#150: Typefully, Building a Lean & Remote Team, Co-founders Relationship and Lisbon Life with Fabrizio Rinaldi and Francesco Di Lorenzo 50:00

Kia ora, ni hao and hello. Welcome to the Cherry Journal podcast. I'm your host, Camille Yang. My guests today is Fabrizio and Francesco from Tapfully. They are serial tech founders based in Lisbon and currently focus on building a writing, scheduling and publishing tool on different platforms, including X and LinkedIn.

In today's episode, we talk about their previous and current products, how to build a lean and remote team, co-founders relationship, and our life in Lisbon. I hope you enjoy the show. So to start with, can you give us a brief introduction about where you're from, what's your background, and what are you building now?

Sure, should I take this? Ok, go for it. Hi, I'm Fabrizio, I come from Italy.

lived most of my lifetime and I moved here to Lisbon here at AlphaGo and I'm mainly a designer but also a set of developer and I'm mostly working on Typhooling which is a social media scheduling tool and I guess we will get a bit into it later. This is what I do. I'm also getting passionate about skateboarding and other stuff here in Lisbon. Hi Camilla, thanks for hosting us. I'm Francesco.

As you can tell from the accent, I'm Italian as well. Do you talk like that? Sorry, I'm doing some Italian hand gestures. I moved to Lisbon about three years ago. My background is in software engineering, but for the past five years I've been a founder and a maker, and together with Fabrizio I developed Typhoonly and many products before that.

Yeah, happy to be here and to talk to you about it. I'm very curious about the story you guys meet up and why you decided to build a business together. Because I know a lot of founders, they are super struggle to find a co-founder. What's your guys' stories? Yeah, no, thanks. By the way, thanks for having us. It's really fun being here and chatting together. Yeah, I guess it all started when we...

we met on Twitter basically at the time there was like a cool cool project by Google Inbox by Gmail was the name you might be familiar with it especially in the tech bubble probably and yeah at the time like I was like

a designer mostly by hobby and I decided to build a little mock-up of how Inbox by Gmail could look like as a Mac app because I was a Mac user already really passionate about I was starting to be really passionate about UIs and good design quality in software and the material design language of Google was like fun and friendly but it didn't really fit into the Mac ecosystem so yeah out for fun I put something on Dribbble

And I think me and Francesco were following each other already and he reached out and then he'll add some details that probably are missing but he reached out and talked about creating an actual working prototype from this Reborn mockup. And that's how basically we started a bit by chance. Probably at the time I think I was still studying

I was still doing film studies in Bologna. So like, yeah, doing completely different stuff than software and UI stuff. That's how it started. And then we decided to take it a bit more seriously. And at some point we realized there was potential and there was quite a bit of interest as well. We probably put a landing page and got a few thousand signups. And so we decided to build a proper working platform.

that basically was a wrapper on top of the inbox by Gmail, but was adding like some native Mac functionality and styling to make it look and feel better on Mac. And then we decided to just ship it and sell it on the Mac App Store.

It had a pretty big success for our standards at the time. Now it might seem tiny, but it made a few tens of thousands of dollars, I think, pretty quickly. I don't remember if in a few weeks or days. Days. Very days. We were kind of blown away by the response. It was a one-time thing. But it really opened our eyes on the opportunity of this because we were at this intersection on Twitter of...

tech bubble. People are really passionate about product, about engineering and about all the indie maker movement. So we shared all these interests and kind of all came together with this first project. It's a male brew, right?

No, no, it was called Boxy. Actually, fun fact, originally it was to be called Male Bro. Oh, Male Bro. And we were about to be cancelled right before even starting our Indie Hacker journey. Like, oh no, bro, what? You know? And so then luckily we found a better name. There is a different timeline where

yeah we are broke okay no but it's fun that you mentioned male brew which is a product that we did much later yeah and maybe we'll get a bit into it so i don't want to say too much about it now but yeah the names are kind of similar which is pretty fun but yeah different different products yeah yeah because the reason i mentioned that product i was a user before even before i met you guys then when i met you guys in this business

Interesting! Yeah, finally met the founder behind that product. So what's the later story like? You guys start to build something more and what's the journey lead to building Type4.ly together? As I mentioned, we were really passionate and we still are really passionate about product and technology and that first project was really a bit compromised because we were

working on someone else's product. So basically one after another, because we worked on several projects over the years, we always tried to raise the bar project by project. And so starting working on product we had full control on. After Boxee, the one Fabrizio mentioned, there was another one called the Boxee Suite, which was kind of a subscription on top of all of G Suite, not just Gmail.

Then came a little project called Unreadit, which was this newsletter network compiled automatically by the content on Reddit.

And then from that, kind of iteratively, from user request we realized that there was this idea about creating a completely customizable email digest which was Mailbrew. And it's funny because Typhooly came one year or one year and a half after Mailbrew as a marketing side project for Mailbrew. Something that we would do to, you know, engineering as marketing, you release this project

by Mailbrew to bring attention to your main product. But weirdly enough, it kind of took a life of its own. And at some point, it became not Typhoonly by Mailbrew, but Mailbrew by Typhoonly, the original product surpassed Mailbrew in users' revenue. And at that point, we realized we had to focus 100% of it because the opportunity was too big. And eventually, we sold Mailbrew. Okay.

Looking back at it, we work on a product for two, maximum three years, and then start a bit looking around. We want to see what's next, which is fun because it has been three years since starting Typefully, so we will get into that. It's time. It's time now. So can you describe what is Typefully to my listeners who haven't used it or haven't heard about it and what are the key features?

Yeah, sure. I think it's useful to say what it was originally because it was a bit of a journey to where it is now. And so basically it started as a small site project to just craft Twitter threads. I think kind of when they were starting to become a thing. At some point, you know, there was a

You know, all the Twitter bros, like we used to do before, we're starting to put content out there. And there were like a couple of solutions out there, but luckily I wasn't aware of them. And so since I wasn't aware of them, I decided, ah, there's no product to do this. So I might as well try to do it to learn React. Because I probably was doing already a little bit of React at that point, but still I was on a journey to become more proficient at React.

as a front-end developer and it was a great chance to get my hands dirty and try to do something. And so yeah, I spun up a mockup, like a working mockup in a weekend or so. It kind of stayed there, we looked a bit into it together, but then it was, I think maybe even a few months later, it took some time to realize that yeah, maybe there's some potential in this as a marketing side project. And so that's when we decided to put more focus into it together.

and expand it so it was started as a twitter thread writing app just that by the time of release i don't remember if we have that scheduling already by the time of the release maybe yes so yeah

So yeah, version 1.0 was probably just writing a schedule into tetraads. And then since we were starting to see a lot of interest and word of mouth, which we struggled with a little bit with Mailbrio, and it felt like it was much stronger, we decided to monetize it, and that's when we decided to add all the analytics features. So we started expanding the product a little bit in that way. And at the time, we thought that the main selling point would be the analytics stuff.

And it converted a few people. So like the first few thousands of MRR came from that. But then in hindsight, we realized that the scheduling part was actually more important. And so we paywalled it as well at some point. And generally, we kept like expanding the product to...

make it become a more useful and comprehensive tool for Twitter now ex-creators. Seems like all the creators that I meant, I mean ex-social network with name unfortunately. And so yeah, now at this point it has features you would expect in a more powerful and comprehensive tool for creators and writers like

AI of course, because now it's almost a table stakes of AI in this kind of product. And so you can rewrite your tweets or posts with AI to improve them. Some automations like auto-retweets, auto-plugs, where you can like, auto-plug is like when you add a reply automatically to something you posted based on some criteria like likes or retweets, that kind of stuff.

We have Zapier support, so like even being a very small team of three, we tried really to up our game with this one and offer a lot of features that even

social media agencies and teams use. I think our main core user is still like the individual creator that wants to grow his audience, but we're starting to see also more and more teams, ghost writers and social media agencies using the product and we even have a few accounts with millions of followers so using Typefully to push content to really big audiences out there which is fun and also

also a bit scary you know to have a product that's reliable enough for that kind of usage and that's where it is right now don't think i missed anything big and the only thing maybe is that we are trying to be like the one-stop shop for creators not just on x twitter but these days we are working hard on reworking the whole platform to the product to add more

more platforms. So LinkedIn, we are going to add soon Mastodon, Blue Sky. And I think this is a big change because it kind of took a re-engineering of the whole product. And I think these days there is not really a great solution that allows you to effortlessly post to all these places in a convenient way. So I think...

we're gonna be the one we are working really hard towards that yeah so what's the user case for using ai as a creator i think in general that there's a lot of interest in using ai from creators to push more content more consistently raising the quality of the content so as like i mean this is one side like augmentation of the writing process

I'd say, unfortunately, there's also another side that's just creating content with AI. You can almost feel it that right now, like these days, there's a lot of basically AI-created content out there.

I mean, I feel like even some good accounts that I follow and I enjoy, like there are those accounts, you know, with cool historical facts or stuff about movies and anything really. Some of them I can feel that these days have automated most of the process with AI. I don't really mind it if the content is cool, but for us it's been an ongoing ethical question, like should we offer these kind of features or not? Especially because I think to this day,

One of the biggest challenges for us is still the blank page syndrome, like trying to take the users by hand and help them write those first few words and find out what they want to write about and publish. And I think this is still like the weakest part of Tidefully. At some point, I think we're going to fix this.

We already like putting some seeds. You can, for example, generate some post ideas, which are personalized post ideas created with AI based on your own posts. So it's not like a completely blank page anymore, but I think there's still some work to do in that regard. And with the latest models and innovation coming from OpenAI and other companies, there are probably more tools right now that we can use to fix this problem. So this is something else that we want to do.

And this is also where you can feel that the small team of three is a bit of a bottleneck to do all of this. But at the same time, we like the autonomy. We like the fact that we're small and lean and we can go quite fast when we prioritize well.

But yeah, this is something that we want to work on. You mentioned you have a remote team, team of three. So how it works? What's your strategy to build a successful remote team? I think the biggest thing is that we continuously iterate on how we work every few months, actually. We try different methodologies to structure our work. But these days, kind of settled on

own variation of these different methodologies. Basically, we work mostly async, remotely, even if there are some core hours during the day when we are all online. We do only one meeting per week to kind of align, see where we are at, and discuss topics that come up.

And other than that, we work in this two, three months sprint when we ship new features as they come up. And these features, we are very flexible with that. If the feature is complex and we have no idea what to build, we do explorations, we do prototypes, we do documents that we share with each other to discuss it and get it right. Other times, like these days, where it's pretty clear what we have to build and it's just a matter of doing it. Yeah.

Sometimes we just go straight into building it, work really hard on it. And a big thing on our team is that we are all contributing to the code.

So this keeps us really focused and we are kind of interchangeable. Someone can pick up when the other left and I think this makes us really fast. There is also a thing to be said in these days about with this, I mean we talked about AI but even in developer tools there is like a renaissance of tools which is making small teams really effective.

I would argue it's making them faster than bigger teams. So in a way, as Fabrizio was saying, it's a limitation, but it's pretty exciting as well to be able to be this lean and move this fast without the communication overhead of having to manage a bigger team. Mm-hmm.

And also, yeah, I think that a theme here is that we don't get religious about a specific way of work or a specific workflow. Like, you know, sometimes you read those people that say no meetings ever. And there are those people that say you need to talk to your team like every day, like you need a daily stand up.

Like we're doing one meeting per week just because right now it works for us. Maybe in three months we decide that we need more or maybe less. And I think this is a more healthy approach to fixing this problem, like realizing what works for your team and just do that instead. Very agile. Yeah, yeah. I think we struck a good balance. That's good, yeah. When you guys make a decision together, have you ever encountered any issues

challenges like if you have a different opinion how do you deal with this co-founder's problem because a lot of co-founders they may yeah i don't want to compromise that i quit or

you guys seem very chilled and the work better. So can you share some stories about working together? I'm not sure about stories. Maybe while you think about it, maybe you have some. I want to say that in general, I feel like we're pretty lucky like being mostly on the same page about some core stuff. But then I think, yeah, we also get pretty passionate and we have strong opinions. And in those cases, it might happen that we discuss it more

very lively way point when we realize that maybe one of us really has a strong opinion on something we say okay maybe let's trust the strong opinion because sometimes you realize that you can just keep on talking forever and usually we realize that even

inside the team like the three of us not just the two co-founders so jaga as well which works remotely from italy we try to follow the the strongest opinion opinion and try it so sometimes we we try to be guided by real world experience and tests and not just you know trying to find the best compromise between the two of us yeah to that i would add that uh

I hear that as well. It's pretty common for people to also compromise friendships over these kind of decisions. I think we are lucky in the fact that even when we talk strongly about something, we don't take it personally, we don't have big egos and we always are able to...

kind of make a decision or try stuff out then go back and try something else no particular story comes to mind or some big struggle in that regard likely that's good I think it's also related to the fact that

We also both try to not become 100% absorbed by the work because I think that kind of stuff where you take things super personally and like a work discussion can become like a personal thing you take into the weekend.

might be more common. I don't know, but I guess it might be more common if you're the type of person that also constantly thinks about work during the weekends and you become so identified with a single product or project or company that of course if someone attacks your opinion of it, you feel attacked on a personal level. So while we deeply care about the stuff we're working on, we also care about maintaining really good work-life balance, which is an active challenge that it's always something we're working on.

but I think yeah it helps in this type of things true yeah speaking of work-life balance what's your routine like in Lisbon good question yeah I think this evolved a bit during the years since moving to Lisbon I feel like my work-life balance has improved you were in Milano before yeah now I live closer to the center I walk everywhere it's uh

330 days a year of sun. So in a way, also with the way we work, I think it's very common for me to take breaks, go for walks, go to the gym in the middle of the day. And I think actually this helps.

gaining focus because you know like maybe after two three hours you're fried you just want to clear your head and this city allows you to walk everywhere maybe go surfing in the middle of the day which is amazing actually something I'm trying to do more

Yeah, I'm not sure if Fabrizio's experience is different. Yeah, no, pretty much the same. I also feel like I found a much better balance here. And to be completely transparent, it's still a challenge for me. Like there are some times of the year or the month where I feel like it's more of a challenge to find that balance. And I might feel a little bit overworked in some periods and other times I feel like I have actually that extra power and I could work a bit more. So just...

Because sometimes in these topics you tend to paint a picture that it's a bit too perfect, I think, stuff that I hear or read. But I think for most people it's more of a challenge than they probably would want to admit. But all in all, yeah, I felt a huge improvement here. I think, as Francesco was saying, the city is really friendly and human-sized and it's really easy to find a routine that you enjoy. Like, for example...

In my case, I love the specialty coffee places. And Italy, which is world famous for the coffee, but it's actually more like about the espresso in Italy. So there's good espresso, but there's not much else. So if you're really passionate about coffee, actually you won't find much to enjoy in Italy. And here, instead, there's any kind of coffee you can imagine. And speaking of dedicating time to hobbies and passions, nowadays I...

I brew my own coffee in the morning and I feel like I have time for that. And then I'm getting passionate about racing, as you're aware, and other stuff. I mentioned skateboarding before. And one might think, well, that's a lot of stuff. But if you don't obsess over scheduling everything, you also try to follow your flow and your energy during the day, during the week, and during the year. Yeah, you can actually have the time for all of it, I think. It's not impossible. Also, yeah, recently I think I read a tweet about someone

I don't remember if it was about not playing video games anymore or something like that for six months because he was an entrepreneur but I think that's a very toxic attitude. Maybe some people need this so everyone is different but yeah personally I think it's better to find the time. And I think it also changes with the phase you're in. Recently I shared on Twitter this

chart of the basically the number of commits which are contributions on github to over the years we have been doing this for five years and looking at the first two years it was super intense like yeah there were like uh 50 more comments compared to the most recent year and lots of these comments were on the weekend so it kind of got me to reflect on like uh

maybe at the beginning it takes a different kind of effort you are more inexperienced you're learning so you're not as effective maybe after a few years of doing this thing so i think the issue is that people try to generalize and say you should

work yourself to the bone for 10 years when you started somewhere balanced thing yeah and it's okay it's okay to work harder in the beginning and it's okay to maybe take it a bit easier going forward yeah that's very silicon valley mentality like just work your ass off yeah i have a friend he he didn't social for half a year just focus on building it's a very unhealthy

I think Lisbon offers a lot of work-life balance. Before when I was living in London, the whole environment was kind of pushy. I needed to work at least 12 hours a day. But here, when I see people, when I see the sunny day, I just want to go out and sit under the sun, drink my espresso. It's a very relaxed environment.

I'm now thinking back at Milan in Italy for example as well where yeah like since most people are overworked even when you want to enjoy some free time with friends usually everyone is really tired so the time for socializing is a time just to relax and unplug and here I'm finding that

a great group of friends and we do stuff like go-karts and other stuff that is also pretty intense but we have the energy to do it because I think we're all trying to also live our lives and not just work all the time so why you pick up Lisbon as your base? I know some people on Twitter they speak badly about Lisbon but

And yeah, it's dirty and overcrowded, blah, blah. But so far, my experience with this man is still positive. And what's you guys' opinion about him? Why pick up

No, also my opinion is mostly positive. I had only been here more than 10 years ago, I think with friends, so I had a very distant but positive memory of it. But yeah, when we came here, almost right away, I mean, of course it always takes like a few months to adapt to a new place. And there are some issues for sure. It's not the most clean city in Europe, that's for sure.

But it really depends on the areas of course, but now in general I found it really welcoming especially the locals because at some point I've even read a lot of tweets about you know Portuguese people are like this like that and usually those tweets are from people that moved away from Lisbon or maybe just been here for a month or two so Honestly like living here. I can say that at least in my personal experience

they're always super nice to me the locals and then also yeah there's an international community of expats digital nomads entrepreneurs and that's been great as well like finding like-minded people like you so it's it's really great and that happens here as well and the food is great and yeah i think it's very workable as far as i'm saying so i think it's associated like that uh

really grows on you when you first come here like first impression it could be a bit chaotic a bit overcrowded but like over the months maybe years so you really start to appreciate it I really experienced this myself over the past year yeah like enjoying it more and more as time went by I only see it as one of the best weathers oh yeah the weather is a

and for me that's a pretty big deal honestly i hate the cold i can tolerate the warm weather a bit more but here yeah it's a good compromise that yeah it's almost perfect for me so for newcomers come here especially the tech founders or people like us digital nomads what's your

top three recommendations for this one first one don't live in a castoso because everyone goes to live by by the river yeah it's actually a party area which is not oh yeah yeah it's definitely dirtier than where we're living now and yeah yeah no that's true i'm pretty chaotic maybe not the best i miss some things of it yeah it's very very lively yeah yeah so many

restaurant and a follow tour no probably one thing I want to mention is that to any new camera I would just really recommend they try as many places as possible because when I came here like I usually I get attached pretty quickly to maybe a certain coffee place or you know a certain restaurant but here honestly there are many good options so for sure I would say try many different places until you find the one maybe it's laptop friendly and you love the coffee and the food or

yeah because there's really plenty of options that I would recommend not just settling up for the first one that would be one recommendation advice is around I think yeah housing it's actually a hot topic in Lisbon because lots of people moved here also from the US so it's kind of this housing crisis yeah I would say that that can get really really tough like when you first move here not having like

a good place to live but actually if you get past that then it can take actually a few months yeah but yeah hunting a house here is crazy now yeah and i realize how that sounds actually i don't know if you want to get into that but there is a bit of attention actually with locals because of all these foreigners coming here maybe also with the

tax schemes produced by the government that were really advantageous. I think what's happening is that this city is turning a bit into London or New York, that kind of city, which may be actually a positive thing for the country. I think what's not happening is that all this influx of money from foreigners and from people moving here

It's not actually probably getting reinvested right by the government, actually improving the life for Portuguese people. I think this is what's causing a lot of unrest and this sense of rage against people coming here.

When I chat with my local friends, Portuguese friends, maybe they are working in tech, so they're very open-minded. They welcome foreigners and they have very good English ability. Because before when I moved here, I was thinking Spain, Barcelona, but their English is not that good. I know I need to learn Portuguese, but here I don't feel the pressure.

pressure to learn it because everybody speaks very good English. Yeah, I was kind of surprised by that. I didn't know what to expect. But even, for example, in the skateboard lessons, there are something that I'm taking and they're mostly Portuguese clients, the one they have.

and just one or two foreigners like me but still they all speak English very well, like me. But yeah, that definitely helped getting accustomed to the city faster. But I'm trying to learn Portuguese as well. It's gonna take a while. I know. I get the basics. I feel it's very similar to Italian.

Yeah, for sure it's much easier for Italians to learn compared to other languages and coming from other languages. Getting the basics, I think it's pretty... You get those pretty quickly. Yeah, a lot better. Once you get to intermediate-advanced level, then I felt a little bit of a cliff. I see. What about social and networking here? What's the best way for people to mingle? How do you make new friends here?

if someone wants to let us know oh i know you are organizing some dinner events right yeah i think the easiest way if you kind of already have a network twitter this kind of places as we are as we likely do sometimes even just a tweet is enough to meet up with a few people i have this friend i met via tweet yeah by just saying i'm in lisbon

wants to hang out and now I have this friend I go regularly go to surf with okay it's amazing and then yeah of course there are lots of co-workings and networking events but to be completely honest those kind of things kind of drain my social batteries like I'm I met these few people mostly to twitter and yeah this is

Circle of friends and I'm happy with that. But I'd say that as a recommendation, since there's a pretty active community here, as you were saying, of people in especially in the tech bubble, but not just that and also other industries and groups.

I'd say just if you come here, even if you just write a few tweets or search for some groups, even Facebook groups or Telegram groups, I guess you can pretty quickly kickstart a few friendships. And then from those, I guess it's pretty easy to expand the circle. Because even myself, I'm a little bit of an introvert. I don't find it very easy to network or pleasant. But still, yeah, here...

Even compared to Milan, actually, I was able to expand the circle, I guess, a bit more frictionlessly. Yeah. I was so surprised. When I was in London, I thought, oh, it's a big city. It's going to be very easy for me to make new friends. I do meet a lot of people, but it's hard to get to know somebody deeper. But here, I feel like, oh, we can talk philosophy on the first meetup.

You seem to have a lot of friends. How did you meet the people here in Lisbon? Yeah, so I use Nomad List. So he should pay me to do that. So there are some digital nomad meetup, the meetup apps where you can meet friends. Also Twitter is a good place. I know so many people moved to Lisbon, so it's very easy to say, okay, you are in Lisbon, let's meet up.

also friends through friends like word of mouth yeah yeah and I have a lot of Italian friends including you

Yeah, I feel, yeah, they all say Italians are Chinese in the West. It's kind of a similar tradition and personality, obviously, yeah. I can see that. No, speaking of which, I think another perk...

which also is a bit of a recommendation since we're talking about recommendations as well is there are pretty decent Italian food restaurants and places here which also was quite unexpected for me and

and a very pleasant surprise so yeah there are a few ones that I for me and my girlfriend are like fixed appointment of the week like pizza place or restaurant so it's really good to help us feel a little bit more at home that's cool yeah that's nice yeah I do find a lot of good Italian restaurant here and they sometimes do some live music event yeah right yeah I'll ask you guys for the other recommendation need to go maybe in the podcast episode description we can

yeah in the show notes so what do you guys enjoy most of working with each other I really appreciate the fact that we strike a good balance between just crafting things

without getting lost in product management or long discussions. So we still have this ability to recognize that there's a good idea. Okay, let's try to ship something and work on a mock-up together. So I still really appreciate the craftsmanship. The fact that we work a bit like this small product boutique. And that's a big thing for me because honestly, like working on this type of stuff,

wasn't like something that I felt deeply in my childhood here, like I'm gonna be an entrepreneur or a software developer. It's more something that came in the way like that. But being a bit of a creative personality, what drives me is like crafting things with quality and care. And this is something that we both enjoy doing. And so yeah, that's something that makes me appreciate the work that we do on a daily basis.

This feels a bit like therapy. A couple of things come to mind from my side. First one is that it connects with what Fabrizio was saying. I think when we work on a new project and we are kind of iterating on it, there is this feeling of we know when something is good.

And usually we agree on that and it's really one of my favorite moments when we work together, like realizing that something has a good shot of working. Yeah, we need to do more of that also with new products. And then the other thing, maybe it's a bit cliche, but I think we complement very well each other. Like I'm a background engineer, so I do a bit more of system thinking, thinking of edge cases, thinking of scaling, thinking of...

And then Fabrizio maybe comes from this more design thinking, completely, sometimes completely north of the maybe technical baggage. I think you need both. If you strike the right balance, you can make some good software. What's your vision for TechFolly or what are you guys thinking to build some other new products?

I think the vision is always a bit of work in progress because the market is always changing. With the Elon Musk thing and X, almost every three or six months it's almost impossible to have, especially in this area, a long-term plan and for it to make sense. I also love the quote that "Plans never survive meeting with the enemy" or something along those lines.

And I think that's very true in this industry. But yeah, in general, I feel like we come from a vision that was more about creating the best possible writing experience for Twitter and in general for the web, let's say. And so there was initial focus, especially on the writing experience. And now it's shifting a bit more to empowering creators to grow their audiences and publish online without depending too much on a single platform.

So I guess that whatever we do, we try to always measure it in terms of how valuable it is to make life easier to creators to publish their content online and not just on a single platform. So I feel like that's a bit of the shift that we saw in the vision. Yeah, and a bit higher level. It took some soul searching to realize this, but we don't want to be like a one product company. Yeah.

I think what keeps this exciting is trying new stuff as I was mentioning before. So we are... and there is one thing in common of the stuff we build which is usually we want to dog food, use them on our own. So these days we are looking at maybe building tools for remote teams empowered by AI.

which is this huge wave we are seeing. And I think there are still a lot of untapped potential of things you can do to facilitate teamwork. Yeah. Or also, even still within Typhoon, we only scratch the surface of what's possible. So we are thinking along these lines. Yeah, and a big challenge with Typhoon specifically, it's always...

It's also always been that it can move in very different directions, the product. So there's almost never an obvious good choice regarding the direction to go. Of course, this is mostly true for any meaningful product or SaaS, because of course there's almost never an obvious direction where to go. But with a product that supports multiple platforms, multiple ways of writing and publishing,

very different types of users as well because really we have the rookie just getting started on X with the 10 followers, we have the huge creator, the company, the Ghostwriter. So at any point in time we can move more towards one of these types of users and in general

In our field, it's also true that it's generally recommended to try to overfit a specific niche. And we've also been relatively lucky in the fact that I fully worked while being a bit of a generic product, not aiming at a specific type of users. And yeah, I just wanted to mention that we're always trying to figure out what's the right type of users and use case where we should aim at any given time. Because it's not always clear. I know.

Do you normally talk to your users on a frequent basis? I know you got the Discord set up. Yeah, we have a small community. So we, especially recently, we tried a bit more actively to talk to users. We tried in the past as well. We had some experiments also with Mailbrew, Twitter spaces, another type of community at that time. Discord maybe wasn't as big for this type of thing as it is today.

And I want to admit it's always been a bit of our weak spot because we're more like tuned to crafting products than building communities and engaging with users. And it's also, I think, related just to the amount of time we want to invest in this. Because in general, we just keep ourselves really busy with building products. So we almost never have enough time for that. But now we're trying to dedicate more and more time to growth and marketing and community.

But I think we still could do a bit of a better work in talking to users, but we try to do it pretty regularly anyway. So whenever I can, I try to even just via DMs on Twitter to talk to users. And if I catch someone saying something about Typhoon on Twitter that raises a question in my mind, I always just instantly send a DM, even if it's a huge account. And often they reply, even the biggest users. Yeah.

So yeah, I always try to do that and it's always very useful. It's really easy like when maybe the user base grows to think of users in aggregate like looking at the aggregated analytics and that kind of stuff but I think it's really useful to actually go down into the specific look and talk with individual users

I think it keeps you grounded and it keeps you from missing obvious stuff, which is very easy to do. And this is especially important in the beginning. I think in the beginning all people should talk with every user that sign up, literally on a Zoom call. And that's actually what we did with Mailbrew. We didn't do it with Typhoon because it was kind of this side project, but...

yeah i think it gives you incredible insight that are really easy to miss yeah and also this is one of the other perks of being a very small elite team where we try all to be owners and being able to take decisions on the fly being blocked by backlogs or active projects because like for example

few weeks or maybe months ago, Guillermo from Versailles, the CEO of Versailles, reached out saying some nice things about iFully, but also raising some concerns about some bugs and some paper cuts of the user experience, because of course he's like...

a great thinker of product and this type of stuff so he noticed a few things and i was really happy about the fact that i just was able to decide okay let's create a linear project for this i opened up like 10 issues of things that he mentioned i wanted to be and i wanted to address and then just something that we did and and the product improves a lot like this

because like normally I guess in a bigger company that's the type of stuff that could just go at the end of the backlog and you never get to it so sometimes it's just better to listen to the user I mean especially if it's a big influential user yeah of course it's very important and just get to it

they work well for us good so we are only two months away to end 2023 from personal level and business level what's your biggest achievement this year

Honestly, personally going back to the work-life balance discussion, it's not one specific thing but it's the fact that in general I feel like I'm progressing in some of the passions that I have and I'm turning them from just hobbies to passions when I really want to progress and achieve something. And even for example with karting or sim racing or skateboarding,

they're not just any more fun thing that I do when I have half an hour or an hour and then when I'm doing them I get a big anxious I should get back to work because until I was in Milan that's how I felt most of the times not always luckily

I don't want to have too much of a hindsight bias where everything is great now and it wasn't before. But I think in general, it was always a bit more challenging for me to find a sweet spot. And so the biggest win for me personally this year is that I love all the progress that we're doing with the product and with the company. I feel like we're really making a lot of progress

and not just in terms of results, it's the highest MRR that we ever had and that's so great but also in the way we work as we mentioned I think we really improved a lot and we're working in a way that it's I think we work quite fast without stressing too much to that but at the same time as I was saying also reaching some milestones in some of these passions and hobbies that I'm able to cultivate without sacrificing too much of the work and I can't wait to see that same race stuff

Yeah, on my side, business-wise, I would say the biggest achievement is actually surviving this X-transition Elon Musk. There were really a few points where we said, like, this is it, we are done. But actually, we stuck together and we managed to fix all the stuff that he broke.

which was not obvious. Lots of companies actually in this space failed while trying to do that. We didn't and actually we are in a really good place now so I'm really grateful about that. And on a personal level, actually all this stress from this situation at work kind of during the summer also put a lot of stress on me. But these days I feel like I'm in a much better place and I think also for me it relates to hobbies and in general

enjoying life and keeping work like in this as this area that doesn't cloud too much your thinking when you're not working yeah and surfing has been instrumental in that because you can't think a lot about work coming your way so

Yeah, I'm pretty happy about that. Nice, good. Okay, I think it's time for dinner now. Thank you guys for being on my show. It's a great pleasure to have a podcast in person. That's been fun. Thank you for having us. Francesco saying it felt a little bit like therapy. You don't always get the chance to talk about all of this stuff in a very coherent way. So I really appreciate it.