Michael Koper

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 (nitter.cf/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 ❤️

Had some unexpected personal stuff this week and had only half week time to work. So a bit of a so-so marketing week but I'm trying - 13 new knowledge base pages - Published our first data report (State of Proposals 2026) - 1 new alternative page - 2 new testimonials - Updated 2 blog posts - Hired a contractor to make more BOFU content

Anti Europe influencers always make it look like that Europe is bad and the rest is good. But if you simply do some minor investigation you see that nothing is as simple. 1 out of 100 people are sick with burn out. Also more Dutch people are working compare to the US. 86.6% vs 80.6%. It is true that the NL has more part timers, which I think is great because it is easier to have kids with 1 partner part time.

Did you read this from a UI or from a MCP? Yeah, I thought so 😅

Here sits the main problem of the "SaaSpocalypse". You can actually do twice the marketing weeks if you only do security audits of your own app and not the 10 SaaS vibe code replacements you did to save a $49/month here and there. Your time also costs money. Normal businesses simply don't want to be responsible for security updates so they are happy paying. (I am at least)

Thankfully I had replaced all the SaaS'es with my own solution so I could patch updates all week. Ahhh no I didn't, actually got something done this week instead!

Holy moly, if you use Railway, rotate all your API keys/credentials asap. Especially your database credentials. All environment variables exposed! blog.railway.com/p/security-…

If I had retainer jobs for apps, I would increase my rate by at least 50%. Now is the perfect time. The PHP incidents were the biggest news story on the largest Dutch news site yesterday. They were literally justifying your rate increase. AI can reverse engineer security incidents faster than ever, so the window between a vulnerability being disclosed and a patch being released is getting shorter. On each incident you have to stop what you're doing and react ASAP. That comes at a price!

They said email is dead for the last 15 years but each time I send an email blast I get plenty of responses. Email will be here for a long while 🤘

As a giant nerd who dislikes doing marketing I have to make it fun for me to be able to fully focus on it. These tiny details makes it fun for me. Just updated a blog post with data straight from production via Nusii's admin MCP.

Wise words from @chriskottom about doing marketing experiments. "Try 10 things expecting that 9 of them will result in nothing. The 9 are the price you pay for the 10th"

Here is the site: 10kenlasierra.com

Had a good marketing week for once! - Created 4 new email sequences - Sent 1 email broadcast - Created some animations on some marketing pages - Did a Testimonial Tuesday campaign and got 35 new testimonials - Got one new G2 review - Added 6 new pages on the marketing site - Rewrote 6 alternative pages - Connected with lots of customers via LinkedIn - Sent many warmish emails to recent signups to get them on a call but no luck there

Working on new alternative pages and just found out that a competitor doesn't do refunds. That doesn't seem like normal in SaaS? Am I a fool to have refunded every single request (in 60 day time limit) ??

I got 26 new testimonials!