocking to sell them, especially for an unexpected reason.

Lesson learned: platform risk is real. Next time, I want to diversify more or avoid platform risk much more.

Userdesk

There’s much more to say about the exit of Userdesk.

I started working on Userdesk after the crazy hype I’ve seen about AI Chatbots around February / March 2023. AI was even more hyped than now, and as a SaaS owner, the value provided was simply incredible.

The platform allows you to “train” an AI Chatbot using your website (and other sources) and embed a live AI chatbot on your website. Simple, yet so powerful for customer support.

I pre-launched it with a $69 lifetime deal, and I sold 20 licenses in 24 hours. That was a validation for me (but I was wrong). A month later, the product was live and public, but a very small percentage of the pre-sale users signed up and used it.

I was perplexed.

This is my explanation. At that time, I already had a good reputation on Twitter / X. This sometimes brings to impulsive purchase from people who follows and appreciates you. This is great, don’t get me wrong, but it leads to misleading validation results.

Also, the product was poorly positioned, it was not targeting a specific niche and I didn’t know exactly who I was targeting: SaaS products, IT agencies looking for AI Chatbot platforms to resell, coaching services, and many others very different from each other.

This is a problem. I didn’t know how to write the copy of my landing pages, which content to write for my blog, and so on.

At the same time, a large number of competitors were already present and arrived in the short future.

Plus, in the end, I didn’t feel a great founder product fit. I have built a community on Twitter/X of 20k followers, and almost nobody was in overlap with the target audience of Userdesk. This meant an extra effort for me to find new clients.

In December 2023 I launched my Next.js SaaS Boilerplate Shipped.club, and I loved working on it, and helping other developers and aspiring SaaS owners to achieve their goals. This fits much better with my expertise and values—it’s simply a better fit for me.

Lesson learned: founder product fit matters much more than I expected.

What did go well?

I loved working with AI tech, and I think it has huge potential, now and in the future. It’s not a bubble. And who knows, maybe in the future I will work on an AI product again.

I found my customers mainly from AI directories. A lot of AI enthusiasts use them to discover new products, and it also brought a good domain rate, with very few blog posts written.

One of the main differentiation factors of Userdesk over the competition had been the UI and UX. Many people told me it was the best they tried between similar products, and it made me proud of the skills I’ve built over time. I am a software engineer, not a designer, but I’ve built many SaaS products now and the effort on the UI and UX paid off.

MRR-wise, the journey had been quite slow, but still brought good results, $1.1k MRR it’s difficult to achieve in less than 12 months.

If you’re wondering what’s the big spike in September, it’s an enterprise customer ($500/month) who subscribed. The fact the subscription plans start at $19/month up, it’s another explanation for the “rapid” increase in MRR.

I know I could have grown it much more with more marketing effort: positioning, content, social—but I still think I did the right thing with selling it, and I’ll focus more on Shipped.club and other SaaS products soon.

What’s the legal process for selling?

I used the platform Acquired for the first time to list my product. I got around 20 people potentially interested, and a couple of offers.

The process is: when you find a good offer, you sign a Letter of Intent between you and the buyer. It blocks you from accepting offers from other potential buyers.
In this period they do the due diligence on your product, you need to describe the technical aspects of your product and the business. And you can still negotiate on the final price.

If this phase goes well and everyone is happy, you sign an Asset Purchase Agreement (APA) which is a contract that finalizes the exchange of assets of your product between you and the buyer, and it sets the payment method, amount, and date.

When you sign the APA, you’re done with the deal. The remaining part is the hand-off of the assets.

I hope this issue was helpful and inspiring, even if a bit long.

If you have any questions, drop me a message by replying to this email or leave me a comment (if you’re on my website).

See you next Sunday with more exciting updates!

And remember, shipped is better than perfect, and leads to revenues and exits.

Luca

Whenever you are ready, I have a couple of ways to help your founder journey.

Shipped.club is the Next.js Startup & Chrome Extension Boilerplate for busy developers, that allows you to build, ship, and make money with your product quickly
108 makers are already shipping faster.

The second is Userdesk, the AI Assistants platform to automate your leads collection and customer support for your digital business.

If you have known me long enough, you know I’ve been active on Twitter/X for a while now.

Through that time, I’ve learned how to stay consistent on the platform and consistently grow the community of people who follow me.

In this newsletter, I’ll show you the exact system I use to achieve my results (21k followers, constant growth).

Are you ready? Let’s get started.

First, I use a product to timebox the time I spend on X.

Social media platforms can be addictive, and easily drain all your time. When that happens, you cannot focus on other stuff, like building your product or marketing, and it’s not good if you are a solopreneur. You need to balance all the activities.

I use an indie product to timebox my tasks, called Llama Life.

Llama Life is a simple task-manager, but very effective.
These are the tasks I defined for my Twitter/X routine.

To do this, you need first to create two lists on X.
Create two lists:
Peers: are profiles similar to you in terms of the number of followers and topics
Big accounts: are accounts with a large number of followers

Now that you have the two lists, create a routine like mine in Llama Life.
When you start the routing, disable all notifications and do the following:

• Open the list Peers and spend 10 minutes replying to the tweets of your Peers, after that

• Open the list Big accounts and spend 10 minutes replying to them (the intent is to be read and seen by the followers of the big accounts, not to get a reply from them), after that

• Spend 10 minutes replying to people who replied to your posts/tweets, after that

• Spend 5 minutes replying to the DMs you might have received, after that

• Spend 5 minutes sharing your product under the “share your product” tweets (I tell you more about this)

If you use Twitter/X for a while, you’ll notice that often you lose some replies and interactions with your content. This is because the Notification section doesn’t include everything (weird, but it’s like this).

So use this search filter instead, it returns all the replies:

filter:replies to:yourhandle

My filter is “filter:replies to:ikoichi”.

I also found it useful to share my product under the “share your product”-like posts.

To find those tweets, use this filter:

("share your product" OR "share your project")

I didn’t invent most of this system, it’s heavily inspired by the course of a great indie hacker Dagobert Renouf who created a course called How to Dominate Twitter, there’s much more to learn from this course, so I strongly recommend it.

You can vary a bit in this routine, like making some tasks 15 minutes long or less, according to the amount of time you want to spend. Remember, you need to engage with others much more than posting your content, especially at the beginning of the journey.

Do this every day, and you’ll see the results, guaranteed.

Personal updates

Shipped.club is still growing. The launch of the Chrome Extension with the SaaS Boilerplate gave a good boost to sales again.

Also, something special happened.

The incredible indie hacker and YouTube influencer Simon Høiberg published a video with 5 Great SaaS Started Kits, and guess what? He included Shipped as well! 🙌

I wanted to double down on YouTube influencers but this happened out of the blue, and it was a big surprise. Of course, it led to some new sales, that I hope will continue in the upcoming days.

March is close to surpassing January and February in terms of revenues.

But it’s not enough, I will continue with the side projects technique.

I recently launched a Hacker News alternative but for indie hackers, called indiehackernews.com which is giving good results. It’s an aggregator platform of links related to indie making (products, launches, articles, stories, and so on).

This product alone is bringing a good amount of traffic (last 14 days analytics below)

That’s all for today.
See you next Sunday
Luca

Whenever you are ready, I have a couple of ways to help your founder journey.

Shipped.club is the Next.js Startup & Chrome Extension Boilerplate for busy developers, that allows you to build, ship, and make money with your product quickly
108 makers are already shipping faster.

The second is Userdesk, the AI Assistants platform to automate your leads collection and customer support for your digital business.

As a tech founder, I struggle with pure marketing.

If you are a coder too, you know what I’m talking about.

The question we wonder is, what am I supposed to do for marketing?

For SaaS products, it consists of these activities:

• have an audience on social media

• write content on your product blog for SEO

• create free tools for backlinks and traffic

• reach out to influencers

In this newsletter issue, I want to focus on creating free tools.

For a tech founder like me, creating free tools feels like cheating.

They consist of some very simple tools that you add to your main product website.

Usually, you create a “free tools” section, and you list them all.

These tools need to be relevant to the potential customers of your product. The reasons why free tools are effective as marketing channels are:

• they are free to use, and people love them

• they solve a small but real problem

• other websites might link them or include them in articles (backlinks)

• people might search for a solution to that problem

Backlinks are important if you are trying to create a reputation on Google.

Google ranking is based on two factors

• the number of backlinks from other websites to your product website domain

• the number and type of keywords your website ranks for

The more of these two things you have, the higher your domain authority, and the higher the probability that Google starts showing your web pages in the search results (which is your real goal).

Hence, you get a lot of organic traffic to your product.

That’s why creating content and free tools are the main activities to bring organic traffic in the long term (yes, guess what, none of these activities is a quick win).

Up to the date of writing this newsletter, I’ve created three free tools for my product Shipped.club (and it feels like cheating to me because I love building, but this activity is also relevant for marketing 🤩).

The tool Secret and Password Generator is to create secrets, unique random IDs, and passwords.
It is useful because the customers of Shipped need to generate a secret during the setup of the product, and in general, random password generators are very useful.

The second I created is a Timezone Checker for Meetings, particularly useful if you work in a geographically distributed environment. As the customers of Shipped are usually software engineers with full-time jobs, this product might be relevant for them.

The most recent free tool is a Blog Image Resize tool. This product was useful to me (and I hope to other startup founders). When I write an article on the blog of Shipped, I usually cross-post it on different platforms like Dev.to, HashNode, Medium, and they all have different cover image sizes and formats.

With this tool, I can upload my cover image and generate all the other images in one click.

Of course, you can’t expect these tools to generate a ton of traffic just because you built them. You need to market them with the usual channels:

• Hacker News

• Indie Hackers

• Reddit/Twitter/X/Facebook/LinkedIn/etc

Do you want more examples from successful products that (also) use this technique?

Pallyy $83k MRR (5 years old) — Social Media Scheduling

PDF.ai $50k MRR — ChatGPT for your PDFs

What are you waiting for? Start creating your free tools today.

Personal updates

During the last weeks, I’ve been very active.

If you’re a reader of The Solopreneur on The Road to Freedom you know that I launched the Shipped’s bundle Startup + Chrome Extension boilerplate.

It performed well with 12 orders and $1.2k+ revenues generated in a couple of weeks.

The main challenge I had was to propose this new bundle, and I ended up adding it to the pricing section and creating a dedicated sales landing page.

New side project launch

A couple of days ago I had a crazy idea, and I decided to launch it as fast as possible using Shipped. It’s a platform very similar to the popular HackerNews website but dedicated to indie hackers’ content.

I called it Indie Hacker News.

The aim is to create a space to share links with the community, learn more about each other, and discuss them in threads.

I already discovered some very interesting products there, like StockmusicGPT

Next week I’ll try to market it on different platforms, let’s see how the community will welcome it.

And that’s all for today, see you next Sunday!
Luca

Whenever you are ready, I have a couple of ways to help your founder journey.

Shipped.club is the Next.js Startup & Chrome Extension Boilerplate for busy developers, that allows you to build, ship, and make money with your product quickly
108 makers are already shipping faster.

The second is Userdesk, the AI Assistants platform to automate your leads collection and customer support for your digital business.

Let’s be honest, being a solopreneur on the side of a full-time job, is not easy at all.

Life is overwhelming. We struggle for 9 hours (from 9 to 18 here in Italy, with an hour lunch break), and out of that, we want to work on our side projects.

That’s overwhelming.

You know, consistency is key in this game.

But consistency is not enough.

Consistency without focus brings to waste of time, or working on the wrong things.

Throughout my journey, I’ve learned many things, and if I had to start over with a new project, this is what I would do.

Let’s say you already picked up a product idea, you validated it with a waitlist, pre-order page, or by talking to enough people to understand that it’s a painful problem. Amazing, it’s time to build the MVP.

If you’re a coder, I suggest you use one of the many boilerplates to save a huge amount of time working on the boring stuff (landing pages, authentication, collect payments on so on). You could use Shipped.club if you’re into the Next.js and React world or you can pick up another one. Just save time on coding.

If you’re not a coder, you can always try a no-code product like Bubble. Those are platforms to build full-stack applications via their (quite complex) platform.

Alright, let’s say you have the MVP, until now you focused on validation and building.

The first lesson I’ve learned is that you need to do both marketing and building (especially if your product is a SaaS) in a balanced way. You can’t skip any of the two.

Coding/Marketing Week

A great way to be consistent with both of them is to alternate the weeks, one week of marketing, and one week of building.

Use this website to decide what you’re going to work on this week:

https://codingweekmarketingweek.com/

and stick to it.

Coding/Marketing Boards

Create two boards using Notion, Trello, or whatever you prefer.

One product board, and one marketing board. Keep them separated.

This way when you’re on one of the two weeks, you open the specific board and you know exactly what to work on.

You might add new tasks within the weeks when you receive a feature request or you have an idea. remember to immediately write it down on the right board to avoid forgetting it.

At the beginning of every week, it’s a good idea to look at the board and reorganize and prioritize the activities.
This way you’ll start with a clean board, and work on the most impactful tasks.

With this simple system, you’ll be able to proceed with both activities and don’t find yourself only coding. Remember, your product might be great, but if no one knows about it, you’ll not get new customers.

Stick to this process for as long as possible, you’ll see the results 💪

Personal updates

Last week I was freaking out.
After 2 months of constant sales of Shipped.club, they suddenly stopped.
That happened when I added the email course, increased the price by $10, and changed a bit the copy/positioning, from “Launch your product” to “Launch your Micro SaaS”.

So I decided to write a product journal, to keep track of all the changes (I update the website quite often).

In the meantime, I worked on a new feature, a React Chrome Extension Boilerplate.

I launched it yesterday with a bundle deal, and I was finally able to unlock new sales after 5 days of zero sales 😮‍💨

As I developed a Chrome Extension in the past for iterspace and OmniWrite, I wanted people to take advantage of it. It includes:

• authentication

• push UI into web pages

• read content from web pages

• React, JavaScript, and TypeScript

• Background, and content script, Pop-up

• installation welcome page

And by the way, I want you to leverage this deal as well.

You can get 50% off the bundle price ($98.5 instead of $197) with this coupon code G5MDMZNQ at the checkout. Valid until Monday the 4th of March. Get it today.

That’s all for today.

See you next Sunday

Luca

Whenever you are ready, I have a couple of ways to help your solopreneurial journey.

Shipped.club is the Next.js Startup Boilerplate for busy developers, that allows you to build, ship, and make money with your product quickly.
92 makers are already shipping faster.

The second is Userdesk, the AI Assistants platform to automate your leads collection and customer support for your digital business.

Let’s be honest, the most difficult part for a technical founder is to understand that marketing matters, much more than the product and building.

Last week I made something completely unexpected for the Luca of 4 years ago: a giveaway, and a lead magnet. Let’s dive in.

The giveaway

Giveaways are a great way to generate hype and “noise” (and therefore marketing) around your product.

A giveaway is when you give something out for free (or not). It’s a very old marketing technique. Have you ever seen big distribution offers like “buy this product, every week we randomly extract the winner of a new refrigerator”? (Randomly replace frequency and product).

Many variations exist, but on Twitter/X it is usually in the form of “I have created a resource that saves you time. Like, reply, retweet to get the link in your DMs”.

Last week I made a giveaway on X.

It’s not my first one ever, I’ve done others in the past. Some of them performed well, others a little bit less.

As always with marketing, the outcome is unpredictable. But if you don’t try, you don’t know and don’t get it.

The reason giveaways give you so much visibility on X, is also due to the social platform algorithm.

The more engagement your content gets, the more the algorithm will show your content to others. Because it “thinks” that the content is relevant to many for some reasons.

💬 819 comments
♻️ 29 retweets
❤️ 484 likes
🔖 344 bookmarks
👁️ 96k views

This is one of the most successful giveaways I’ve ever done.

My giveaway was a free guide on how to build and launch a Micro SaaS in 7 days.

I’ve put all I learned in the last 4 years building SaaS products as a solopreneur.

My community on X knows me, and I have a reputation as a side hustler there, but the giveaway gave me more visibility. This was the outcome (numbers you usually don’t see publicly shared)

+400 followers on X in a couple of days.

I also have my personal newsletter (that you are reading 🤗) linked in the X profile.

~30+ new subscribers to the newsletter.

Not bad for a single tweet!

Lead magnet

Later on, I converted the same guide into a free email course. One email is sent every day, with the instructions to build a Micro SaaS, for seven days.

And I’ve added the course as a lead magnet on the website of Shipped.club — The Next.js Micro SaaS boilerplate for busy developers.

So far, I’ve got 20 subscribers to the course in the last 24 hours.

This is probably the marketing with the best outcome I’ve done so far, and I have to say that I enjoy doing it!

What I realized in the last years is that when you have Product Market Fit (your product has an audience and resolves a painful problem for them) you need to spend 80% of the time on marketing, and only 20% on coding.

And that’s my goal for 2024.

That’s all for today.
See you next Sunday 🙌
Luca

Whenever you are ready, I have a couple of ways to help your solopreneurial journey.

Shipped.club is the Next.js Micro SaaS Boilerplate for busy developers, that allows you to build, ship, and make money with your product quickly.
85 developers are already using it, and are shipping together in the private Discord community.
Shipped also comes with Parity Purchasing (extra discount) depending on your country, discover your discount on the landing page!

The second is Userdesk, the AI Assistants platform to automate your leads collection and customer support for your digital business.

Most people I know are amazed when they discover I am a solopreneur on the side of a 9-5 job.

I recently went full-time indie hacking (but I’ll return to a 9-5 soon, I’ll tell you more in the next issue), but since 2019 I’ve been doing the indie hacker on the side of a full-time job.

In this issue, I want to show you how I was able to build 6 SaaS, and sold 3 of them (probably 4 soon), while working as a senior software engineer and team lead for different companies.

But let’s give you the exact daily schedule I use:

• I wake up around 7/7:30 AM (I’m not an early bird, I can’t wake up before, I tried, but it’s not for me)

• I bring the dogs out and I prepare breakfast for me and my girlfriend

• I work out a bit, (usually push-ups)

• At 8 AM I’m in front of my desk, I work for an hour on my stuff (coding my products, or scheduling tweets and engaging)

• 9 AM: I start working for my employer, until 1 PM, launch break of 1 hour, employer work until 6 PM

• The evening is usually dedicated to personal time, I watch some TV series, or go out for dinner. I rarely work.

• During the weekend I might do something, or not, but I never overwork. I try to keep a good work-life balance because I want to do this in the long term and avoid burning out at all costs.

That’s it, do this every day, and your effort will compound over time to build something bigger.

You don’t need morning routines, to wake up at 5 AM, or any other fancy technique.
Do just a little bit over time.

Of course, I work from home, and I don’t have commuting time.

Having a 9-5 removes from you the money pressure, the pressure to make money to pay the bills. And you can reinvest part of your salary into your businesses (sponsorships, paid ads, etc.).

This is what I was able to achieve by being consistent:

• Between 2019 and 2021, I built the SaaS iterspace and sold it.

• In 2021 I started building an audience on Twitter talking about web development (by the way, grab the free 200+ slides about JavaScript, React, CSS if you haven’t already).

• In 2022 I started building Hivoe in public, a Twitter DM automation micro SaaS, and Inboxs, a Twitter DM productivity inbox micro SaaS (I sold both of them in 2023)

• In 2023 I built OmniWrite an AI writing Chrome extension, Userdesk, an AI Chatbots platform for businesses, Wuf a mobile push notifications micro SaaS, and launched Shipped.club, the Next.js Micro SaaS Boilerplate for busy founders.

I strongly suggest that everyone start indie hacking on the side, it’s the most sustainable and stress-free way of approaching it.

Also because there’s a lot to learn, and it takes time.

I hope you find this information useful, and if you have any questions, please write to me on Twitter/X or via email 🙌

My projects

There are no relevant updates on Userdesk (yet) but I’m actively working on Shipped.club—The #1 Next.js Micro SaaS Boilerplate for busy founders.

This year, I want to focus on SEO much more. Therefore I started building free tools around Shipped.

The first one is a Secret / Password / ID Generator for developers, the second one is a Timezone Checker for Meetings for professionals working in geographically distributed companies.

On the revenues side, I’m super excited as I’m close to reaching $10k and 80 customers since the launch in December 🤩 and this has been my goal for February.

That’s all for today.
See you next Sunday 🙌
Luca

Whenever you are ready, I have a couple of ways to help your solopreneurial journey.

Shipped.club is the Next.js Micro SaaS Boilerplate that allows you to build, ship, and make money with your product quickly.
79 indie makers are already using it, and are shipping together in the private Discord community.
Shipped now comes with Parity Purchasing (extra discount) depending on your country, discover your discount on the landing page!

The second is Userdesk, the AI Assistants platform to automate your leads collections and customer support for your digital business.

Recently, I’ve been thinking of it.

I would like to have a cofounder for Userdesk.

The reason is simple, I suck at marketing.

I am a coder, I love building products, I have a community on Twitter/X, and I tried doing marketing, but I still haven’t mastered it.

Plus, doing marketing for a SaaS product is hard.

I’ve also recently launched Shipped, which has a great founder product fit and product market fit. I know the domain, and I know how to please the users.

But with Userdesk (AI Chatbots for businesses) I have no clue.

Isn’t it the dream of every tech founder to find a strong marketer as a cofounder? (YES!)

Easier said than done.

But how do you find the right cofounder? What does it mean “right”?

Let me explain it.

Having a cofounder is like being married. You share one of the most important assets in your life (your business) and therefore the relationship must be perfect. Or at least it must work for long enough (10+ years).

You’re going to invest a lot of time, energy, and money into that, so you need:

• perfect alignment on the goals (short-mid-long term)

• the same mindset

• great cultural fit (you want to avoid misunderstandings and tensions)

• compatible characters

• open and transparent communication, always

• complementary skills (you want to avoid overlaps and unclear responsibilities)

So, if I need to answer that question again: how do I find the right cofounder?

The answer is: you don’t.

You don’t find it the same way you don’t find a wife just because you’re looking for one.

It happens.

You notice when you meet that person. There’s the same enthusiasm, energy, alignment, compatibility, and so on, that you are looking for.

Therefore you decide to work together, the start a new challenging, and scary journey together.

So if you are wondering if I’ve found a cofounder, well. That didn’t happen.

A lot of things are happening in my indie life, and I’ll share them here, with you, as always.

Product updates

Free info product

Last week I did a giveaway for a free product, 200+ slides with tips and tricks about Web Dev (JavaScript, React, CSS, etc).

It has been well received by the community, with ~50 downloads and a couple of people who donated (thank you 🙏).

I didn’t expect much of it, and this was an experiment, I had fun doing it.

If you are still interested, you can grab it here for free.

Shipped.club

Last week I had some fun adding some new cool components to Shipped, the Next.js Micro SaaS Boilerplate.

The Tabs component, and the Sidebar ✨

The feedback has been great, and I keep selling copies of Shipped. It looks promising and I’ll continue working on it.

That’s all for today.
See you next Sunday.
Luca

Whenever you are ready, I have a couple of ways to help your solopreneurial journey.

Shipped.club is the Next.js Micro SaaS Boilerplate that allows you to build, ship, and make money with your product quickly.
72 indie makers are already using it, and are shipping together in the private Discord community.
Shipped now comes with Parity Purchasing (extra discount) depending on your country, discover your discount on the landing page!

The second is Userdesk, the AI Assistants platform to automate your leads collections and customer support for your digital business. I recently added a ton of new features and a brand-new analytics section.

If you are following my journey, you’ll probably know that I’ve always been a micro- SaaS-kind-of solopreneur.

I started with iterspace.com, and moved to hivoe.com and inboxs.io, just to mention a few.

Last year I launched Userdesk.io an AI Chatbots platform.

I decided to build this product because I found it incredibly useful as a SaaS owner—use the public website pages of your micro SaaS to train a Chatbot that automatically replies to users’ questions. Mind-blowing.

Of course, the market was quickly saturated with similar solutions, but the market is also huge, right? That should be space for each one of them.

But I didn’t consider one thing—and I just discovered it these days.

This SaaS product is f*cking complex for a solopreneur. Let me explain why.

First of all, I don’t have a clear target niche. The positioning is too broad, and my customer base is very fragmented. This makes writing copy that resonates much harder impossible.

Second of all, the customers ask for a ton of integrations and improvements, for their specific use cases (SaaS, e-commerce, agency, and so on).

Here’s what I should do.

1. Decide what’s the target audience.

2. Reframe all the landing page copy, so that would be clear to new users and customers who’s the product for.

3. Accept only feature requests that align with the target audience.

With this in place, I can (probably) start seeing more results.

At the moment, I feel like completely overwhelmed by the product, and like I should have other people helping me with the marketing and development, but I can’t afford to pay collaborators.

So I’m looking for a co-founder on the product and marketing side, to make all these adjustments. But it’s not easy to find the right person.

Someone told me “You can’t find a co-founder, exactly like you can’t find a wife just because you are looking for one”. Harsh but sincere words.

Finding the right co-founder for me means having a great cultural fit, a very similar mindset, transparent communication skills, compatible characters, and sharing the same short-term and long-term goals. Without all of this, the collaboration would be quite hard.

Let’s see how it goes and if I can save this product from stagnation.

Personal updates

Shipped revenues

I am super excited about my latest (and first ever) one-time purchase product Shipped.club.

There’s great product market fit and founder product fit (my favorite kind of fit) and the Discord community is pretty active (everyone is busy of course, but things happen).

And I recently got to $8k total revenues since December 4th.

Who’s Shipped.club for?

If you are a coder, with a 9-5 job, who wants to quickly build a micro SaaS or validate a product idea (without building it all), Shipped is a great time saver and it’s perfect for you.

Free info product

I finally launched a free info product. In 2021 I started being active on Twitter posting web dev-related slides, daily.

I always thought I should have done an info product that collects them all, but I never found the time. This week, I did it!

You can grab it here for free.

That’s all for today.
See you next Sunday.
Luca

Find me on Twitter / X — LinkedIn

Whenever you are ready, I have a couple of ways to help your solopreneurial journey.

Shipped.club is the Next.js Micro SaaS Boilerplate that allows you to build, ship, and make money with your product quickly.
64 indie makers already bought it, and are shipping together in the private Discord community.
Shipped now comes with Parity Purchasing (extra discount) depending on your country, discover your discount on the landing page!

The second is Userdesk, the AI Assistants platform to automate your leads collections and customer support for your digital business. I recently added a ton of new features and a brand-new analytics section.