![authcookie's tweet photo. How I picked myself up after shutting down Orbit
The whole sneakers and scalpers community is deeply flawed.
Don't get me wrong, you bump into some great folks and can make some serious cash (well, you could've until a few years back). That's not the problem here.
The problem is the way things work inside the “sneaker game” compared to the real world. Especially when we talk about software.
When we launched Orbit, we got product market fit immediately. And we weren't the only ones; loads of other bots and services were popping up from nowhere and killing it too.
The tech barrier was so high, that once you had a working product and proven success, you were golden.
Marketing? Practically took care of itself because demand was through the roof. A few tweets and boom, you're selling out.
This does not work outside of the “sneakers game”.
Back then, a bunch of us bot devs were kids, myself included. We knew how to code, but running a legit business? That was a whole different game. We were playing on easy mode, no doubt about it.
The fact that we learned in that environment is the reason why we don’t see many bot developers venturing outside of botting or failing when they try to.
When I did leave, I had to rewire my brain completely. I had to go back to the fundamentals and learn everything the right way.
It was a journey of failing over and over again. Launch, fail, repeat. For more than a year straight.
Definitely one of the lowest points in my life. It broke me down completely. But, it also allowed me to rebuild myself from scratch.
At the same time, I was learning very quickly. I saw little hints of success getting bigger and bigger after each failure.
After more than a year of trying everything, it struck me, launched a new SaaS named [REDACTED] and felt the immediate market pull, got to $5k MRR in a few months.
This first small win gave me so much confidence that the path I was walking was the right one.
So much so that two months later, I launched another one. Called [REDACTED], another SaaS that got to $4k MRR in the first week, in a completely different market.
And recently launched another B2B SaaS, that currently sits at $15k MRR, growing 200% MoM.
I’ll keep out the details for future stories, follow if you’re interested.
I'm not telling you this to brag. I couldn't care less about people's opinions on the internet. I'm telling you to show that the only thing that allowed me to go from a streak of failures to a streak of wins is…
Well, nothing. The “magic switch” does not exist.
It was the constant struggle I had to go through. Improving my craft day by day, relentlessly, for more than a year.
If you’re reading this and especially if you come from botting, I cannot stress this enough: you HAVE to go through this phase. There are no shortcuts.
It can take from a few months to a decade, there’s no exact formula.
Embrace those falls, soak up the lessons, and keep pushing forward.
The screenshots that you see above are the result of 6 years of obsession.
Failure produces knowledge, knowledge leads to success.
Each month, you should be able to see your past self from the month before, and realize how much of an idiot you were.
[Transmission Complete]](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GGJwFdEW8AAH36A.png)
Olivia
Online
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@authcookie
24 // Growing a portfolio of AI consumer apps
🇮🇹
Joined February 2018
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How I picked myself up after shutting down Orbit
The whole sneakers and scalpers community is deeply flawed.
Don't get me wrong, you bump into some great folks and can make some serious cash (well, you could've until a few years back). That's not the problem here.
The problem is the way things work inside the “sneaker game” compared to the real world. Especially when we talk about software.
When we launched Orbit, we got product market fit immediately. And we weren't the only ones; loads of other bots and services were popping up from nowhere and killing it too.
The tech barrier was so high, that once you had a working product and proven success, you were golden.
Marketing? Practically took care of itself because demand was through the roof. A few tweets and boom, you're selling out.
This does not work outside of the “sneakers game”.
Back then, a bunch of us bot devs were kids, myself included. We knew how to code, but running a legit business? That was a whole different game. We were playing on easy mode, no doubt about it.
The fact that we learned in that environment is the reason why we don’t see many bot developers venturing outside of botting or failing when they try to.
When I did leave, I had to rewire my brain completely. I had to go back to the fundamentals and learn everything the right way.
It was a journey of failing over and over again. Launch, fail, repeat. For more than a year straight.
Definitely one of the lowest points in my life. It broke me down completely. But, it also allowed me to rebuild myself from scratch.
At the same time, I was learning very quickly. I saw little hints of success getting bigger and bigger after each failure.
After more than a year of trying everything, it struck me, launched a new SaaS named [REDACTED] and felt the immediate market pull, got to $5k MRR in a few months.
This first small win gave me so much confidence that the path I was walking was the right one.
So much so that two months later, I launched another one. Called [REDACTED], another SaaS that got to $4k MRR in the first week, in a completely different market.
And recently launched another B2B SaaS, that currently sits at $15k MRR, growing 200% MoM.
I’ll keep out the details for future stories, follow if you’re interested.
I'm not telling you this to brag. I couldn't care less about people's opinions on the internet. I'm telling you to show that the only thing that allowed me to go from a streak of failures to a streak of wins is…
Well, nothing. The “magic switch” does not exist.
It was the constant struggle I had to go through. Improving my craft day by day, relentlessly, for more than a year.
If you’re reading this and especially if you come from botting, I cannot stress this enough: you HAVE to go through this phase. There are no shortcuts.
It can take from a few months to a decade, there’s no exact formula.
Embrace those falls, soak up the lessons, and keep pushing forward.
The screenshots that you see above are the result of 6 years of obsession.
Failure produces knowledge, knowledge leads to success.
Each month, you should be able to see your past self from the month before, and realize how much of an idiot you were.
[Transmission Complete]
![authcookie's tweet photo. How I picked myself up after shutting down Orbit
The whole sneakers and scalpers community is deeply flawed.
Don't get me wrong, you bump into some great folks and can make some serious cash (well, you could've until a few years back). That's not the problem here.
The problem is the way things work inside the “sneaker game” compared to the real world. Especially when we talk about software.
When we launched Orbit, we got product market fit immediately. And we weren't the only ones; loads of other bots and services were popping up from nowhere and killing it too.
The tech barrier was so high, that once you had a working product and proven success, you were golden.
Marketing? Practically took care of itself because demand was through the roof. A few tweets and boom, you're selling out.
This does not work outside of the “sneakers game”.
Back then, a bunch of us bot devs were kids, myself included. We knew how to code, but running a legit business? That was a whole different game. We were playing on easy mode, no doubt about it.
The fact that we learned in that environment is the reason why we don’t see many bot developers venturing outside of botting or failing when they try to.
When I did leave, I had to rewire my brain completely. I had to go back to the fundamentals and learn everything the right way.
It was a journey of failing over and over again. Launch, fail, repeat. For more than a year straight.
Definitely one of the lowest points in my life. It broke me down completely. But, it also allowed me to rebuild myself from scratch.
At the same time, I was learning very quickly. I saw little hints of success getting bigger and bigger after each failure.
After more than a year of trying everything, it struck me, launched a new SaaS named [REDACTED] and felt the immediate market pull, got to $5k MRR in a few months.
This first small win gave me so much confidence that the path I was walking was the right one.
So much so that two months later, I launched another one. Called [REDACTED], another SaaS that got to $4k MRR in the first week, in a completely different market.
And recently launched another B2B SaaS, that currently sits at $15k MRR, growing 200% MoM.
I’ll keep out the details for future stories, follow if you’re interested.
I'm not telling you this to brag. I couldn't care less about people's opinions on the internet. I'm telling you to show that the only thing that allowed me to go from a streak of failures to a streak of wins is…
Well, nothing. The “magic switch” does not exist.
It was the constant struggle I had to go through. Improving my craft day by day, relentlessly, for more than a year.
If you’re reading this and especially if you come from botting, I cannot stress this enough: you HAVE to go through this phase. There are no shortcuts.
It can take from a few months to a decade, there’s no exact formula.
Embrace those falls, soak up the lessons, and keep pushing forward.
The screenshots that you see above are the result of 6 years of obsession.
Failure produces knowledge, knowledge leads to success.
Each month, you should be able to see your past self from the month before, and realize how much of an idiot you were.
[Transmission Complete]](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GGJwFdLW8AAvoh0.png)
Easy to go from 0 -> $50k MRR when you're scamming kids and claiming that a $1 purchase is worth $49.99 of MRR.
He then proceeds to lie about it on X - making a few thousand $ worth of sales look like $50k MRR.
This guy is selling a scam "Reveal your soulmate" AI slop funnel via ads to kids, with a shady trial that converts to a $49.99/month subscription (written in fine print).
The whole thing is borderline illegal lol.
Honestly, I've been following Arib for a while, and I can say that most of the stuff he does is legit.
But this is an insane play, and I feel like people have to know, especially when you're tricking them into believing this BS.
May this serve as a lesson not to believe everything you see on here.
Building the Blackboard HQ in Milan.
2026 will be insane.
11 months later, we officially hit 500,000 users and a 7-figure run rate 🎉
100% bootstrapped while completely crushing all of our VC-backed competitors.
A year ago, I predicted we would hit 1 million users by the end of 2025. At that point, we had just a few thousand users and no proof to back it up.
Tweeted that into existence below.
It was an utterly insane goal. In fact, we didn't hit it.
Do I care? Absolutely fucking not. Hitting 500k users in under a year is still an unbelievable achievement.
This is proof that in order to win, you MUST be delusionally optimistic.
If you can internalize the future, it becomes one of the most powerful hacks you can install in your brain.
Setting crazy goals is easy, but not nearly enough. The hard part is convincing every single cell in your body that you're going to succeed.
This was all possible thanks to the insanely talented team we're building at Blackboard.
If you'd met them, you'd also believe you could achieve anything.
10M users in 2026. And I mean it.
How we hacked TikTok to scale our first consumer app to 12k users and $6k MRR in a single month.
Last month, me and my team wanted to try something new and have some fun, so we decided to launch an app on the App Store.
Keep in mind we never launched a B2C product before.
We thought this would be a small project we could launch in under a week, and have fun marketing it.
We created an MVP in a few weeks and started scaling it immediately via organic content on TikTok.
This was no ordinary strategy, we set up a team of 5 people to scale content across many different profiles.
The initial thesis was, could we take a working product from the US and adapt it to the European market?
So we focused all our efforts on a single EU market, and it turned out we were right.
A month after the launch we're at 12k users, growing at a rate of 200% per week, without any sign of stopping anytime soon.
Now we're 100% focused on making it a killer product, and once that's done we'll start the expansion into other major EU markets.
Like this if you want me to break down the TikTok strategy that we used and how we plan to hit 1M users by the end of the year.
Most people are terrible at judging their own decisions
We judge our decisions by how they turn out, not by how well they were made
A good decision that goes wrong gets rewritten as a fuck up
A terrible decision that works out becomes proof of our genius
That's hindsight bias
A founder I know launched into a new market. Bigger TAM and better unit economics. On paper, it was a strong bet. Then the market shifted in ways no one could have predicted. Now he's pivoting again.
Bad outcome does not equal bad decision
The better framework is to think in bets
Every real decision is made under uncertainty. You're never choosing certainties, you're choosing probabilities. The only honest question is: given what I knew at the time, did I make a positive EV bet?
You can lose a 70/30 and still be right
You can win a 30/70 and still be wrong
Poker players understand this. Over the long run, outcomes converge to decision quality, but individual hands lie.
Once you separate outcomes from judgment, a few things change:
- You stop being afraid of reasonable risk
- You learn faster from failure instead of rationalising it
- Being wrong feels like variance, not a character flaw
Most people don't avoid risk because it's irrational: they avoid it because they're terrified of retroactively condemning themselves
Thinking in bets fixes that
We take many bets every day, and small positive EV compounds exponentially over time
Don't ever confuse luck with skill, in either direction
[End of broadcast]
![authcookie's tweet photo. Most people are terrible at judging their own decisions
We judge our decisions by how they turn out, not by how well they were made
A good decision that goes wrong gets rewritten as a fuck up
A terrible decision that works out becomes proof of our genius
That's hindsight bias
A founder I know launched into a new market. Bigger TAM and better unit economics. On paper, it was a strong bet. Then the market shifted in ways no one could have predicted. Now he's pivoting again.
Bad outcome does not equal bad decision
The better framework is to think in bets
Every real decision is made under uncertainty. You're never choosing certainties, you're choosing probabilities. The only honest question is: given what I knew at the time, did I make a positive EV bet?
You can lose a 70/30 and still be right
You can win a 30/70 and still be wrong
Poker players understand this. Over the long run, outcomes converge to decision quality, but individual hands lie.
Once you separate outcomes from judgment, a few things change:
- You stop being afraid of reasonable risk
- You learn faster from failure instead of rationalising it
- Being wrong feels like variance, not a character flaw
Most people don't avoid risk because it's irrational: they avoid it because they're terrified of retroactively condemning themselves
Thinking in bets fixes that
We take many bets every day, and small positive EV compounds exponentially over time
Don't ever confuse luck with skill, in either direction
[End of broadcast]](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/G8jJpjWXcAA8EvX.jpg)
unpopular opinion: if your app has a hard paywall, it's not a product, it's a funnel.
i often see people on my TL not knowing the difference.
hard paywalls are not inherently bad, but people often treat them as the solution to all their app problems.
a hard paywall it's not a solution for your broken product, and it's definitely not always the most performant.
when we AB tested hard paywalls on our app (500k users), the RPU halved.
just make sure you know what game you're playing.
Hard paywalls print.
Unskippable.
Right after onboarding.
Fewer free users.
More paying users.
Better business.
I don’t know how else to explain it.
Install your hard paywall.
Where it all started
Hiring Engineers at Blackboard Studio! [Europe only 🇪🇺]
We're a software holding company (B2B & B2C) building the next generation of AI products, currently counting 200,000+ users across all of our products.
Join a team led by passionate builders and design enthusiasts, ex-sneakers, shaping the next generation of software products.
Looking for mid-senior engineers with experience in building from the ground up, and highly passionate about product.
Tech stack: Next.js, Typescript, React, Postgres, Redis, Docker
AI skills required: Vector DBs, RAGs, Prompt engineering, Self-hosted models
Fully remote / Must be based in Europe
DM me or shoot us an email:
<https://t.co/TQlRJNO0Cv>
1M by EOY
How we hacked TikTok to scale our first consumer app to 12k users and $6k MRR in a single month.
Last month, me and my team wanted to try something new and have some fun, so we decided to launch an app on the App Store.
Keep in mind we never launched a B2C product before.
We thought this would be a small project we could launch in under a week, and have fun marketing it.
We created an MVP in a few weeks and started scaling it immediately via organic content on TikTok.
This was no ordinary strategy, we set up a team of 5 people to scale content across many different profiles.
The initial thesis was, could we take a working product from the US and adapt it to the European market?
So we focused all our efforts on a single EU market, and it turned out we were right.
A month after the launch we're at 12k users, growing at a rate of 200% per week, without any sign of stopping anytime soon.
Now we're 100% focused on making it a killer product, and once that's done we'll start the expansion into other major EU markets.
Like this if you want me to break down the TikTok strategy that we used and how we plan to hit 1M users by the end of the year.
Looking for cracked iOS/SwiftUI devs that can make this app the best in its category
Schizo scaling this to 1M users by EOY
Send portfolio in DMs
How we hacked TikTok to scale our first consumer app to 12k users and $6k MRR in a single month.
Last month, me and my team wanted to try something new and have some fun, so we decided to launch an app on the App Store.
Keep in mind we never launched a B2C product before.
We thought this would be a small project we could launch in under a week, and have fun marketing it.
We created an MVP in a few weeks and started scaling it immediately via organic content on TikTok.
This was no ordinary strategy, we set up a team of 5 people to scale content across many different profiles.
The initial thesis was, could we take a working product from the US and adapt it to the European market?
So we focused all our efforts on a single EU market, and it turned out we were right.
A month after the launch we're at 12k users, growing at a rate of 200% per week, without any sign of stopping anytime soon.
Now we're 100% focused on making it a killer product, and once that's done we'll start the expansion into other major EU markets.
Like this if you want me to break down the TikTok strategy that we used and how we plan to hit 1M users by the end of the year.
How we hacked TikTok to scale our first consumer app to 12k users and $6k MRR in a single month.
Last month, me and my team wanted to try something new and have some fun, so we decided to launch an app on the App Store.
Keep in mind we never launched a B2C product before.
We thought this would be a small project we could launch in under a week, and have fun marketing it.
We created an MVP in a few weeks and started scaling it immediately via organic content on TikTok.
This was no ordinary strategy, we set up a team of 5 people to scale content across many different profiles.
The initial thesis was, could we take a working product from the US and adapt it to the European market?
So we focused all our efforts on a single EU market, and it turned out we were right.
A month after the launch we're at 12k users, growing at a rate of 200% per week, without any sign of stopping anytime soon.
Now we're 100% focused on making it a killer product, and once that's done we'll start the expansion into other major EU markets.
Like this if you want me to break down the TikTok strategy that we used and how we plan to hit 1M users by the end of the year.
I am looking to hire a COO/Ops Manager for a serviced agency business.
Must have experience in running DWY agency operations and working with b2b clients.
Remote (US/EU) + high comp.
DM for details.
@benjaminakar When a user signs up you can add it to Stripe and add a 14-day trial period to the recurring subscription price, then you wait for the invoice_paid webhook to know if the user activates their subscription while on trial
Where it all started
the Q4 lock-in just feels different
accelerating into the new year
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