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 🤓