I’ve been building WriteStack for the last 16 months.

And lately I keep watching creators on X claim they vibe-coded a whole SaaS in an afternoon and pulled in serious money from it.

So I’ve had one question rattling around my head:

Could someone do that to me?

Could a stranger fire up Claude Design and Claude Code, type a prompt, and replicate 16 months of WriteStack before lunch?

I had to figure it out.

So I sat down with Claude Opus 4.7 Adaptive. The entire suite.

Claude (the architect) → Claude Design → Claude Code. No human code.

One rule: I’d guide the plan and architecture. Then I’d let the AI do its magic.

Here’s what happened.

The Plan

I needed a real product to build. Something people can use easily.

So I picked something I’d actually been wanting to ship: a free public feedback portal for WriteStack. The kind of thing where my users could submit ideas, vote on what matters most, and watch features move through a roadmap. Canny, but free. Featurebase, but mine.

I talked to Claude first to develop the idea, pick the stack, and lock the scope. Here’s the spec it produced, summarized:

Claude listed every technology, database, infrastructure and library to use.

I swapped out a few I didn’t want to use.
Rule one of working with AI: don’t let it pick libraries you can’t debug yourself.

Then I sent the spec to Claude Design.

The Design

Fifteen minutes later I had a SaaS that looked like it raised a Series A.

Landing page. Pricing tiers. Public feedback portal. Admin dashboard. Roadmap view. Tight typography. Bold accent. Copy that wasn’t embarrassing.

Claude Design is genuinely scary good.

If you’re prototyping a SaaS landing page right now and you’re not using it, you’re already behind.

But, if you’re a designer, before you panic and update your LinkedIn profile, listen.

A real designer reads your audience, knows the psychology of a paywall and can connect the dots WAY better than AI. A human designer has one more, very important advantage.

A HUMAN designer can create completely new ideas.

The design I got was almost a complete replica of Featurebase.

Claude Design produced a beautiful UI out of templates. Templates don’t know your users. Templates are usually copy and pastes.

It’s enough to start something. Not to make it f*cking good.

The Coding part (Claude Code)

I expected something close to working.

What I got was a beautiful, well organized... Nothing.

The UI was there. None of it functioned. Half the navigation did nothing. 0 animations. Sign-up? Doesn’t work. Workspace creation? Full of bugs.

The whole point of the product was letting a user spin up a workspace where their visitors could submit feedback, vote, comment.

That’s the app. That’s the one thing that had to work.

And it failed quite miserably.

And while I wasn’t looking, Claude Code was using libraries I never approved. A different auth solution. A database layer I don’t use. Dependencies I’d now have to learn just to maintain code I didn’t write.

It made decisions for me even though I specifically told it what frameworks and libraries to use.

So I did what anybody would do. I tried to fix it.

For a couple of hours, I pointed Claude to where there were bugs, what I wanted to fix, and what the UI didn’t work. Although it burned through $20 of tokens, it still amounted to nothing because it was way too buggy to work with.

And then I got bored.

The bug-fix loop with an AI that doesn’t fully understand what it just built is worse than debugging your own code. At least your own code came from a brain that knew what it was trying to do.

So Could Someone Replicate WriteStack?

Back to the question that kicked this whole thing off.

Could someone fire up Claude Design + Claude Code and clone 16 months of WriteStack before lunch?

Nope. Not even close. Not yet, at least.

And even if they could, the moat isn’t the code.

It’s the 16 months of edge cases, user feedback, pivots, UX improvements, Zoom calls, relationships and late-night support.

A product isn’t just a beautiful page or a well written code. It’s WAY beyond it.

Btw, if you write on Substack, you NEED to try WriteStack. It lets you:

• Batch-schedule a month of Notes in minutes

• Triage hundreds of notifications in minutes

• See exactly which Notes drive subscribers and impressions

• Build an evergreen library of notes that are scheduled on repeat, automatically

• Claude MCP, so you can manage your WriteStack directly from Claude

Grow on Substack without burning out.

7-day free trial →

Final Thought

Here’s the whole essay in one sentence:

Vibe coding is a prototyping tool. It is not a shipping tool.

That’s it.

Want a mockup? Vibe code it. Want a clickable demo for an investor? Vibe code it. Want something to test a positioning idea in 48 hours? Vibe code it.

But the moment your app needs logic that works in production for dozens or hundreds of users, you need to know what you’re doing.

Vibe coding won’t replace developers yet, but it will make them 100x more efficient.

I mean, look at this homepage that I am building for WriteStack:

One good prompt + one improvement prompt.

3 years ago it’d take me at least a week to build it. It took me an hour yesterday, while drinking my coffee in a restaurant.

But without a good code base, without my knowledge, telling the AI what to build, how, where, etc. it’d never been as good.

If you’re a junior dev panicking about your career, you can relax. The AI didn’t take your job. It took the boring parts.
Now you have to learn the interesting parts faster.

If you’re a non-developer trying to vibe-code your way around hiring one, you might be able to get something working. But probably not a full-scale app. Not yet.

By March, it felt like something real was happening. Subscribers tripling, new users signing up every day, the kind of momentum that makes you think you've finally figured something out.

Every single metric was going up and to the right. the kind of growth curve you screenshot and post about at 1 am because you can’t believe it’s real. It felt so good. The product was working. People were paying. All I could imagine is what happens if this growth continues until the end of the year.

Then, Substack announced they were building a native Notes scheduler.

The exact feature that brought in more than 40% of all new subscribers.

This is the story of what happened next and why it turned out to be the best thing that could have happened to WriteStack.

Then Substack Built What I Built

I was on vacation at the time I found out.

After working endlessly for more than a year to build WriteStack, I decided it was time to take a short 4-week break from everything. No coding, no new features. Only scheduled content and support tickets.

One casual night, 14 days in, I did what used to be a routine for me. I searched “WriteStack” and “Schedule Notes” on Substack to see if anyone was talking about it.

Then I saw a Note saying Substack had released a native scheduler.

I assumed it was a troll. But I opened my laptop and tried anyway.

It happened. Substack released a native scheduler. No need to leave your computer running anymore for Notes to go out.

I opened my Stripe dashboard. 25 cancellations within the hour.

What I Did About It

I knew this day would come. I was mentally prepared to integrate it, so users wouldn’t have to leave their computer running anymore.

But knowing something is coming and watching it happen are two different things.

I told my fiancée what happened and that I’d need to shorten our days until the integration was done. She completely understood.

For the next 7 days, while she was getting tanned on the beach, I sat in the shade with my laptop, coding the new integration, fixing bugs, sending emails, posting updates. While we ate at a cool Thai restaurant, I took calls with users to figure out what wasn’t working.

It was a tense week. But I had to make it happen.

7 days after Substack’s scheduler was released, it was fully integrated into WriteStack. I finally had some time to breathe.

What Happened Next

The integration changed everything. But not instantly.

The users who stayed weren’t staying because they had no alternative. They were staying because WriteStack was actually worth it to them.

The #1 cancellation reason, by far (60% of all cancellations) was “have to keep my computer running for notes to go out.” With that gone, the users joining WriteStack now are stickier. And I started seeing something I hadn’t seen before: renewals. People who had unsubscribed were coming back.

The churn rate, which used to sit at 20-25%, dropped to 4.5%. The lowest it has ever been.

What I Learned

Platforms evolve. Your code should too.

Substack can change at any point and I must be able to adapt quickly. Before this, my scheduling code was a complete mess. Duplicates, different routes for the same thing. Now everything goes through the same pipeline. If Substack releases an API tomorrow, the integration is a piece of cake.

I don’t wait for the threat anymore. I build for it.

Keep your users informed at all times.

When big shifts happen, let your users know what’s up. I sent at least one email a day with updates on the integration, and at least one Note. I was upfront about bugs, even when I could have blamed Substack’s new scheduler.

I prefer being honest over looking good. If I break something, I’ll tell you. But I’ll also fix it.

The response blew me away. Users replied saying they were behind me, that they couldn’t wait for the new integration. I got more support from being transparent than I ever got from being polished.

Nothing is as bad as it seems. Breathe.

When that first wave of users left, I thought the house of cards was coming apart.

As the days passed, I realized I was exaggerating. BIG TIME. Users told me they wouldn’t have minded keeping their computer running.

WriteStack was valuable enough. That was a massive surprise to me.

The product was always worth more than I gave it credit for.

Final Thought

Looking back, I’m glad Substack released a native scheduler.

Every founder I’ve talked to and every book I’ve read says the same thing: for a SaaS to stay strong, the number one focus has to be churn. Not acquisition. Not features. Churn.

The benchmarks: Minimum: under 10% Good: 5–8% Gold standard: under 5%

WriteStack is now at 4.5%.

I used to get cancellation emails every single day. Now I get maybe three a week.

The users who are here are here because they want to be. That’s the only foundation worth building on.

My next goal is simple: keep building something people don't want to leave.

The future is bright for WriteStack.

left a very interesting question:

So here’s the real timeline. Every tool, when it entered, and why it mattered at that specific moment.

Phase 1: Day 1 — Just Ship It

When I started building WriteStack, I needed exactly four things: something to host the app, a database, payments, and logs.

Vercel + MongoDB handled hosting and day-to-day operations. Vercel is a deployment platform for web apps (and a lot more) and has the BEST developer experience.

MongoDB is a cloud database that handles the application layer. user accounts, settings, notes created in WriteStack and all the day-to-day stuff.

AWS (Amazon’s cloud infrastructure) came in from the start too, but for different reasons.

1. I needed a big, separate database to store all the Substack data. All the notes from many creators, posts, analytics, and aggregate it into stats for users.

2. I needed a place to store all the files

3. Have a few independent endpoints that require heavy libraries, which makes debugging the app slow.

Looking back, I’d skip MongoDB entirely and use AWS RDS for everything. Mongo is expensive, and maintaining two databases adds complexity I didn’t need. I might still make that switch.

Stripe — obviously. You need to get paid from day one. No point building without it.

DataDog — logging and monitoring. Doesn’t have to be DataDog specifically, but you need something that tells you when things break.

OpenRouter + Zilliz — these are specific to WriteStack. OpenRouter is an API gateway that lets you access multiple AI models through one integration. It powers the AI content generation features.

Zilliz is a vector database that powers the inspiration page, fetching Notes that are actually relevant to each user.

Pinggy — this one’s technical but worth mentioning. When you want to debug things like payment flows with Stripe, Stripe needs to send data back to your app (webhooks) to confirm things like successful payments or cancellations. The problem is, during development your app lives on your local machine, and Stripe can’t reach it. You need a tool that creates a public URL pointing to your local server.

Free tools like ngrok do this, but they generate a new URL every session, so you have to go update it in Stripe’s dashboard every single time.

Pinggy gives you one permanent URL. Thirty bucks a year. Saves hours of friction.

The principle: at this stage, only pay for things the product literally cannot function without. No marketing tools, no support chat, no affiliate program. Just build and ship.

And honestly, besides AWS, all of the tools I used were completely free in the beginning. I upgraded ONLY when the free plans were not enough.

A moment before we continue, I’ll share with you the tool I built, WriteStack:

If you’re on Substack and you want to grow without being chained to your laptop 24/7, here’s what WriteStack gives you:

1. An analytics dashboard that actually shows you what’s working,

2. engagement tools like the Activity Center and Follow Page that help you find and connect with the right readers

3. Custom-made feed of your favorite creators, without relying on an algorithm to show you what you want to see.

4. AI-powered content generation that sounds exactly like you, using best practices to improve your engagement.

5. Scheduling for Notes, without leaving your computer running (WriteStack gives you bulk scheduling and unscheduling, tags, import of notes and soon evergreen content)

→ Try WriteStack For Free

It’s built for creators who take Substack seriously but also don’t want to spend hours on it.

Phase 2: First Paying Users (Months 2–4)

Once real people started paying, a new category of problems appeared: communication.

Resend (a developer-friendly email API) handles transactional emails.
Welcome emails, payment confirmations, cancellation notices, weekly digests, retention nudges, reminders. I’m at 39 different emails now.

You figure out what’s needed over time, but don’t try to build all of this before you have paying users unless it’s required for the app to work.

I started on the free plan of Resend and only upgraded eight months after the MVP launched.

ImprovMX (an email forwarding service) routes emails so that when someone replies to anything @writestack.io, it lands in my main email’s inbox. Small thing, but it matters when users start reaching out.

Rewardful came in about two months after the first paying user, four months after the MVP. This is my affiliate program. Users get a commission (30% for life) for recommending WriteStack.

There’s no point paying $49.99/month for affiliate software when you have zero users to refer anyone. But once you have even a small base of happy users, giving them a reason to spread the word is one of the highest-leverage things you can do.

The principle: now you’re spending money to keep and grow users, not just to build the product. Every dollar here should either reduce churn or bring in new customers.

Phase 3: Growth and Retention (Months 5–10)

Kit became my email marketing platform a few months in. The big usage was automated sequences.

A welcome sequence that teaches new users how to use WriteStack, and an acquisition sequence that nudges free signups toward paid. I’m running five sequences now, and they work in the background 24/7.

Crisp is a live chat and support. I added it ten months in, and honestly, that was very late.

Before Crisp, I was inventing clunky workarounds for users to reach me and it wasn’t good. Even on a free plan, just having a chat widget there builds trust and gives you direct product feedback that you can’t get any other way. If I started over, I’d add support chat from day 1.

The principle: Support and email marketing feel like ‘way later’ tools. They’re not. You don’t need them on day one, but don’t wait ten months like I did.

Once you have paying users, these should be next.

Phase 4: Recent Additions

Zoom — I started paying just to look more professional on client calls and demos. Google Meet feels cheap, and Zoom’s 40-minute limit is even worse. Small thing, but impressions matter.

Notion — mainly for AI meeting summaries. I record calls now and have Notion transcribe and summarize them. Looking back, I’d start doing this much earlier. The insights from user calls compound over time, and I lost months of them by not recording.

The Cost of Everything

Here’s the stuff that doesn’t make it into the “SaaS stack” screenshots:

Stripe takes roughly 4.5% of all revenue. At $10K MRR, that’s $450/month just in processing fees. Delaware LLC tax is $300/year. I pay a US accountant $200/year and a local accountant $600/year. Affiliate payouts hit $1,200 in a single month recently.

All in, I went from about $100/month in total costs in early 2025 to $2,500/month today. It happens faster than you expect.

Final Thought

Every single tool on this list is entered at a specific pain point. Something broke, something was too slow, something was costing me users or time. That was the signal.

If you’re not feeling the pain yet, you don’t need the tool yet.

Two exceptions: add support chat earlier than you think you need it, and start recording your calls from day one. Everything else can wait until it hurts.

‘What if somebody has an issue and I can’t reply?’
‘What if there’s a bug in WriteStack that breaks everything?’
’What the hell is going to happen if I don’t reply to any comment?’

I’m writing this while looking at a beautiful pool in a resort in Thailand. And it’s been almost 2 weeks since my girlfriend and I landed here.

And it’s been stressful at the beginning, but I’m kinda getting used to it :)

In this article, I’ll briefly share how it feels like, how I came over the stress and the results so far of being completely disconnected.

Everything you will read in this article, the scheduled Notes, the business that grew while I was at a pool in Thailand. All of that ran on WriteStack.

I built it because I needed it. And apparently, 360+ Substack creators need it too.

If you’re on Substack and you want to grow without being chained to your laptop 24/7, here’s what WriteStack gives you:

1. An analytics dashboard that actually shows you what’s working,

2. engagement tools like the Activity Center and Follow Page that help you find and connect with the right readers

3. AI-powered content generation that sounds exactly like you.

4. Scheduling for Notes, without leaving your computer running (WriteStack gives you bulk scheduling, import of notes and soon evergreen content)

It’s built for creators who take Substack seriously but also want their life back.

Try WriteStack →

The stressful times

In the beginning it was quite easy. I told myself that I have to relax and take some time off after working for 2.5 years straight and never taking a real vacation.

But then doubt and anxiety started creeping in. I felt like I needed to work and release some features that I promised I would. I had so many things to do, write more Notes, send DMs, improve some emails sequences.

It felt like I was missing so much.

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The system that saved me

So I decided to do something about it, which will release all the pressure and put everything in order, so I can truly relax and enjoy my vacation.

I started a new list of things that I have to do and ideas that came to mind, besides the main list that I currently have and just feel it with things that I need/want to do after my vacation.

And it works! I have the app on my phone, and whenever a stress rises or an idea pops into my head, I quickly add it to the list and let it go.

The app I use is linear.app. I don’t have any affiliation with them, just an app I stumbled upon and started using.

By the end of the trip, I had 47 items on that list. Feature ideas, bug fixes, content angles, emails to write, people to reach out to. Some of them felt urgent at the time. Most will be removed.

But the act of removing it from my mind made all the difference.

The hard numbers: what I didn’t do

Before I get to the business results, I want to be honest about what “completely disconnected” actually looked like:

• Notifications left unanswered: 604

• DMs I didn’t reply to: ~40+

• Support tickets received: ~11 (I answered these — they took ~15 minutes total over 2 weeks)

• Notes published: 4-5/day (all pre-scheduled through WriteStack)

• Articles published: 2 (also pre-scheduled)

• Hours spent on WriteStack during the trip: ~2, total

That last number surprised me. Two hours in two weeks. Compare that to my normal 60-70 hour weeks. That’s a 97% reduction in work time.

The results

Note: This post is written on March 29th, 5 days after ending my vacation. On March 16th, Substack added a native scheduler, which caused a drop in subscribers, 58 in a 10 days (vs ~20 in regular times).

So all the results will include data from the 28th February - 24th March, including the timeframe of the March 16th+, when the scheduler was released.

The results here consider the fact that I was completely off for the vacation and all the Notes were scheduled on WriteStack beforehand, as well as articles.

I didn’t reply to comments, rarely replied to DMs and only answered support tickets, which were very few.

218 new users signed up to WriteStack, while 96 converted into subscribers. That’s ~7 new sign ups per day and ~3 paid subscribers per day.

Around 40% drop from what it usually is when I’m fully available.

I marked the line where Substack released its native scheduler.

As you can see, there was a decent growth (17.14%) before the release of the scheduler. After the release, something interesting happened.

Although the number of new subscribers stayed consistent (350), the MRR grew by 1.54%.

That means that some of the users who churned are those who joined early, for the scheduler only, and paid a lower price.

Generally, if we ignore the part where the Substack scheduler was released, it seems like WriteStack is kinda growing on autopilot.

Engagement on Substack without me

This one was the most interesting to track. My scheduled Notes performed as good as or even better than when I’m engaging.

Final thought

Here’s what 3 weeks of doing almost nothing taught me:

WriteStack grows while I sleep. Not as much as it is when I’m online, but but it still grows. The system works. The scheduled content publishes. Users sign up. Some of them pay. The product holds.

I spent over a year building something that can survive without me for 3 weeks. That’s not a small thing. Most solo founders never test this because they’re too afraid of the answer.

And honestly? I think the vacation might actually accelerate the next phase of growth. I am fully prepared to get back on the horse and grow it better and faster than ever before.

Sometimes the most productive thing a founder can do is absolutely nothing.

I’ve been building WriteStack for over a year now, and achieved:

1. Over $9,000 MRR

2. 350 paying users

3. 1000s of Notes scheduled at the same time

And today, I’m going to reveal all the tools that I use and their cost.

Infrastructure

• AWS — $221/mo.
  I use AWS to run many things, such as my big database, where I hold all the data about Notes/Posts from Substack. I also use AWS to schedule different things, run my cdn and more.

• MongoDB — $90-120/mo. The app database. Day-to-day operations of each user.

• Vercel — $48/mo. The Next.js deployment layer. I host WriteStack there, my cron jobs and all the libraries required to run WriteStack.

• DataDog — ~$20/mo. Monitoring and logs.

• Pinggy — ~$30/year. Expose localhost to a global URL, so I can debug things like Stripe webhooks.

• Zilliz (Milvus) — ~$0.4/mo. Vector database for the inspiration page, to fetch relevant Notes for each user.

AI & Development

• Cursor — averages ~$50/mo. Fluctuates wildly. Some months it’s $20, others it’s $78, depending on how deep I’m in a build sprint.

• OpenRouter — ~$67/mo average. The API gateway for AI content generation features inside WriteStack.

• OpenAI — $20/mo.

• Claude (Anthropic API) — $20/mo. Added recently, I find it WAY WAY more accurate than ChatGPT.

Email & Marketing

• Kit — $59/mo. My email list platform.

• Resend — $20/mo. Transactional emails, signups, receipts, notifications, digests, etc.

• ImproveMX — $10/mo. Email routing, so all the emails to *@writestack.io go to my main email.

Growth & Affiliates

• Rewardful — $100/mo. My affiliate program management.

• Affiliates (payouts) — variable. This hit $1,200 in a single month recently, but it fluctuates. This is my top payments that I need to send by the end of the month:

  

Customer success

• Crisp — $95/mo. Live chat and support. I upgraded to a higher tier as support volume grew. Direct access to customers has been invaluable for retention and product decisions.

Productivity & misc

• Adobe — $38/mo. Photoshop, Premiere Pro, and more.

• Zoom — $27/mo. Client calls, demos.

• Notion — $24/mo. Mainly used to transcribe my meetings.

• Bolt — $24/mo. Rapid prototyping tool for UI experiments. I find it to have the most compelling and beautiful UI generation.

• Domains — $6/mo. Amortized across WriteStack and other domains.

Stripe fees

• Yearly Delaware tax - $300

• Yearly accountant - $200

• Fees - ~%4.5 of all revenue.

Local accountant

• I pay a local accountant ~$600 to take care of my books and help me manage my taxes.

What the Full Picture Looks Like

Adding it all up, WriteStack costs roughly $1,000–1,100/month in fixed tooling before variable costs like affiliates, Stripe fees, and AI API overages.

On top of that, affiliate payouts in a good month can add another $500–1,500. That’s a real cost of acquisition that shows up nowhere on a “SaaS margin” tweet.

At $9K MRR (~$108k ARR), that puts my rough monthly expenses somewhere around $2000-2500 in a normal month and a net revenue of ~$6,500 before taxes.

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The tools I dropped along the way

Not everything survives. Here’s what I tried and cut:

MailChimp — Used it briefly in early 2025, paid $40/mo for two months, then realized Kit was the better fit for creator-focused marketing.

MailGun — Transactional email attempt before Resend. Cost $7–15/mo for a few months. Resend’s developer experience is just SO MUCH better.

The lessons

1. Your stack will triple in cost as you scale — plan for it. I went from ~$100/mo in early 2025 to over $1,000/mo today. Every new user tier, every new feature, every growth channel adds a new line item or a future overhead that will force you to improve your infrastructure.

2. Growth tools cost money to run. Rewardful + affiliate payouts is over $1,100 in a good month. Email marketing through Kit is $59. But these tools boost the revenue by A LOT.
Don’t get cheap when it comes to products that save you dozens of hours of work and bring in tons of value.

3. Stripe fees are tough. At this scale, it’s ~4.5% of revenue. At $10K MRR it’s $450/month. Factor it in.

P.S.

If you are a Substack creator who wants to grow with Notes (best growth engine) but doesn’t want to spend hours, you NEED to try WriteStack.

And you can try it, for FREE. 7 days risk-free trial.

Try WriteStack for Free

With deep analytics to show you what’s converting, an Activity Center to save you hours upon hours replying to comments and a Notes management system with a personalized AI, growth is inevitable.

‘I would recommend to anyone who wants to take Substack seriously.’

-Tim Denning

That’s how much I made working for somebody else. The number that was supposed to mean “I’m good enough to earn my living by myself.” The number that would finally make me feel a sense of freedom.

I’ve never refreshed Stripe more in my life.

The lie we all believe

There’s this fantasy every founder carries around.

“Once I hit $X a year, I’ll feel secure.”

Then you hit it. And the voice changes. “Okay, but if you got to $100K, what stops you from hitting that juicy $200K? That’s when I can actually relax.”

You won’t.

I know because I’ve played this game with myself for years. Ever since I started my solopreneurship journey, my #1 goal has been to hit 100k/year (at times it was getting to $1,000,000 a year, but that was when I thought I could do it in my first year).

And now that I’ve finally hit it, it doesn’t feel like freedom. I don’t feel like I can just relax, take my time, release the pressure of the gas a little and enjoy the fruits.

Quite the opposite, I feel like I need to press harder to get to the $200k/year, because why not? I made it to here, I can probably make it to the 200k, which will give me A LOT more freedom. Right…?

I check Stripe 100 times a day

I wish that was an exaggeration.

On bad days, the flat days, the “why did nine people cancel” days, I check it every few minutes. I’ll be mid-sentence writing something and my fingers just automatically go: CMD+T → ‘dash’ → Return (Chrome auto completes to dashboard.stripe.com).

And in 2 seconds I see what I expect to see, but can’t resist the urge: Nothing changed. I check again 10-15 minutes later.

Here’s the thing I didn’t admit until I wrote these words: I’m not checking for data or to learn anything new. The data doesn’t change that fast and I get an email every time someone cancels, so I can contact them. I don’t need to refresh.

I’m checking for a hit.

Growth becomes a drug. Early on, every new subscriber is a rush. You screenshot it. You feel validated. Someone paid me. This is real. And when the growth becomes explosive, it becomes even more intoxicating.

Then the tolerance builds.

Four new subscribers? That’s just the baseline. We can do more than that. Give me seven. Ten. Heck, let’s break the freaking ceiling and get over 12 new subscribers.

As I’m writing these words. I feel like it might be more of a gambling issue (I’m ashamed to even write this). I open Stripe, hoping to see more subscribers who joined in the few minutes that I didn’t check.

Flat days make you feel empty. Like you’re failing.

$100K doesn’t feel like $100K

When I didn’t make any money, the fear was: ‘What if I’ll never make it?’ That fear had a simple answer (not an easy one, btw): Get more users. Prove the concept. Charge for the product.

At $100K/year, the fear is different.

It’s not “What if I’ll never make it?” anymore.

It’s “what if this was luck?”

What if I just happened to catch a wave? What if I’ve already reached everyone who will ever want this? What if the people who cancelled this week are the first of many, and by next month the chart bends the other way and never recovers?

The bigger the growth, the more you feel like you have to lose, which worsens the urge and the compulsive behaviour.

What I thought was that the anxiety would shrink as you grow. Well, it doesn’t. Some days it’s even worse.

You’re not broken. It’s just hard

If you’re reading this and you’re earlier in the journey, maybe grinding toward your first $1, you might think I’m complaining.

I’m not.

I'm just being honest about how it feels.

The solopreneurs who post their wins probably feel this too. The indie hackers who crossed $10K MRR and tweeted a screenshot checked Stripe four times while writing the tweet.

You’re not broken for feeling anxious about something that’s working. You’re not weak for checking your dashboard when you know nothing changed. This is just what it costs.

Building something that’s yours, something that could disappear tomorrow, something with your name on it, means you care. And when you care, you’re scared.

If the fear wasn’t there, it would mean this doesn’t matter to you.

But it does.

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The point

I don’t have a 5-step framework to fix this.

I still check Stripe too much. I still feel the dread on flat days. I still catch myself running mental math on “what if the churn keeps up at this rate.”

But I stopped thinking I was the only one. And I stopped waiting for a number that would make the feeling go away.

It won’t.

Build anyway.

Today, he runs a 7-figure recruitment business in just 10 hours a week and helps others break free from limiting beliefs. We talked about mindset, sobriety, ambition, self-doubt, and why your past doesn't have to define your future.

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First, I’d like to address the title and say that I am not biased at all.
Thanks.

Growing an email list is a very hard task. There are so many things you can do to increase your exposure and get subscribers. It’s exhausting.

And let’s be honest, Substack doesn’t make it any easier, to say the least. Honestly, it’s probably the hardest platform to grow on.

But it’s also the best platform to grow on

I wrote a whole article about why every creator should be building an audience on Substack:

But with the right tool, it all changes.

It has the things you wish Substack had, takes the friction out of your daily workflow, and frees up your energy for the stuff that actually matters. Writing great articles, building your product, or just thinking clearly without ten open tabs and a growing to-do list.

And right now, the best way to grow on Substack is through Notes. Daily Notes.

It’s not enough that it’s difficult to keep up with everything as it is, you also:

1. Have to post every Note manually, because Substack still won’t let you schedule them.

2. Have to spend four clicks and seven seconds per Note just to find its stats. And even then, you only get 90 days of history, no sorting, no overview. It’s buried and it’s a mess.

3. Have to go through Substack’s messy notification center. Replying to all your comments takes hours, especially if you’re a bigger creator. At some point, it becomes almost impossible to keep up.

The Solution

As a solopreneur, it’s hard for me to see a problem and not immediately look for, or build, a fix.

So that’s exactly what I did. I built WriteStack.

• Analytics that show you exactly which Notes are converting readers into subscribers, with the ability to repost your best ones in two clicks, instead of digging through Substack’s UI.

• An improved notification center where you can get through all your comments in minutes instead of hours.

• A Note generator that learns your writing style and produces Notes that actually sound like you.

• A dead-simple scheduler so your Notes go out consistently whether you’re working or not.

• An Inspiration page that shows you best performing Notes in YOUR niche

All of that. One place.

Let me show you exactly how it works.

The Analytics

This is the feature that’ll get you the most subscribers.

Instead of clicking into each Note one by one to find its stats, WriteStack gives you everything in a single view. All your Notes, all their numbers sortable.

You can see which Notes are actually turning readers into subscribers. That changes how you think about what to write.

And if you want to test different things and see how your engagement changes over time, like posting 5 notes a day instead of 3, or changing the topics you write about, you can easily see how it affects your Substack.

With these graphs you can track what changed.

The Activity Center

Substack’s notification center is a mess. Everything gets buried, comments, restacks, tags, replies.

Plus, even if you sort by ‘replies’, you still have to open each reply to see which Note/Post it’s related to, to reply accordingly.

WriteStack replaces that with a clean, streamlined feed that shows you exactly what needs your attention.

You can reply with keyboard shortcuts. Notes auto-dismiss when you’ve responded. What used to take 60 minutes now takes 15.

If you’re a creator who gets a lot of engagement, this one alone is worth it.

The Activity Tracker

As of right now, there is absolutely no way to know when your audience are most active.

WriteStack fixes it.

WriteStack tracks your followers’ engagement activity with your content, almost in real time, to figure out when’s the best time for you to post your Notes.

You don’t have to guess anymore.

The Scheduler

This is the one that will give you A LOT of mental space.

Substack still doesn’t let you schedule Notes. Which means if you want to post at 8am, you have to be there at 8am. Miss a day, and your consistency breaks. Miss a week, and your growth stalls.

WriteStack fixes that completely. Not only that, it lets you create your schedules based on when your followers are most active!

You write your Notes in advance, pick your times, and they go out automatically.

There’s also a heatmap that shows your posting streak so you can actually see your consistency over time.

Note:
Due to Substack limitations, in order for me to post your Notes safely, you have to download a Chrome extension and leave your computer running for Notes to go out.

The Note Generator

WriteStack generates Notes in your voice, based on your past posts, your writing style, your tone.

Not generic AI content. Not something that sounds like it was written by a robot who read too many LinkedIn posts. Notes that actually sound like you wrote them.

And the most used feature in the Notes generator is generating Notes based on your articles.

Pick up to 10 articles and generate Notes based on them.

Perfect for promoting your Posts.

The Inspiration Page

Sometimes you just don’t know what to write.

The Inspiration page shows you the best performing Notes in your specific niche.

Use it for ideas. Use it to spot patterns. Use it to figure out what your audience actually responds to before you spend time writing it.

P.S.
If you’re a serious creator who looks for a Notes research tool, you can also search through millions of Notes, new and old

Who Is It For?

• If you want to grow your subscriber count without burning out, WriteStack is for you.

• If you struggle to stay consistent with Notes because life gets in the way, WriteStack is for you.

• If you want to know what’s actually working instead of guessing, WriteStack is for you.

If you like having everything in one place, your Notes, your stats, your schedule, instead of scattered across five different tabs,
you NEED WriteStack.

And the best part? You can find out today, completely risk free.

👉 Try WriteStack For Free

Takes 2 minutes to set up and another 15 to set up your week’s worth of Notes.

I was convinced there was a “great idea” out there. Something so obviously valuable that people would instantly want to use it and pay for it. I thought once you found that idea, everything else became easy. The product would sell itself. Growth would follow. Money would show up.

That felt logical. If nothing was working, the problem had to be the idea. So I kept looking for better ones.

That assumption turned out to be completely wrong.

Why Everything Failed

In 18 months, I built over 12 products. 12 ‘good’ ideas. And none of them failed because they didn’t have potential. They failed because the first version of almost anything is bad, and I never stayed long enough to fix that.

Sometimes the idea itself is wrong, but the direction is right. Sometimes the idea is fine, but the execution is terrible. You don’t know which one it is until people use the product and push back on it. And that only happens with time and consistent effort.

My pattern was always the same:

I’d get excited, build fast, and polish just enough to feel nice. Then I’d launch, write a LinkedIn post, maybe put it on ProductHunt, and wait a few days to see if anybody’s interested.

Spoiler alert: Nobody was.

And that’s when I decided it ‘failed’ and to move on to the next idea.

Why I failed

“Don't fall in love with your idea, fall in love with the problem.”

You’ll often say founders fail because they fall in love with their ideas. And that is probably right for many entrepreneurs.

But that wasn’t my problem. In fact, my problem was that I didn’t cling to them. I abandoned them faster than I’d built them. I liked them just enough to build, but not enough to stick around when they didn’t work immediately.

The accidental start of writeStack

After 12 products and 18 months, I was exhausted. I was just tired of restarting. Tired of feeling busy with nothing to show for it.

So I gave myself one last constraint: six months. Six months to make my first dollar online. I will choose an idea and stick with it long enough to see what happens.

That product was originally called Article Generate. The idea was a personalized article outline generator. I built it in about two weeks, and then realized I still had almost the full six months left.

Normally, this is where I would’ve jumped to the next idea. Instead, I forced myself to stay and think about what to do next.

So I did what I hadn’t done properly before: I went looking for users. I started messaging people directly, asking them to try it. And people did (well, most didn’t, but some did).

Some thought it was fine. Some disliked it. No one loved it.

But the feedback was consistent: ideas weren’t the bottleneck. Time was. People didn’t struggle to come up with ideas but they struggled to keep up with writing. I started to think that another idea is going to the trash..

Then one user told me that they have an issue staying consistent with Notes, not the long-form articles.

And suddenly everything clicked.

The tools that actually work on LinkedIn and X don’t help you write essays. They help you stay consistent with short-form content and manage their account efficiently.

So I pivoted. Completely.

I shifted from long-form articles to short-form Notes and spent the next month and a half doing nothing but working on this idea and talking to users. I gave the product away for free, including expensive AI features. At that stage, learning mattered more than revenue.

The first signal that mattered

I once thought that what matters is the first customer. The first user to pay for the product. And it is a very important signal, but it’s not the most important one.

The most important signal you can get is someone sending you a message, first saying thank you for the product and then showing you how much progress they made with it and how it helped them. That first customer for me was .

A few weeks after he started using WriteStack, Bruno sent me a message thanking me for WriteStack and showing me a graph of his subscribers before using WriteStack and after using WriteStack.

That’s when I knew that I have something that will really help people get more out of Substack, get more emails, put out more notes, really help them grow.

Bruno now has 1,500 subscribers, almost a bestseller and he wrote a BOOK! How cool is that?

WriteStack freed enough time for him to grow consistently on Substack and write a book.

Here’s his amazing creation (of course I purchased it), Dark Matter, with 4.5 stars (!!) from dozens of people

(Amazon link, no affiliate) → geni.us/darkmatterstory

If you’re into science fiction, you don’t want to miss his book.

Final word

WriteStack today is incredibly profitable. It just hit $7,200/month with almost 300 active paid subscribers, 10 months after the first payment.

What made WriteStack work wasn’t the idea. Because the initial idea and MVP sucked.

Focusing on it did. Most products don’t fail because they’re bad ideas, but because we leave before they have a chance to become good. If you’re bouncing between ideas, wondering why nothing sticks, maybe the problem isn’t what you’re building.

It’s how long you’re willing to build it.

Choose one problem to solve. Focus on it for 6 months. Your future self will thank you.

It’s not that I didn’t work hard or didn’t have the discipline. My problem was that I built alone. I had a consistent loop that I did over and over again, thinking that it will one day work:

I came up with a ‘genius idea’ → I built it → I thought I made progress → I launched launch → Nobody came → I made no money → I felt awful → You I burnt out → Repeat.

If you’re a founder who just wants to build products and figure out “distribution” later, I get it. I believed the same thing. And it was the most expensive mistake I made.

The lie founders love to believe (me included)

There’s this comforting idea most early-stage founders cling to:

“If the product is good, people will come.”

It sounds completely logical. I mean, if it’s a solution people need and it works well, they should come, right?

Wrong. They don’t. And the reason is pretty simple.

Good products don’t magically attract users. They’re discovered, explained, trusted, and refined by USERS. Without users, you’re just hoping what you built works good enough and solves an issue.

I launched multiple products (12). I shipped features(countless).

What I didn’t get:

• customers

• revenue

• signals

What I did get was this creeping thought most founders get at one point or another:

“Maybe I’m just not good enough.”

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The real cost of building without an audience

When you don’t have an audience, it’s almost impossible to verify your idea. I mean, you need people to want to spend their time on your shitty product. And it’s hard.

You spend months, sometimes years, building the wrong things for the wrong people. And with every product you feel like ‘THIS IS THE ONE!’

For me, that was roughly 600 days.

Six hundred days of effort without direction. Six hundred days of building without confidence. Six hundred days I can’t get back.

Why building alone breaks founders

You, as a founder, need a little less unknowns.

When you put something out and someone replies, agrees, disagrees, asks a question, your motivation stays high. When you work hard and nothing comes back, motivation decays.

Founders experience more burnout than anybody else because they live in the unknown. And it’s MUCH harder when you don’t even get feedback for what you do.

Eventually, you wonder if you’re the problem. That’s why good builders quit.

Audience isn’t marketing

Here’s the reframe that would’ve saved me years:

An audience is for verification.

When people follow you, you can test ideas before building. You get reactions. You build the product before you ever sell it.

Once you have an audience, something shifts.

People know you. They’ve seen how you think. They follow you for a reason.

So when you ask a question, they answer. And when you want to test a solution, they WANT to help you.

You become someone they already trust.

Why substack is the easiest place to start

I don’t actually care which platform you use.

What matters is ownership.

Substack works because you build a community and you own the email list. That combination is everything. Email means you can reach people directly. You’re not at the mercy of algorithms. You’re building possible leads, not just engagement.

Think about it. If X decides to ban you for any reason, you lose EVERYTHING you built.

With email + community, you can ask what people struggle with. Validate ideas before writing code. Make money without a big launch.

Directly. Get to everybody, without hoping your post is good enough to reach them.

Final word

There are two paths in front of you.

Path one: Keep building alone and tell yourself you’ll market later. Launch when it’s “ready.” Hear nothing. Repeat.

Path two: Start writing and sharing what you’re thinking and building. Get people to follow you along and give you feedback. Build momentum while you build products, so once you find a good solution, you won’t need to market as hard.

It’s called ‘Ship fast’.

In short, it means that you should ship products as fast as you can and kill them if they don’t get any traction.

Now, it works. But for big creators with an audience.

I was convinced that it’d work for me as well. So I shipped a product every month or so, put some on ProductHunt and hoped for the best.

Eighteen months.
$0 revenue.
Not even a single signal that I was getting better.

I felt awful.

And then came the moment everything snapped.

One day I decided that I am going to change something or I will keep failing forever. So I said to myself:

“This is it. My last hoorah. Six months. One product. No escapes.”

No more jumping to the next idea.
No more quitting at the first sign of boredom or “no traction”.
No more pretending I was learning when I was literally wasting time.

Either I build something someone pays for, or I walk away from the dream entirely.

That’s how WriteStack was born.

The Illusion of Momentum

For a long time, I believed the same lie most engineers believe:

“If I build a good enough solution, people will pay for it”.

Wrong.

Each time I killed a project after a week of no traction, I missed a golden opportunity to learn:

• What users actually needed

• What to fix next

• Why did no one care

• How to market anything

• How to iterate.

In the past, entrepreneurs failed because they built something that took them months to complete and fell in love with their solution.

Nowadays, entrepreneurs fail because they lack the patience to build something, stick to it for long enough and pivot with user feedback.

It became so freaking easy to build and write anything, that we want results now. Fast.

Instead, we need to slow down, commit and focus.

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The Skill I Avoided for 600 Days

There’s one thing that I avoided doing for over 600 days.

Talking to users.

Why? because I thought my solution speaks for itself.

I thought, “If the product is good enough, people will get it.”

Spoiler: they didn’t.

Users don’t magically understand what you built. They don’t know why it matters. And they definitely won’t tell their friends about it if you never ask them what’s wrong.

Users don’t care about you or your solution is.

And it’s your job to make them care.

Once I committed to six months on one product, I didn’t have excuses anymore. I couldn’t rely on “the next idea” that will pop into my head and change everything.

I had to change my mindset from ‘1 week project’ to a ‘6 months’ one.

I needed to find ways to fill the time after building the MVP. I couldn’t just sit and stare at nothing.

So I started reaching out.
Sending DMs.
Showing demos.
Asking questions.
Offering things for free.
Watching users use the product, learn and improve.

I did everything I didn’t do in the first 18 months of my journey. And let me tell you something (honest):

I learned more in 2 months than I learned in the first 18.

The First Win (And Why They Finally Happened)

I spent 18 months making $0. Not a pity subscription from a friend.

I keep repeating it so you know that WriteStack was not an overnight success. Not even close. Heck, there were weeks I was so burnt out and desperate that I sat in front of my computer and stared. For hours.

Awful feeling indeed. The unknown killed me.

After I decided to dedicate 6 months to a product, I started seeing some change. Things started moving

Small signals at first:

• Feedback is sent to my inbox

• Somebody uses the product with me telling them

• I get messages about features to add and things to fix

Then, at April 6th, after spending 2 months pivoting and improving, decided WriteStack is good enough to pay for.

And he became my first ever customer.

—

Maybe I need to hang a picture of him on my wall. 🤣

—

And it all traced back to one decision:

Stop resetting the game every week. Stay in the fight long enough to get better.

There is no “fast” path to get profitable with your idea. In fact, I’ll go on a limb and tell you that your initial idea will probably suck.

What Engineers Get Wrong About Side Income

Most engineers think a second income stream is just:

1. Build a clever solution

2. Launch

3. Get users

4. ???

5. Profit

Nope. Here’s the truth:

1. Brilliant code is useless without distribution.
If no one knows you exist, you don’t exist. Or like Grant Cardone says:

“If they don’t know you, they won’t flow you.”

2. Your first idea will be wrong. Don’t treat it like a final product.
Treat it like a draft.

3.***** You must iterate with feedback. ******
This is so freaking important. If you don’t talk to people, you might as well close shop and move on.

4. Pivoting is not a sign of a bad idea.
It’s a sign that you got a golden idea from feedback. Act on it.

5. You need patience more than you need talent.
Every engineer has talent. You need something else to win.

The Mindset Flip That Changed Everything

When I finally committed to six months on one product, something in my head snapped into place.

I stopped acting like a casual ‘ship fast’ indie hacker. I started acting like a founder.

It always felt cringe to think of myself as a founder.

But after spending thousands of hours on one product, building it, refining it, talking to users, answering support DMs 24/7, I finally feel like one.

Here’s the mindset shift I had:

From “Ship Fast” → “Stay Long Enough to Learn”

Shipping fast teaches you nothing if you kill the product before anyone can give you feedback.
Commitment forces learning.

From “My idea is good” → “My idea is a draft”

The moment you assume your idea is wrong, you suddenly become open to user feedback, pivots, and improvements.

From “I built it, so they’ll come” → “I built version 0, now the actual work begins”

The MVP isn’t the time to rest and let the market do the work. It’s just an opportunity to start the work.

For my gamers out there who played Wow, here’s the analogy:

It’s like reaching the level in which you can start raiding. It takes time, but you just start playing at 80.

From “I need traction in a week” → “I need clarity every week”

• What did I learn?

• What did I improve?

• What did a user tell me?

• What changed in the product?

From “I’ll do it alone” → “Users are my roadmap”

Users will show me the way.

Final thought

Here’s what I needed to hear before WriteStack:

You’re not losing because you’re untalented. You’re losing because you quit before the learning begins.

You quit before the needle can start moving.

If you want a second income stream, stop resetting the game every week.
Pick one thing.
Stick with it.
Talk to users.
Iterate until it’s obvious.

That’s it.
That’s the entire formula.

Everything else is a waste of your time.

P.S.

If you are a busy Substack creator who wants to grow with Notes (best growth engine) but doesn’t want to spend hours, you need to try WriteStack.

And you can try it, for FREE. 7 days risk-free trial.

👉 Try WriteStack for Free

Hey everybody!

Today we are hosting as a guest on TheIndiePreneur.

Ilia writes about AI and gives practical tips on how to use the different AI tools/LLMs out there.

I spent months hiding my work.

I’d built my first website - a simple directory for open source software - and I was convinced it was garbage. Too rough. Too amateur. The kind of thing people would look at and think, “that’s cute, but...”

So I kept it to myself.

My wife saw it (she had to). She’s an amazing and talented graphic designer. But beyond that? Nobody.

Then one afternoon, I did something that terrified me.

I was at my brother-in-law’s place. He’s also a graphic designer. My wife and him are someone who actually know what good design looks like. The worst possible audience for my scrappy first project.

But something pushed me to pull out my laptop, open the website, and turn the screen toward him.

What happened next changed everything.

The Long Road to That Moment

Let me back up.

I’d been thinking about learning to code for years. I love software - everything about it fascinates me. But thinking and doing are very different things.

In 2024, I finally decided to stop thinking and start building.

The problem? I had no idea where to begin.

What tools should I use? Where do you even buy domains? What do half these code snippets actually do? The questions felt endless.

I discovered Windsurf and started watching what other people were building with it. That got me excited enough to try.

Was I slow? Absolutely.

Too slow to start. Too slow to prompt. Too slow to make decisions. Every step felt like wading through mud.

But I kept going, because for the first time, I was actually building something.

I decided on a simple directory website - a place to discover open source software. Nothing fancy. Just functional.

A couple months of working on-and-off later, I had something.

The Fear of Showing Up

Here’s the thing nobody tells you about building your first project:

Finishing isn’t the hard part. Showing people is.

I’d look at my website and see every flaw. The spacing that wasn’t quite right. The features I couldn’t figure out how to add. The overall “first attempt” energy radiating from every pixel.

Around September, I finally bought the domain: prosperinoss.com

(The data pulls automatically from GitHub once a day - that was the last feature I managed to add. Feel free to check it out. It’s changed a bit since then, though I haven’t touched it much this year.)

Putting it live felt like progress. But I still wasn’t telling anyone about it.

The site existed. I just pretended it didn’t.

The Laptop Moment

So there I was at my brother-in-law’s place.

My laptop was in my backpack. The website was live. And for some reason I still can’t fully explain, I decided this was the moment.

I pulled out the laptop.

Opened the browser.

Loaded prosperinoss.com.

Turned the screen toward him.

And waited for the polite disappointment.

Instead, he said: “Oh wow, is this your first website ever?”

I braced myself. “Yes.”

“It looks amazing! I love the animations and the design. I think it looks pretty good!”

I was stunned. We talked about the site for a few minutes - how I built it, what tools I used, what I was trying to accomplish.

Then I was about to start packing up my laptop.

That’s when he said the thing that changed my trajectory:

“Hey, one of my good friends has been asking if I know anyone who can build them a website and an app. Do you think you could do it?”

The Leap

My brain immediately said: You have no idea how to build what they need.

My mouth said: “Yes, I can definitely try.”

Here’s what I want you to understand about that moment:

I genuinely did not know how to build what they were asking for. My only experience was one directory website I’d cobbled together over months. An app? For a real client? With actual expectations?

I was terrified.

But I said yes anyway.

Long story short: I figured it out. The customer loved the product. I got paid for work I didn’t know I could do until I was already doing it.

All because I showed my brother-in-law a website I was embarrassed about.

What I Learned

The lesson here isn’t just “show your work.”

It’s more specific than that:

The person you’re most afraid to show your work to might bring you your first opportunity. And it’s maybe not related to software at first. It just could be your thoughts that you want to put out on social media.

I wasn’t networking. I wasn’t pitching. I wasn’t running a marketing campaign.

I was just surviving the vulnerability of showing something imperfect to someone whose opinion I respected.

That moment of exposure - the one I almost avoided - became my first opportunity.

Your mind will race with stress and doubts. That’s normal. That’s actually the signal that you might be on the right path.

The fear doesn’t go away. You just learn to move forward anyway and move the fear to the side.

The Takeaway

If you’re sitting on a project you think isn’t ready, ask yourself:

Ready for what?

My website wasn’t ready for a design award. It wasn’t ready for a Product Hunt launch. But it was ready enough to show one person - and that one person connected me to my first paying client.

You don’t need perfect.

You need one conversation. One response. That’s it. It would shift your thinking into: “Wait, this whole thing is actually possible.”

And you won’t get that conversation if your laptop stays in your backpack.

—

Thank you for reading TheIndiepreneur.

—

I didn’t start growing on Substack because I became more confident.

I grew because I removed friction between having an idea and actually putting it out.

That’s what WriteStack does for me.

Once I started showing my work, the next obstacle was consistency. So I built a system that lets me show up even when I don’t feel like it.

WriteStack lets me sit down once a week, write a batch of Notes, schedule them, and then get out of my own way. No daily pressure. No forgetting. No spreadsheet trying to track my Notes statistics.

And if you’re a Substack creator, this tool is was made for you.

And you can try WriteStack free for 7 days.

👉 Try WriteStack 7 Days Risk Free

And if you go annual, I’ll personally jump on a 1:1 with you. In the call we’ll go over your product detail and build a roadmap to scale it to $10,000 MRR.

Valid until December 31st.

But not in a lazy way. In a socially acceptable, nicely-worded, self-forgiving way (the worst kind).

I know because most days I’m under-motivated. My tank is literally almost empty, and I feel like I run on fumes the past few months.

And WriteStack still moves forward.

In fact, I’ve hit the highest growth ever in the past 4 weeks.

Double the MRR of 6 months effort in 2 months. And it’s not stopping. And it’s not because I’m special. Heck, if you read my past articles you’ll see how I had nothing going on for me for over 600 days.

Literally $0 income, no discipline and just ‘shipping fast’ and wasting time.

And it’s not because I “love the grind”, even though I love the feeling after I grind. The reason is I stopped letting my mood decide what happens next.

Most days, I don’t feel like doing anything

A couple weeks ago, on a Wednesday, I sat at home and felt absolutely nothing.

No drive, no excitement. Didn’t even go work out or leave the room.

I stared at my screen, procrastinating and scrolling. I knew I had to do something. Anything, just to keep the ball rolling.

So I made one decision:
Today’s lever is writing notes. Nothing else matters.

So I closed everything but WriteStack, and started writing Notes.
I set up a 2 hours timer and started cranking them. It wasn’t as productive as I hoped it’d be. I wrote like 30 Notes, which usually take me 30-45 minutes.

But hey! Progress is progress.

But when I was done, the week’s schedule was covered. I can allow myself some time off now.

I was productive that day.

What People Tell Themselves About Motivation

People love saying things like:

• “You just need to rest.”

• “You’re probably not aligned.”

• “Motivation will come back.”

Sometimes that’s true. But most of the times it’s just bullshit. Motivation is not something you wait for. It’s something you generate by moving.

I had to accept this:

Low motivation isn’t the problem.
No process for low motivation times is the problem.

when I don’t have a plan the day before, or I don’t plan for these bad days, I just sit down in front of the computer, and wonder what I should do next because I have no idea.

If you don’t decide in advance what you do on bad days, bad days decide for you.

And they’re terrible decision-makers.

Bad days aren’t dangerous. Undefined bad days are.

Here’s where people get stuck. They wake up tired and ask:

“What do I feel like doing today?”

Or worse

“What do I need to do today?”

On low energy days my brain defaults to choosing:

— Comfort
— Distraction
— Fake productivity
— Or nothing at all

And that’s how I end up doing literally nothing, promising that I will get better tomorrow and move on to do absolutely nothing.

So I created a rule. The Lever Rule.

The Lever Rule: How to stay productive

My coach told me something that stuck:

Every day, you have a few levers you can pull.
Your only job is to choose which one will generate the highest ROI.

Some days, that lever grows revenue that takes a lot of effort and focus.
Some days it’s a small action to keep the ball rolling.

I spent a full week building an activity feed for WriteStack.

It’s crazy useful and I love it. The responses are also great. I even enjoyed building it.

But sales dropped about 50% during that period.

Was it the “right” lever to pull? Probably not. But that’s the result of not having a “bad day” plan.

When you have a bad day plan, you can do the things that you need to do and then continue working on what you’re enjoying without feeling bad.

When you don’t, you just do the opposite.

You work on the things that won’t push the business forward (as much) and then you feel bad about it.

My non-negotiable daily minimum (Steal this)

Every day, I have three tasks that I want accomplish:

1. High-energy task
   Writing an article. Takes 2–3 hours. Annoying. Important.

2. Mid-energy task
   Writing notes and scheduling them with WriteStack.
   Still requires thinking, but way lighter.

3. Low-energy task
   Sending direct messages. No creativity. Just discipline.

On decent days, I do all three.

On bad days I always do at least one, preferably the

That’s it.

This is why low days are not an issue for me anymore.

Waiting for motivation is procrastination

It’s as simple as this:

Waiting to feel motivated is just procrastination with better branding.

If you wait, nothing moves and you lose momentum. And the worst thing is you find yourself starting over. Again.

If you do something, even a tiny thing, you move the needle. Your habits stay strong and your progress. Look, I’m under-motivated 60–70% of the time. But I still write content. Still grow. Still move forward.

Because I decided what “enough” looks like on bad days.

The tool that keeps me going

WriteStack does the heavy lifting for me when I don’t have motivation.

Every week I sit down to write and schedule a bunch of Notes, so they are sent in the background and I don’t need to worry about it every single day.

And for a busy creator, that’s everything.

WriteStack allows me to save time through:

1. Scheduling Notes - I can schedule a month of Notes in 2 hours and completely forget about it.

2. Notes Analytics - I don’t have a spreadsheet to see which Notes performed. With the analytics on WriteStack, I can find in seconds Notes that converted to free and paid subscribers, and with 2 clicks repurpose those notes (literally money on the table).

3. Comments Section - I used to spend 45 minutes to an hour EVERY day replying to comments. With the streamlined comments section, it takes me 10-15 minutes. That’s 45 minutes saved every single day.

So in total, I save ~10 hours a week.

—

P.S.

If any of this sounds familiar, you can try WriteStack for 7 days for free.

👉 Try WriteStack 7 Days Risk Free

And for all my readers I offer a 1:1 to annual subscribers. In the call we’ll go over your product detail and build a roadmap to scale it to $10,000 MRR.

—

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Most starting solopreneurs think they need a perfect product, a fancy landing page, and a 12-month roadmap before they make a dollar.

On the other hand, there are those who think that all they need is a week to figure out if something is worthwhile or not.

Both stay broke.

If you want your SaaS to make money, the game in the beginning is stupidly simple:

Talk to people. Give them something to try. See if they actually care. Fix it. Repeat.

This is exactly how I built WriteStack to almost $36,000 in revenue, and growing.

And I’m gonna walk you through the real process it took me to get that first dollar.

1. Your First Goal: Verify the idea

At the start, you don’t need to overthink your idea.

Heck, I’ll say something even harsher:
Your first idea doesn’t matter.

Many builders obsess over finding the perfect idea that will solve a problem right from the get go.

Well, if that you, stop.

Almost any idea can make a few hundred bucks a month.
And almost every idea will change shape completely once people start using it.

Your job in the beginning isn’t to find the right idea, but to find the problem other people are looking to solve.

And you only get that truth by putting your ugly little MVP in front of people and asking them to give you feedback.

Let me give you my own example.

What I thought I was building… was not what people needed

WriteStack didn’t start as a the Substack Notes engine it is today. It didn’t even start as “WriteStack.”

It started as ArticleGenerator.com. a long-form article generator.

I thought people struggled to write articles (I know I did).
I was convinced this was the pain (It was for me).

So I built it, showed it to people, and was sure this is going to be my breakthrough. After 600 days of nothing, to was my killer idea.

You know what I got instead? A unanimous:

“Writing articles isn’t my problem.”
Dang.

That was hurtful. The good think is that every DM that repeated that was hurting less than the one before it.

So I kept it up!

After several DMs of people who didn’t like the idea, I started getting this type of message:

“My problem is Notes.
I can handle long-form.
What I can’t handle is consistent short-form posting.”

Coin drop. Suddenly everything made sense.

Tools like Taplio, TweetHunter, Hyperfury and others all solve short-form problems, not long-form ones.

And Substack writers have the exact same pain.

So I pivoted and dropped the long-form idea. From a killer idea it turned into a feature that was later completely removed from WriteStack.

2. Build an MVP

Your MVP shouldn’t include everything you wished for. Even if your dream product is huge, your first goal should be to dumb it down to a single feature.

Something that won’t take a lot of resources to build and change.

When I built the first version of WriteStack, everything was awful.

The design was bad.
The UI was buggy as hell.
The UX was crap, I had to explain everything
No onboarding, no emails, no guides.

It was literally:

“Here’s a box.
Paste your newsletter URL.
Click this button to generate a new outline.
Edit it and copy paste it to Substack.”

And that was enough, because the people who tried it weren’t judging the UI. They knew it’s an MVP.

They judged the idea and the problem it tried to solve.

3. Talk to People

Once you realize your first idea isn’t holy, the next step is to talk to the users.

Not read about them.
Not guess their problems.
Not imagine what they “probably” want.

You need to hear it straight from their mouths.

On Substack you get 10 outbound DMs a day. That means you get to send 10 DM requests, per day, to people who are not subscribed to your newsletter.

Use them. All of them. Every day. No exceptions.

And then, after the hard part’s done, start sending DMs to your subscribers list. As many as you can, the goal is to reach everybody on your list.

Here’s what you’ll ask tell them:

‘Hey X. I have built a tool that does Y and I wondered if that’s something that could be useful to you? I’d be happy to give it to you, for free, in exchange for feedback.’

And yeah, most people won’t respond.
Some will say ‘interesting’ and never reply again.
Some will ghost.

But some will help you and give you feedback. Especially people with whom you have a connection from before.

Pro tip:

Follow up on people. Like I said, most will ghost/will show interest but never give it a go.

One of my favorite ways to follow up is to send a meme. Something like:

Very high response rates compared to text.

P.S.
Here’s where the term ‘Build a well before you’re thirsty’ comes into play. If you don’t have an idea yet, start creating connections. Start sending DMs to people and build a community.

It’ll be much easier for you down the road.

4. Pivot!

Sometimes you’ll need to pivot. Either by changing direction completely, like going from long-form posts to focusing on Notes, or by doing things differently.

In my case, it was changing the product completely.

And when you have a chance to pivot, it’s good. It means that you learned something valuable. Your job is to get to it, complete it as fast as possible, and get back to finding more feedback.

Especially from those who gave you the feedback.

5. Get More Feedback. Then More. Then More.

Once you pivot, you don’t just disappear and build a giant version 2.0 in silence.

You go back to the same people.

The ones who:

• tested your first version
• gave you a minute of their time
• cared enough to answer
• told you what sucked
• told you what didn’t

People who help once will probably help again.

People who tried your crappy first version will try your slightly-less-crappy second version.

Follow up with them. Even if they ghost, follow up again.

You have nothing to lose, and they have a lot to gain. After all, you are solving a problem for them, for free.

6. Build → Get feedback → Fix/Pivot → Repeat

Your goal is to keep repeating points 3-5 until you see that people are using your product with you telling them.

That’s when you know you’re close. You have a product that people like and that you need to improve. Your job is to:

• Fix the bugs

• Polish the obvious rough edges

• Remove dead features

• Add the stuff everyone keeps asking for

• Make the flow smoother

• Generally improve based on feedback

It will take time, but you’ll eventually reach a point where people praise your product and tell you that you’ve build something valuable (those who use it).

That will be your cue to put up a paywall (the moment of truth).

7. Put Up the Paywall (The Right Way)

Before you set a price, ask your early testers one question:

“What’s your no-brainer price?”
or
“What amount would you pay without thinking, right now?”

When I asked my early WriteStack testers, the answers were all between $5–$10.

There are 2 reasons I asked.

1. The obvious one, to figure out how to price the product.

2. To prime those users and prepare them for a paywall that’s coming up.

So I priced WriteStack around double the no-brainer:

• ~$9.99/month for annual
• ~$13/month for monthly

Then I messaged them.

“Hey X.

First of all, I want to thank you for trying Y and giving me so much feedback. You helped shape the product for years to come, and it means a lot.

Now, I decided that Y is good enough at this stage to put up a paywall. And as an appreciation token, I want to give you a 30% discount forever.

Thank you for believing when the product was awful <3.”

Final Thought

Build an MVP. Talk to people. Pivot aggressively. Repeat until good. Price fairly.

You don’t need to have everything figured out from day one.

Heck, to this day WriteStack still has so many bugs that people report/I find as I use it. I still have tons of things that I don’t know, and the more I progress, the more I understand how much more I have to do.

Start simple, build an MVP, get feedback. That’s it. You’ll figure out the rest along the way.

I believe in you.

Subscribe now

People wait for an entire year just to get their hands on a juicy discount on their brand new TV, waiting all night in line.

I was never that type of person.

If I need something, I get it. I talk to someone in the store, ask for their honest opinion, which they usually give, and purchase whatever they said. And now, when I have a valuable product, I considered running a Black Friday of my own.

But this stuff works. Every single year.

My problem with Black Friday

Every time I thought about doing it for WriteStack, I hit the brakes.

1. Will it make WriteStack look cheap?

Probably. And that’s the opposite of what I’m building.

2. What will current users think?

If they paid full price and now see 60% off… that’s a slap in the face.

And these are legit concerns.

When you see something for 70% off, you suddenly think that it’s junk and someone wants to get rid of it ASAP.

And, in my mind at least, when users see that you suddenly offer a 60% discount on something they paid full price for, you train them to wait for your discounts instead of purchasing on the spot.

But I was thinking about it completely wrong.

After reading Tibo’s newsletter (the creator of Taplio, Tweethunter and many more awesome products), I understood something.

The other side of Black Friday

When done correctly, Black Friday does something amazing for a SaaS product.

1. Lowers the barrier for people on the fence

2. Creates urgency without desperation

3. Maintains product value and positioning

But you gotta keep the discount meaningful, not stupid. You remove friction, not giving it away for free.

A big creator suggested I do 50% for an entire year. But it feels like I am almost giving it for free.

I mean, WriteStack is not meant to be a cheap product that you get at a discount on AppSumo (guilty for trying it once 🙈).

It’s a premium tool that automates your entire Notes workflow.

That’s exactly why attracting ‘discount hunters’ is the LAST thing I want. So I found a smarter way to do Black Friday.

Here’s how I do it

Instead of getting you to pay for something you might not use, I’ll do you and I one better.

40% off for your first month.

Why only one month? Because if in 30 days you didn’t get anything, the discount isn’t the problem.

I am not trying to trick people into buying something that they won’t use. I don’t want to make people waste money.

I want to remove friction for those people who considered it but weren’t sure yet if it’s for them.

So you get 40% off for the first month. Love it? Keep it. If not, cancel. You’re not locked into some ‘50% off for a year’ shenanigans like other products do.

Claim your 40% off

For an entire week, I am giving you the opportunity to get WriteStack for 40% off.

👉 Claim WriteStack Black Friday 40% Off

Use the code BF40 at checkout

This offer expires Tuesday, 23:59

If you have any questions, reply to this email or send me a DM :)

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Hey everybody!

Today in the article, is going to share his journey, from his service in the army, to becoming a solopreneur.

Fascinating story, hope you enjoy!

When I finished high school in Germany, I had 0 clue what I wanted to do with my life.

The one thing that was clear to me though was that I am not going to have a 9-5 job.

And as a kid, I was obsessed.

I would walk from one side of the classroom to the other just to get my 10K steps in.

One day I heard about the National Defense Institution. It’s a job that pays you good money to stroll around.

So the idea of the getting paid to walk seemed... well, practical. :)

Plus, I didn’t like the mindset that my classmates had of refusing to share a piece of paper with a classmate who didn’t have one.

And it was the norm.

So the promise of camaraderie everyone talks about in the army, the brotherhood, the “dying for one another” really spoke to me.

So little Timo signed up.

For two years, the military would be my world.

Waking up at 5 am every day, strict rules, and constant uniformity.

I thought I was signing up for purpose and belonging, instead, I found the exact opposite…

Lonely in a Room of Twelve

There’s a strange kind of loneliness that comes from being surrounded by people you don’t connect with.

I remember one mission particularly.

We were twelve guys packed into one room.

Sleeping, eating, and existing together in the same air for 10 weeks (no free weekends.)

It should have felt like a brotherhood.

But while everyone scrolled TikTok, drank, and joked about nothing changing in their lives, I was sitting there on my laptop, building something no one understood.

Most of the guys were in the military because it was “easy money.”

A stable job, no performance goals you have to hit, just do what you get told and you’re good.

This straightforward dullness was seen in every aspect of their lives.

You could feel the emptiness in the conversations, that quiet resignation that this was just how life went.

I didn’t belong there.

So while they were numbing themselves with TikTok and beer, I was quietly creating something new.

A small online project that might, just might, lead me out of the system entirely…

The $25 Moment

Back then, I was still in the barracks, twelve beds, one room, and Wi-Fi from the 70’s.

And while everyone else was killing time, I was building my first Notion template.

I called it Twitter HQ.

It’s a content management system I built to organize and scale my ideas on X.

.

It didn’t have crazy automations or a Oscar-worthy design, but I was proud of my product.

One night, while I was half asleep after a 5 a.m. wake-up and another day of drills, I got a notification.

“You made a sale!”

Someone had actually bought it.

Twenty-five dollars.

It sounds small, but to me, it was the loudest message the internet had ever sent:

“You can do this.”

Someone out there, not in Germany, not in my barracks, had connected with something I made.

They saw value in it.

And that one sale, as small as it was, felt like a bridge being built to a new world.

That sale wasn’t just $25.

It was proof that I made the right choice, not giving in to the habits of my environment.

Replacing TikTok with Notion & Gumroad, and German beer with some solid instant coffee.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but that $25 wasn’t the reward.

It was the signal that told me it was time to leave everything I knew behind me…

Freedom Ticket

A month before my contract ended, I bought a one-way ticket to Bali.

We were stationed in the beautiful city of Strasbourg, technically France, but you’d never know it from how the guys lived.

Every weekend, they’d drive across the border back into Germany just to hang out in a familiar city.

They had zero interest in exploring French culture, meeting locals, or even trying to learn French.

I despised this mindset of closing down towards new experiences, and just staying with the familiar.

So I went full in “french-mode”

- or at least however far you can go without speaking a word of their language -

I even have photographic proof of me holding baguettes, trying my best to embrace “French culture.” :)

Everything about their lives was German.

Their mindset, their habits, their sense of “home.”

Leaving the country, let alone the continent, was unthinkable to them.

So when I said, “Yeah, I’m taking a one-way ticket to Bali next month,” they didn’t even know how to process it.

They were kind about it, wished me luck, shook my hand, but I could see it in their eyes.

For them, Bali was just a vacation spot on Instagram.

For me, it was a declaration of independence.

When the plane lifted off, I thought I was chasing freedom.

But I didn’t realize that the start of my full-time solopreneur journey would max out a completely different emotion.

Connection.

Landing in a Different World

By the time I actually arrived in Bali, I was already half-finished as a human being.

36 hours of travel behind me, sixteen of those spent on the stone floor of the Athens airport, using my backpack as a pillow.

I’d taken the cheapest ticket I could find; I’m still German in that way. ;)

When I finally stepped out into the humid air, everything felt different.

Warm, alive, unpredictable.

There was no uniform or daily routine planned to the minute.

It was chaos, but it was beautiful chaos.

Within days, I started meeting other creators, freelancers, and entrepreneurs.

People who were building their own paths, just like me.

For the first time, I didn’t have to explain why I was doing what I was doing.

Everyone just got it.

There were conversations that lasted until sunrise.

Brainstorming sessions that felt like group therapy.

And shared moments that made me realize I wasn’t alone at all.

The same solitude I feared had turned into connection deeper than anything I’d found in the military.

More Together Than Ever

Ironically, the more I worked “alone”, the more I felt together.

Solopreneurship has a funny way of forcing you to meet yourself first, to listen to your own voice.

And when you do, you start attracting others who are doing the same.

It’s connection built on choice, not circumstance.

Today, I’m not in Bali anymore.

Right now, I’m in Vietnam.

Next month, maybe Thailand.

But the sense of belonging hasn’t gone anywhere.

My network stretches across time zones, made up of people I’ve met online or in faraway cafés.

Friends who understand the grind, the vision, the quiet joy of creating something from scratch.

I might be moving all the time, but I’ve never felt more grounded.

Because connection isn’t about being surrounded by people.

It only truly exists if you are surrounded by your people,

Becoming a solopreneur wasn’t a lonely leap into independence.

It was the first time I truly found my tribe. :)

P.S.

If you want to become part of that tribe, and learn how to grow and monetize your personal brand through AI-powered writing then feel free to subscribe to my newsletter.

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