About

Some years ago I left Bumble. I got burned in corporate wars. And wanted to build something of my own. Be your own boss and all that.

I gathered a small team and started to work on a planner app called Emery. Something I desperately needed on my busiest days at Bumble. Building product wasn’t an issue for an experienced team. We even sparked some initial interest with a viral post on Hacker News and got our first customers. But couldn’t get any further traction. Back then, my excuse was simple – I simply didn’t know marketing.

Not a very original story. The internet is full of failed products like that.

But then things took an unexpected turn.

A few years ago I joined Speechify and started to work on growth. And got obsessed with it. Reading dozens of books, watching hundreds of YouTube videos, researching with Claude, generating ideas and experimenting at work. All while building a growth engine at Speechify from the engineering side. Marrying marketing and engineering.

Two years in, I felt I’d finally learnt enough.

So I decided to take that failed product and grow it.

That failed planner made an ideal candidate:

• It’s boring. No AI, no innovation. Just a daily planner for busy people.

• It’s in an extremely overcrowded market. The internet is full of todos and planners.

• People are used to paying very little. Todoist charges $5 a month, making any ad spend barely possible.

• It’s bootstrapped. So every mistake I make comes out of my own pocket.

Overall, it’s the worst market to enter. But the best candidate to test my knowledge. If I can sell a daily planner in that market, I can sell pretty much anything in B2C.

So, with this newsletter, I share everything I learn along the way. How I run ads, how I build funnels, how I structure offers. I want to build the place I desperately needed back then, when just starting out.

One last thing. Everything here is written by an engineer. Every idea I share was tested multiple times, every method has some engineering logic behind it.