The Best Startup Advice I Got: Monetize First

The most useful advice I got:

1. Explore monetization opportunities If you quit your job to work on your own project, as tempting as it is to start cranking out a bunch of cool features, pay yourself first (as Kiyosaki would say).

My hypothesis at the time was that solo indie students and hobbyists wouldn’t pay. So I needed to find small engineering teams and study their processes.

I was advised to explore both directions.

What to do For B2C — based on past interviews, pick the most needed features, create teasers and pricing descriptions. Instead of payment, ask for an email for a waitlist. This way we can tell if there’s real demand, experiment with pricing, and calculate conversion rates.

For B2B, they suggested outreach via LinkedIn and cold emails, finding more people for interviews, sending them questionnaires.

What happened Two weeks went into updating the site. We switched to Tailwind+DaisyUI — modern layout libraries. I was skeptical, but turns out it’s super convenient and saves a ton of time. I named the paid subscription Lopaka PRO, set the price at $10, and waited.

Then my wife joined me and started actively pushing LinkedIn. We picked about 30 companies that make electronic devices with screens. Got about 80 contacts. It’s a very slow process, people are reluctant to accept connection requests, rarely reply, but we got maybe five constructive conversations going. We even got a response from the head of platforms at Teenage Engineering 🤩! (Though he thought it was another pitch looking for investments, so it didn’t really go anywhere.)

My assumptions were wrong…

B2C: In a month of experiments, 50 people wanted to buy and filled out the form on the site! Some even filled out an additional survey. That’s absolutely insane. I could already be making $500 a month (hypothetically 😁)

B2B: It’s complicated. Only managed to collect a few responses, never got on a call with anyone. There’s a set of features that could be interesting, but it’ll be super hard to replace a whole bunch of established, if suboptimal, processes all at once. It’s a lot of work, we’ll get there gradually.

Next piece of advice:

2. Sell the most needed feature you can build fast I was researching demand by offering a huge set of different things for graphics design: team collaboration, asset library, prototypes, and diagrams. But I’d be building all this forever. It’s very hard to do well and quickly as a one-person team. And I ideally need to roll out some features and start making a living in less than a year.

They suggested I focus on the bare minimum, with a small price tag. A basic feature set—Lopaka Plus!

And so for the past two weeks I’ve been rewriting the beta and integrating cloud tech into the current project. There will be a database, a project list, and auth via GitHub and Google. Just need to hook up payments. So far I’ve only registered with LemonSqueezy, haven’t figured out how everything works yet.

One more small insight:

3. Talk to people who are ready to pay All this time I’ve been conducting interviews without paying much attention to money. I was trying to understand how people’s processes work and what’s missing in their workflow.

When project survival is on the line, you need to focus only on those whose pain is so strong they’re willing to pay just to stop suffering. They’ll be much more eager to share their experience and demand solutions to their problems. Exactly what you need!

The advisors also confirmed that an editor is not really a venture story at all. Pure bootstrap, you can launch it on your own.

You’d think I’ve been reading about startups, product launches, and all that for years. And the advice is super simple. Like, stupidly basic. And yet I struggled to get my thoughts together and pick the right direction. Over the next couple months I’ll be testing new hypotheses.

Maybe you’ve got some advice too? I’d love to hear it, maybe something will work.

The Lopaka Journey: Incubators, Frustration, and Small Wins

Ever since Lopaka’s first big announcement, I’ve been thinking about a revolution in embedded graphics design. But any revolution needs mass support and a steady cash flow.

Over the past year, I haven’t managed to achieve explosive growth in the Lopaka community. We’ve racked up 319 GitHub stars, 246 Twitter followers, and about 3-4 thousand monthly users on the site. Which is decent overall, but doesn’t exactly scream WOW. I stopped finding mentions on sites and YouTube, and feedback started coming in way less frequently.

Remember that closed beta test I ran? Let’s just say it flopped. In the beta, you could create projects and store everything in the cloud. About 200 people signed up. I created accounts for everyone, sent out emails, and… nothing happened. Maybe it was the timing: I started sending out access codes months after collecting emails. Then I was creating accounts with delays of several weeks. But I did send regular newsletters with updates. And I even sent out a follow-up asking “Remember you signed up for the Lopaka Beta. How’s it going?” Only got a handful of responses.

Meanwhile, site traffic isn’t dropping. We consistently get 60% new users. Repeat visits keep growing. The feedback is overwhelmingly positive. Basically, the last six months have been an emotional rollercoaster of frustration and joy, trying to figure out what to do next.

In May 2024, I quit my main job. That’s a long story worthy of its own post. (By the way, this is considered a big plus for startups seeking their first investments.) I didn’t have much of a plan. Just the understanding that my savings would last a year of modest living at most.

So I decided to find the right crowd, like a founders community, where I could ask for advice. I needed a startup incubator-accelerator in Lisbon, preferably close to home and with a relevant focus. Despite the common belief that Lisbon is the capital of innovation, finding an active incubator that takes early-stage SaaS wasn’t easy. Found maybe 3 or 4. Got accepted into one of them.

In mid-May, I signed up for the incubation program at https://builduplabs.com/ It’s a small team with their own main business, kind of like consulting. The incubation plan costs €340 a month. But they gave me a 50% discount for the first two months.

Those two months are just about wrapping up, and so is my incubator experiment. Hard to say whether the results were worth €340, but I did get something out of it. To be honest, the guys weren’t super actively involved.

I went to meetups, did a bit of networking. We also had two calls and some Slack chatter. The most useful advice I got will be in the next post.

For now, you can check out the pitch deck I threw together in half an hour 🤓

Lopaka Turns One: Announcing PRO and New Features

Recently lopaka.app turned one year old — the project launched back in June 2023! We’ve made huge progress since then. Huge thanks to everyone who’s been involved and showing support. 🥳

Now we’re ready to take another step forward, and we need to hear from our users.

If you’ve used lopaka.app before, please take a moment to fill out this survey. It means a lot to me:

https://lopaka.fibery.io/@public/forms/UsDh0Qvy

Recent Updates

• TFT_eSPI Library Support One of the most powerful graphics libraries is now available in the Lopaka editor. For now it’s the basic set of functions.

• Rounded Corners Use the RECT tool and set a corner radius to draw rounded rectangles.

• Image Processing Wizard Now when you import any image, you can make adjustments — crop, dim, or choose a processing algorithm.

Lopaka PRO Announcement Some of you might have noticed visual changes on the site. From the very beginning, my goal was to simplify the process of developing graphical interfaces for electronics. That’s why we came up with Lopaka PRO — a full feature set for small engineering teams. Launch is planned for late 2024 🤩

Essentially, I want to cross Lopaka + Figma + FigJam and tailor it for open-source libraries. Here’s the feature list:

• Cloud storage for your projects
• Collaborative access
• Comments
• Asset manager: icon and font collections
• Component library
• Interactive prototypes
• User scenario diagrams

You can join our Early Adopters program and get a lifetime 20% discount on Lopaka PRO! Just drop a comment on this post with the word WANT.

Surfing, Bouldering, and the Joy of Movement

I’ve got writer’s block. There’s so much I want to share, but I’m just not feeling it 😢

I think I figured out what’s wrong: I haven’t surfed in three weeks! Finally got out there today. As usual, had an absolute blast. Sport is everything.

I used to go bouldering regularly. I honestly think it’s the most accessible and well-rounded sport out there and I recommend it to everyone. There’s a constant challenge, a short dopamine cycle, no need to compete with anyone (except yourself), a low barrier to entry, a super welcoming community, and it’s easy to meet new people.

For the longest time, I thought rock climbing was just for extreme sports junkies who scale cliffs in the snow and sleep in hanging tents tied to ropes.

Turns out, you can just walk into a climbing gym, rent some shoes, and start climbing the wall. In bouldering, you don’t even need a harness. I was hooked from day one, immediately bought my own shoes, and I’ve been climbing for about 5 years now. A couple months ago I tweaked a finger, so I’m taking a break for now.

I had similar thoughts about surfing before I moved to Portugal 😄 From Russia, it seemed like something only rich kids could afford — flying off to islands in winter, dropping a grand on gear, then posting YouTube drone footage of themselves riding three-meter barrels…

Turns out in Portugal, surfing is basically like soccer. You walk out of your house and go surf. From Lisbon, there are dozens of beaches within a 30-minute drive. Every spot has rentals for €20. With a wetsuit, it’s warm enough even in winter on a gloomy +15° day. It’s a bit more extreme, there are risks, you need to know how to swim and be careful.

But I was hooked from the first time. Even just splashing around in the water was a blast. Doesn’t matter how many waves I caught — I’m vibing with the process. Though a lot of people struggle with it. You gotta try it a couple times in good conditions with an instructor to see if it’s your thing.

Planning to try kitesurfing next. That’s even more complex — besides the board, you also need a kite-parachute thing. And there’s a lot to learn, the first lessons are literally on land. Gonna try it soon, there’s plenty of that here too.

What else would you recommend from the not-so-obvious but awesome sports?

ShareDrop: AirDrop for the Browser

Check out what I found: an AirDrop analog, but through the browser.

Sometimes you find yourself in situations where you need to print or process something on someone else’s computer — in someone else’s office or coworking space — and you don’t have a flash drive handy.

Today I ended up in exactly that situation: I came to a workshop with CNC machines and lasers, and they had Windows, while I had a MacBook with USB-C. Both computers had a browser and internet. Links take too long to retype. I was already starting to brainstorm my new startup…

So basically, just open https://www.sharedrop.io and drop files there. Sweet!

By the way, send me something https://www.sharedrop.io/rooms/d13a472f-2658-47d0-af31-657e68d8a39d

Works without links inside a local network. But over the internet you have to share a link.