I’m doing yet another major change to what this newsletter will contain going forward.

• I’ll officially call it newsletter everywhere. Not publication. Not blog. Just newsletter.

• I’ll aim to include three sections in every edition:

  • Startup Wisdom → where I highlight some wisdom bits in a short format.

  • Indie Highlight → where I highlight one or more indie businesses I find intriguing. Here, over time, I may include paid promotions, but I will of course disclose them.

  • My Journey → I offer some updates about my current endeavors with Vuuh (my main startup job), The Tech Bubble (this newsletter), Quest of the Hero (my indie game I am working on) and maybe even include some things about my political activism with CURAJ.

• I will start sending it once per week instead of twice per week, as I find this twice per week cadence a bit too much, because I feel I am always against the clock and under pressure to find subjects to post about.

🧠 Startup Wisdom

• Always start with the clients, even before you write a single piece of code. This is a lesson I learned the hard way, unfortunately, after starting multiple indie businesses and all of them failing miserably.
  But at least, with my latest one, SpamLabs, I killed the idea before I wrote too much code. I had only ~600 lines of code written at that time, before I pivoted it and ultimately killed it due to not seeing any kind of demand or interest around the problem I thought it was worth solving.

• Technologies don’t matter at the beginning. If you want to start doing something, just do it with the tools you already know and the tools you are already familiar with. Some people start selling and getting money it only with an Excel file, so the tech stack definitely isn’t a make or break issue. Don’t stress over it. If you only know PHP, do it in PHP.

• Pricing is always a hard topic, especially at the beginning where you don’t really know how much value you provide. I stumbled upon an interesting method to get an idea on what the ideal pricing should be, by asking these questions:

  • At what price point would you feel my product is low quality?

  • At what price point would you feel my product is a bargain?

  • At what price point would you feel my product is on the more expensive side?

  • At what price point would you feel my product is prohibitively priced?

🏆 Indie Highlights

This week, I stumbled upon two interesting indie businesses that I look forward to seeing their growth journey:

• Easy Branding: which is a SaaS that helps you build on-brand graphical assets for different purposes, such as LinkedIn, Meta, Twitter, etc. I will probably start using it in the future for my social media posts.
• Veklar - Gaming focused social media. Although starting a social media project is insanely difficult, I think the right way to go about it, if you really want to do it, is to niche down and build it around a core niche market. The gaming market seems an obvious candidate, and integrating the video game concept natively and tying user generated content to it seems an advantage over traditional social media.

✈️ My Journey

• With Vuuh, we are working on some integrations with some enterprise big companies. But I can’t say more than that, for now 🤫

• With “Quest of the Hero”, I got some more feedback about the game, this time about the game quality :( I need to focus a bit more on making things more obvious, bug fixing and player action feedback. I expect to start doing a complete graphic overhaul really soon, that will completely change the vibe of the game and make it more “marketable”, point in which I will also start marketing it more aggresively.
• With “The Tech Bubble”, I am still trying to find the “perfect format” so that I can find the sweet spot between effort and results. Right now, I did this major change in format, I’ll stick with it for a while and record (and report back) on the results I’m getting.

That’s all for now. Let me know what you think by dropping me your thoughts at vlad@vladcalin.ro !

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