Photo by Thierry Lemaitre on Unsplash
Last week I bought Mattia’s half of BlackTwist.
No press release, no big announcement. Just a wire transfer, an updated cap table, and a Slack channel that suddenly had one person in it instead of two.
I own 100% of BlackTwist now. I’m a solopreneur again.
I’ve done this dance before: solo, then not solo, then solo again.
But this one feels different to write about, because for the first time it’s not a product I’m selling or shutting down. It’s a partnership I’m ending, on a product I’m keeping and still believe in.
So let’s talk about what actually happened.
Mattia and I teamed up in May 2024. I wrote about it at the time, we met on Twitter, had a pizza dinner in Milan, and decided to build a Threads scheduler together (years after).
He’d bring the marketing and content instincts, I’d bring the product and engineering. Clean split, on paper.
A year and change later, BlackTwist was a real product with real revenue. And I was buying him out of it.
Nothing dramatic happened. No fallout, no fight. Just a slow realization, on both sides, that the partnership had run its course.
I want to be fair here, because a lot of it worked.
Having a co-founder meant accountability. When you know someone else is checking the metrics on Monday, you ship on Friday instead of Sunday night. That alone probably saved us months.
It also meant I wasn’t alone in the journey. Building a SaaS solo is lonely in a specific way. You make a hundred small decisions a day and nobody to sanity-check them with. Having Mattia there to bounce ideas off, even half-baked ones, made the whole thing feel lighter.
We had a weekly call, every week, no exceptions. Just us, going through what shipped, what didn’t, what we were worried about. That call kept us in sync in a way async Slack messages never could have. I miss that call more than I expected to.
Here’s the honest part.
When we started, I expected Mattia to be the marketer. That was the whole premise. I build, he grows. But over time, he ended up pulled more toward the product side than the growth side. Not a bad instinct on its own, but it meant we started overlapping on things neither of us had signed up to overlap on. Two people with opinions about the same roadmap decisions, and nobody clearly driving distribution.
That overlap created tension. Small at first, a disagreement about a feature, a “wait, I thought you were handling that”, but it added up.
The bigger issue was pace. Mattia had a full-time job the whole time we were building BlackTwist together (as I do). I didn’t fully appreciate how much that would cap our speed until months in. I wanted to push, ship faster, post more, run more experiments, but he owned all of the email communication and copy, and when his day job ate his week, that work just... waited. I couldn’t push on a lane that wasn’t mine to push on.
I don’t think either of us did anything wrong. He gave what he could give, which was real and valuable. It just wasn’t the pace or the role I needed from a co-founder to get BlackTwist where I want it to go.
So we talked about it, agreed a buyout made more sense than forcing a mismatch to keep working, and figured out a number that felt fair to both of us.
Now I’m back to being the only person in the room. Which means no more weekly call to keep me honest, and no more second opinion on the ideas I’m not sure about. I already miss both of those things.
But it also means every email, every line of copy, every growth experiment is mine to run at whatever pace I want to run it. No more waiting on a lane I can’t touch.
Lesson learned: a good co-founder isn’t just someone you like and trust. It’s someone whose available hours and role actually match what the moment needs. Mattia and I had the first part. We didn’t have the second, and that’s what eventually made the split make sense for both of us.
If you’re thinking about bringing on a co-founder, don’t just ask “do we get along.” Ask “does their capacity match the pace I need?” That question would have saved us both some tension a year earlier.
BlackTwist is still growing, still mine, and now fully in my hands. More on what that looks like in the coming weeks.
See you in the next update.
Luca
Hey Luca, thanks for sharing this, I imagine it’s a tough thing to discuss publicly, and I haven’t seen many founders write this openly about buying out a co-founder.
One question I had: you mentioned Mattia gradually took on more product work, even though that was originally your lane. Did you ever consider doing the reverse and taking on more of the marketing/growth work when his bandwidth was limited? Curious what prevented that from working in practice.
It's always a builder buying out a marketer, because as soon as you see some money, the alarm goes off in your head thinking you will become a millioniare over night, but before that, let throw our cofounder under the bus instead of growing together.
Simple human greed, nothing else...