Cristian Magherusan Stanciu

It's not really about the money, the feedback is much more valuable at that stage.

If you can't get a job you'll also struggle with finding clients for your agency business.

In my opinion an agency is best done as a way to scale yourself after doing freelance gigs for a while and consistently running into your capacity limit for a while, and only after first maximizing your rates

Have you considered to offer localized pricing?

People who do that are probably doing it for many other tools, distracting themselves from whatever they're supposed to be doing...

So I bet that they also can't easily afford paying you those $19/month.

You built the second project to solve a real problem you encountered while building your main one.

That's very different from building something in an entirely different space.

In the worst case you make no sales but still benefit from using it on your main project.

A former client refused to pay me over $15k for work that saved them over $150k/year on their AWS bills.

It was really painful but helped me improve my model to protect against those, and soon after landed a customer over 5x bigger with the improved model, which may bring me about 5x more money.

Seems nice, thanks for sharing this!

One thing that might be useful is to do it in multiple steps, first to gather all the alternatives, and the second one to ask all the LLMs about the full list of the alternatives.

Because some of them missed some of the alternatives, but their score was higher

Yes, using Siri all the time to set alarms and timers 😊

Works like a charm!

That's a great idea!

I tried to see the code but getting a 404 when trying to visit the repo.

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Starting a SaaS company is like jumping off a cliff and building a rocket ship on the way down.

Most people die.

Smart founders use a parachute (agency/consulting) first, then build their rocket from safe ground. 🚀

As an European I never understood why would someone who's not running a fast food restaurant entertain the idea of buying a gallon of ketchup to save a few pennies.

It's enough for a lifetime and would go bad before you consume even a small fraction of it.

Take a day off when it's a rare snowy day and take your son sledding, without having to inform or ask permission from anyone.

Thanks Timothy, I think this is a great way to start a SaaS without a 90% chance of failure, getting paid by customers to reach PMF for the SaaS you build out of it.

For the first 6-7 months after leaving AWS did SaaS and burned a good chunk of my savings.

Luckily I had a setback that cut my MRR in half, which got me to switch to services in the same niche.

Money is good, I work on my own terms and still sell software I build to accelerate my services work.

Cristi is a force of nature, but he's right, my advice probably helped him get here faster.

Btw, I've got one open spot for a new coaching client on Thursdays.

Ping me if interested, happy to do a free consultation.

Much of that speedup is because I've got you as mentor and coach.

You helped me avoid many pitfalls and take a shorter path forward.

I just wish I started with you earlier, I guess it would have saved me some time from learning so many things the hard way.

But the compounding also needs time.

Feedback from other builders is useful only as long as they're also your customers, otherwise they may waste your time implementing nice to have features your customers won't care about.

The most useful feedback is from your paying users.

Took me 2 years to reach 100% of my previous gross AWS salary back in October, after an abysmal first year.

3 months later I'm now at about 150%.

And this is from a mix of part time freelance work, productized cost optimization services and selling cost optimization tools.

It didn't support the animated GIFs and emojis people so desperately need to share each Friday afternoon 😊

Maybe something like the infamous pets.com?

It’s Climate Change.

Show anyone dissenter this pie chart of stats via CalFire.

Then tell them to STFU forever.

Yeah, like even a few weeks ago when I was in that situation with that customer who didn't want to pay for my work.

You suggested me to write about it but I just couldn't figure out how to do it in a way according with my values and the stoic philosophy I try to practice,so I gave up writing at all

These days I do HIIT, mostly using weights and as much as possible pushing hard enough to feel the burn and ideally to muscular failure.

Do you consider that as cardio?

What's your opinion on HIIT?

Or what other kinds of exercise do you recommend?

Guilty as charged.

I had a really tough time back in the second half of 2023 and couldn't get myself to talk openly about it until I got out of it.

In general I don't like to complain or beg people for help, no matter how hard it is.

I'd rather clench my teeth and soldier through it.

What does that mean?

I wonder if any other company out there sees as much and prominent vandalism on their brand as MILES Mobility Berlin gets on their carssharing vehicles.

I've lost count of how many of their cars that were valdalized like this 😊

It's never linear, always ups and downs.

I started from about $300 MRR, slowly grew it to about $800 in the first 6 months and then it halved overnight and I pivoted to services.

Had a few months on zero, then started to hover at $1-3k for the next 6 months.

Last 6 months were between $7-13k.

We have it like that in Germany, basic things are covered by the mandatory health insurance.

But my dentist often explains how the included things aren't really what one would want, and recommends(up selling?) more desirable but also more expensive alternatives that are not covered by the insurance

Just canceled my Loom subscription

I barely used it over the last year but I would have kept it.

But today they sent me an email to tell me that a feature I used to have will only be available in a higher plan going forward.

SaaS 101 lesson: existing users might churn if you change their plan.