2023 wrap-up. What a year 🎢

The ups and downs of the most challenging year of my life.

Until 2023, my years passed almost comfortably. The most exciting events were usually moving from one company to another. But in 2021 I decided to start an entrepreneurial journey on the side of my full-time job, and that would have changed my routine forever.

At the beginning of 2023, I had two active products, both related to Twitter (Hivoe and Inboxs). They were both B2Prosumers products. They were “leads nurturing” and “cold outreach” products. And they were growing almost on autopilot — I was truly amazed.

Let’s be honest, you don’t need to be a genius founder or a marketing expert to grow products that have product market fit. You need to be present where your potential customers are. I was (and I am) active on Twitter and the products were Twitter-related and helped people make money.

It was the perfect match.

Despite this idyllic situation, Elon bought Twitter (now X) and decided to apply $42k/month pricing to access the Twitter APIs.
Long story short, I found a buyer for both of them and sold the products around June.

That hurt me very much. I was dreaming of doing full-time indie hacking around $5k MRR and I was at $4k… it sucked so much.

Chapter: AI-Writing Product ✍️

Around May AI was hyped. So considering that Twitter was disabling all the Twitter apps, I decided to build a new product. It was OmniWrite a browser extension to leverage AI text composition in different apps, without the context switch. It looked like a good idea, but I didn’t see much traction, I didn’t get any paying customers in a month and I decided to pause it.

That happens. Move quickly to the next idea.

Chapter: AI Chatbot product 🤖

In June I built and launched Userdesk.io an AI Assistant platform for businesses.
It helps companies automate customer support and leads collection right from the website. I did a pre-sale and made $2k in revenues in 24 hours with a single tweet. That was the validation I was looking for 🤩

A month later the product was live, I invited all the buyers and… surprisingly only a few of them joined the platform and used the product. I was confused.

That’s when I learned that having a reputation on a social platform is a double-edged sword. People buy on the excitement of a new product from you, because they know you and want to support the maker.

This is great, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not the kind of validation from the market that you need.

Userdesk is live, I see great potential for it, but I’m struggling with positioning and bringing traffic to it. X doesn’t seem to work, and I need to find new ways to bring it to the market (content marketing and SEO?).

Chapter: Scratch Your Own Itches

Around August I had a need for Userdesk. I wanted to send mobile push notifications to the live chat agents when new messages were received from the users.

I learned that in the market some products provide a mobile application to solve this problem. I thought it was simply genius! And that the indie makers on Twitter would have loved it. That’s how Wuf was born.

Fun fact: during that period I was watching the TV series The Office with my girlfriend. That was the inspiration for the name 😄

Around August / September the product was live, I talked about it on Twitter, and also this time, nothing happened. I learned that there are many products in the market that provide mobile push notifications and that they are almost commodities right now. And the teams just use Slack to send themselves notifications. So it’s quite difficult to monetize.

I currently use Wuf for myself, to send me push notifications from Zapier or Lemon Squeezy when a new purchase occurs.

Chapter: The Black Swan 🌚 🦢

At the end of August, I was invited to a sudden meeting by my manager, a few minutes before, one of my colleagues received the same meeting invitation. That was a big warning.

20 minutes later, my colleague wrote a message on Slack saying goodbye to the whole company just before his account was deactivated. It was my turn.

For the first time in my life, I was included in a round of lay-offs, along with other 15 people. That sucked, again.

During the meeting my company accounts were disabled, and I found myself without a job, in around 10 minutes, with no notice.

At that time the MRR of Userdesk was around $400. That was scary.

I looked for a job for a couple of months, without a real commitment, and finally gave up. That was not what I was looking for, so I decided to try full-time indie hacking for 2/3 months.

Chapter: Bright Light ✨

Around October I noticed a new trend in the indie hacking community: boilerplates.

It was 2021 when I thought of building a boilerplate for SaaS products. At that time I sold my first SaaS iterspace but I didn’t know if there was a market for them. In the end, I moved to something else and never released it.

But the success of that kind of product in 2023, gave me the motivation to ship one myself.
I already had the code to solve all the needs of a micro-SaaS, I just needed to generalize it in a codebase and document it.

In early December Shipped.club was launched, and generated $2.7k in revenues in a few weeks.

I know that most of the customers are my followers, are aspiring indie hackers, and that it’ll be much harder to grow it in the future.

But some elements excited me:

• I love to help other developers succeed

• I have tech knowledge to create educational content around it

• I can ship more products using Shipped

I have tons of ideas to bring to the market Shipped, and I think I’ll enjoy the journey.

This is my first one-time purchase product, and it will be a nice experience to learn how to grow it without a recurrent model.

New hobby: Hiking ⛰️

This summer I decided to leverage the beautiful mountains of the Alps.
I live in northern Italy, and we’re surrounded by them. I was running almost every day in the woods, and I wanted to change perspective and see the plain from another point of view. 3,000 meters high.

I visited two peaks, Chaberton (3,131 meters) and Rocciamelone (3,538 meters). It was an amazing experience, but in case you want to do the same, remember to bring with you at least 2 liters of water, food, and technical clothes (the weather changes pretty fast).

But it was worth it.

Conclusion

2023 had been one of the most challenging years of my life.

However, I learned that I am very determined to accomplish my goals and that I work hard to get there.

Let’s make 2024 THE year, no matter what.

Happy New Year ✨