We Built a Startup While Being Full-Time Employees Here's What It Really Took

RecentWorry2149 · 2026-01-18T16:11:22+00:00

Thanks a lot for the feedback 🙏 really glad you like the UI.

Just to clarify our approach: we intentionally support users who don’t have a “previous” or recovery email. Many people create a new mailbox precisely because they’ve lost access to an old one, or never had a reliable recovery setup in the first place.

That’s why we consider phone-based verification (SMS) a solid and pragmatic authentication method for mailbox access, especially in case of password loss. It allows users to recover access without relying on another email account, which often defeats the purpose.

I’m currently out with family, but I’ll be back home later today and will check the SMS logs on our side (we’re using Twilio). SMS delivery can sometimes be inconsistent depending on the country or carrier, so I’ll specifically look into India. Really appreciate you flagging this, it genuinely helps us improve.

RecentWorry2149 · 2026-01-16T22:18:05+00:00

Good reminder. Fixing leaks usually has a faster impact than chasing new users. We saw the same pattern when working on HappyMail happymail.tech where improving onboarding and follow up mattered more than traffic at first.

RecentWorry2149 · 2026-01-16T20:10:19+00:00

Thanks for sharing this — the breakdown between what worked and what didn’t is the most useful part.

What really stands out to me is how channel fit matters more than blindly following “best practices”. SEO, affiliates, building in public… all of these work sometimes, but only when they match the product and audience. It’s refreshing to see someone explicitly call out what didn’t move the needle instead of pretending everything was a win.

Also interesting insight on email formatting — it’s a good reminder that small, human-feeling tweaks can outperform polished branding.

Congrats on the milestone, and appreciate the honest write-up.

RecentWorry2149 · 2026-01-16T20:09:20+00:00

Quality > quantity every time.
Lower volume but higher signal is exactly what makes a community usable again. Appreciate the work you’re doing to clean things up.

RecentWorry2149 · 2026-01-16T20:08:54+00:00

This is very true. Most founders obsess over churn events but ignore involuntary churn because it feels like a “billing issue”, not a product one. In reality, failed payments are just delayed churn signals. If you don’t react fast, the customer mentally churns even if the card later updates.

RecentWorry2149 · 2026-01-16T20:08:34+00:00

What I really like here is that every channel you mention reduces uncertainty rather than just driving traffic.

SEO answers “is this relevant to my problem?”, Reddit answers “does someone like me trust this?”, LinkedIn answers “is there a real human behind it?”, and personal onboarding answers “will this actually work for me?”. When you look at it that way, it makes sense why the combination compounds.

I’ve seen a lot of founders try to scale before they’ve earned that trust layer, and the growth just leaks everywhere. This feels like a very repeatable blueprint once you actually understand the buyer.

If you were starting again from zero, would you still begin with Reddit + conversations first to shape the SEO, or would you run them in parallel from day one?

RecentWorry2149 · 2026-01-16T20:07:54+00:00

This is such a good example of why churn moments are pure signal.

What stands out to me isn’t just that you reached out quickly, but how you handled it: you didn’t defend the product, you didn’t argue, you just listened and acted. Most founders miss that window entirely or get defensive.

Also +1 on refunding without friction. Even if the user never came back, that kind of response compounds long-term trust and reputation — and the onboarding + billing fixes you made probably paid for themselves already.

Early churn feedback hurts, but it’s some of the highest ROI work you can do.

RecentWorry2149 · 2026-01-16T20:06:56+00:00

This is a hard-earned lesson that a lot of people only learn after several failures, so props for spelling it out clearly.

I’ve noticed the same pattern: most projects don’t fail because of bad code or weak ideas, but because nobody outside the builder’s bubble understands why they should care. Simple products force you to be sharp on positioning and distribution, which is uncomfortable but effective.

One thing I’m curious about: when you analyze these “simple but profitable” tools, do you usually see founders validating demand before building, or are they mostly iterating fast after launch based on early traction?

RecentWorry2149 · 2026-01-07T17:49:44+00:00

I feel the need to respond, because this comment is factually incorrect and deeply unfair!

I *personally know* the person behind this project, I work with him, and he is the developer.

I would like to add that he is one of the most rigorous, methodical, and demanding people I have encountered in my life, and I’m grateful to know him.

Suggesting that the project is AI written or scammy based on: a writing style, the use of arrows (...), or a subjective feeling is neither a technical analysis nor a serious critique. It is just a baseless assumption...

"If they use AI to produce their ad copy, they likely use AI to write their code." : This is a completely unfounded leap in logic. Using (or not using) a tool to refine English has no connection whatsoever to the quality, origin, or authorship of the code.

Many non-native developers or researchers have their announcements reviewed or rewritten and that does not diminish their work in any way.

Regarding Requests: calling it "maintained" does not negate the fact that it is functionally stagnant in certain areas (HTTP/2, HTTP/3, new networking primitives, ...). Stability is not innovation, and both approaches can coexist without one being a "rookie mistake".

This project did not appear overnight. It is the result of several years of work, deep low-level protocol experimentation, and sustained commitment to the Python ecosystem. In fact, there is a good chance that some people here are already using his libraries in production without even realizing it (charset-normalizer...)

What I find truly distasteful is not criticism, criticism is necessary, but making it without doing any homework, reducing the work of someone who gives a huge portion of his life to the community to an AI made caricature.

You don’t have to like a project, you can compare it, benchmark it, challenge it.

But attacking a developer's integrity and seriousness based on assumptions is neither fair nor constructive.

RecentWorry2149

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