Ivan Messina

Running a hosting company (7,500+ clients, ~€1.2M ARR) while traveling the world. 13 acquisitions. Building Billanz in public to replace WHMCS. Italian.

[Ivan Messina @ivanmessinait]

@Saas_addy Just different. For example, before spending hours for browser testing, I have Claude or codex use the browser for me, to find the first wave of problems in the code. Then You check it.
It's more like:
1. the present or programming
2. debuggin code you didn't write

[Ivan Messina @ivanmessinait]

@danielkleach Clients have always be the hard part. Writing code and creating the product has always been easier. The difference is that now it's faster and cheaper

[Ivan Messina @ivanmessinait]

@MrPunyapal 100%
Failing to plan is planning to fail
Why would you code something you have no idea what the final result should be?

[Ivan Messina @ivanmessinait]

@VicVijayakumar @yelkhayami @jessethanley I guess I'll write in ok english and write it. It saves time since I'm not reviewing it

[Ivan Messina @ivanmessinait]

@yelkhayami @jessethanley Appreciated. The content is mine the form is not. Thanks for this kind of critique, useful for me to improve

[Ivan Messina @ivanmessinait]

@yelkhayami @jessethanley I use AI to fix my english, it's not my first language

[Ivan Messina @ivanmessinait]

Fair point on the H1, that mismatch is real.

~$2.70 is simply what the market pays for an entry plan in hosting. It's the door, not the product, and 15 years say the door works.

The actual trap isn't the cheap plan. It's that we started cheap and never found a clean way out — raising prices on people who've been with you a decade costs you some of them, every single time. You pick your floor once, then you live in it.

How do you square that with dropping price radically?

[Ivan Messina @ivanmessinait]

The number that matters in your post isn't the $1K. It's the 9-9.

You're not choosing between safe and risky. You're choosing between a product that gets your leftovers and a job that gets your attention — and $1K in 2 months on leftovers is a strong signal.

Burn the boats, go all in and grow it. You will burn some savings for a few months, but with 12 hours more of attention focused on the right thing you can crush it.

Just don't do what I did... Don't stop pushing as soon as you see a number you're confortable with, as I wrote I burned the easiest growth I could have had

[Ivan Messina @ivanmessinait]

@jchatelaine What did the fix turn out to be? Asking from the other side of the pipe — we run mail for 7,500 hosting customers and I'm curious whether what you saw matches what we saw.

[Ivan Messina @ivanmessinait]

@ahmedgagan11 Or the opposite. $1K MRR with one product means that product has something. Starting a second is how you end up with two things at $1K. Push the first until it stops responding or you are able to automate and systematize it, then look around.

[Ivan Messina @ivanmessinait]

@KJ_CodesDaily Enjoy the café. Then go straight back to work. I celebrated my first few thousand a month by working less, and stayed there for years. It was the cheapest growth of my life and I slept through it.

[Ivan Messina @ivanmessinait]

$1K MRR is trending and everyone's asking whether to quit their job. That's the wrong question.

I hit €3K/month working 4-6 hours a week. Then I stopped. Not the job — the growth. I genuinely hoped the company wouldn't grow, because growth meant having to work more.

That was 15 years ago. Ranking on Google was easy. There was almost no competition. Every month I coasted, the cheapest customer acquisition of my life was sitting there unused.

The company does ~€1.2M a year now. If I'd pushed in those years instead of protecting my afternoons, it would be a multiple of that.

Quitting your job at $1K MRR is a risk you can measure. Quitting the growth at $3K is the one nobody warns you about, because it doesn't feel like a mistake. It feels like winning.

[Ivan Messina @ivanmessinait]

@itsalicesoul When you own a business you can do 2 things an employee can never do.

You can systemize it and remove yourself. Took me five years but I did it.

You can sell it and get a big fat exit.

Try doing those as an employee

[Ivan Messina @ivanmessinait]

@danellisona Couldn’t agree more. It’s like trying to run if you can’t walk. I was reading about saas hacked or someone having success and looking for a programmer and finding out what a mess the code was, to the point that a programmer would say he would not touch it

[Ivan Messina @ivanmessinait]

@WhoWorksThere Just as much as I need to figure out it’s a newsletter and delete it

[Ivan Messina @ivanmessinait]

@vibeonX69 Of course being better. An experienced programmer can build faster and build better products than someone who started coding a few weeks ago

[Ivan Messina @ivanmessinait]

@agazdecki It’s all about exposition. If you try enough times and learn from your failures, success is inevitable. Or maybe is just the survivorship bias talking

[Ivan Messina @ivanmessinait]

@BuildingWaves @marclou @levelsio @jackfriks @dannypostma Been working in my boring online business for 15 years and making money. Decided only now to post about it. Let’s see if my content is interesting enough to build an audience.

[Ivan Messina @ivanmessinait]

@yongfook Any good open source software makes no sense to re-do