Nusii is 10 years old! 🥳 I can't believe it is this long ago. It all went by so fast. Time to reflect on the first couple of years! 13 years ago, I joined a tiny startup called Cabify (@CabifyTech) as employee number 1. It was my 2nd job in Spain. This was by far the coolest job I ever had. We were building so much cool stuff with a very small team of awesome people. Here, I met my future cofounder @nathanjpowellUX, who had been contracting for them for a while. I was building small side projects with colleagues here and there, but nothing was serious. One day, Nathan gave me @robwalling's book 'Start Small, Stay Small', which instantly clicked with me. It completely changed my life. From that day, all I wanted was to have a bootstrapped SaaS. Nathan had built a scrappy MVP called Nusii and needed some help fixing some bugs and adding 1 or 2 features. Luckily, it was built with Ruby on Rails, so I could quickly help. I remember charging €30/hour and there was a budget for like 5 hours. The MVP was in a terrible state. I fixed the bugs and added a small feature, but the code was in horrible shape. With almost no paying users, it didn't have much of a future. I approached Nathan that I would love to join and work for free (and 50% 😅). To my surprise, he already thought about it, and he said yes. We didn't know each other that well, but we were working great together. He redesigned version 2 of Nusii from scratch, and I completely rewrote the MVP. This was all on evenings and weekends as I still had a full-time job. We first built a working prototype, which we put in front of potential users and asked for feedback. We launched the beta and instantly had a group of fans who loved it. We quickly got it to $1000 in MRR. I was lucky that in that period, I could work part-time 3 days a week for Cabify so I could focus a bit more on Nusii. Cabify was growing super fast at that time, and the job I used to love so much was changing slowly. New employees every single month, and the work became less interesting for me. I realized that I'm more of a person who works well at smaller companies. Not talking natively Spanish didn't help either. I felt a bit detached from all of it. I think I was close to burning out in that period. So, in December 2014, I quit. I had saved enough to live for like 4 months. I thought that would be enough to be able to grow Nusii to support me. What I didn't know (because I'm stupid 😅) is that I had 3 months to buy my stock options before they expired. As being the first employee, it would have been really stupid to not buy those. Not knowing that it was exactly the amount of my entire savings 🤣 And as if that wasn't enough already, in the same month, my girlfriend got pregnant with my first child. This gave me an 8-month deadline to really make Nusii work. Meanwhile, I had to earn money quickly because I was broke and unemployed. Together with a friend, I quickly made and launched a website/service within a day called sketchtohtml.com. We launched it on ProductHunt. It was live for about 45 minutes, and then they took it off because it wasn't a product (fair enough). This gave me 1 or 2 projects. But luckily, @brennandunn tweeted it out (x.com/brennandunn/status/539…). This drove around 50 website/app submissions and gave me enough work for me to survive. I sold the domain a little later for around $2000. 8 months later, Nusii made enough to support my very frugal life. Just in time, my daughter was born. For the first 3 years, Nusii was growing slowly but steadily, but we hit a plateau pretty soon. We couldn't crack it. Nathan wanted to move on, and I really wanted to continue. In early 2019, we decided to split ways, and I bought him out. All in good ways. We are still very good friends. For the last 4 years, I've been running Nusii solo. It grew a bit, but it still has the same plateau. As much as I want the numbers to go up, I am really pleased with it. It is my dream job and the best job I ever had. I love every single day of it. I can't imagine my life without it anymore. I hope I'll still run Nusii for the next 10 years ❤️

In a country where it is legal to buy a gun before drinking a glass of beer, banning Fable for everyone, it must be seriously dangerous 😂

One of those paid admin plugins that I never regretted buying because it makes my life a lot easier is @avo_hq. Just the fact that it was easy to add and change things before AI, it is now incredible easy now with AI. After an hour feature development, it literally takes 10 seconds to also update the Admin panel. It always works. Simple code and great documentation really pays off in this new area.

Fable replaced a $150/month SaaS today 😳 The SaaS wasn't good enough for my usecase (I need A LOT more usage, so it would cost thousands). I tried with Opus 4.6 untill 4.8 but no luck. Fable nailed it! Max subscription justified for the rest of the year 😅

I converted a site and I used Hugo for the first time. By far my favorite static site generator that I have used. I used Middleman( Ruby), Jekyll (Ruby), Eleventy (JS) and now Hugo (Go). Super super fast, no npm stuff, no installation issues. Opus and Fable nailed every single thing.

My dog is the perfect dog. Good with children, very sweet, plays a lot, listens well, good with other dogs, doesn't bark that much. Except for one thing... When he is lose he looks for cow 💩 and covers himself with it.... I guess nobody is perfect. 😅

I wish indie hackers read this type of advise. The advise you read from twitter is from people who have large audiences, but it is bad advice for most people. You don’t need to build an audience, the vast majority of successful SaaS is successful with other distribution channels.

wtf? 🤣

I'm not really sure how it works but I absolutely love ui dot sh (how do you write and pronounce this tho? 😅) by @tailwindcss. I'm not a designer, but all the people I gave my redesign preview link said it looks really good! Best $120 I spent this year so far 👍

I never really understood this. Why are we talking down on the only continent that tries? What is the alternative? We all just ignore this?

I wonder how many admin panels support 2FA? I guess not that many? It is probably the most important login you own. I just added 2FA to Nusii's admin panel 🤘

To be fair, I don't know much about Docker and Kamal. I just wanted to share that I went from local registry to AWS ECR (same region as my app) and right now, deployments are like 3 times faster.

Or 4) they simply don’t want to work there

Smart move! They won't be able to exit the app and will be stuck in there forever! 😅

Quick update. One and a half years ago, I got bored of working alone, so I joined a company to work on a brand new app. Originally, it was only meant to be for 3 months, but I loved it so much that I just continued. This month, I left that project and I'm fully focused on Nusii again. It was a weird move because Nusii was more than enough for me financially. I could have just continued, but I’ve never been motivated by money alone. I’ve always just followed my interests. Working with a team again was great. I learned more in 1.5 years than in the 5 years before. Every single person on that team was smarter than me, and that is always the place I like to be. I will miss it, but I am more motivated to work on Nusii again than ever before!

Using @userlist like a true pro marketing guru 🤣

This is more than our VAT, just saying!

Im about to do a big positioning push (and redoing my website, etc) in the next week. Everyone is Clauding this like a mofo but I decided to go all in the other way and hiring a great professional writer. So far I’m really pleased with the way it goes!

I might not have that many new customers, but this stat I'm really proud of! From all our customers 52.5% are a customer for longer than 5 years. 3 years: 66.5% 4 years: 60.6% 5 years: 52.4% 6 years: 44.1% 7 years: 35.9% 8 years: 25.3% 10 years: 11.8%