I Disappeared for 7 Months. Here's What Happened.

Turning 40, hitting a plateau, and why slow growth isn't the same as failure.

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!