Michael Koper

Founder of @Nusiiapp. Ex @CabifyDev

[Michael Koper @michaelkoper]

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 https://t.co/vOYeEwZRrE.

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 (https://t.co/KtI03zKR4g). 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 ❤️

[Michael Koper @michaelkoper]

@IanLandsman I saw a 13 year old today with a Nirvana tshirt coming from guitar class. Even new generations are digging it!

[Michael Koper @michaelkoper]

@RaulOnRails I thought it was easy, but later realised I just got lucky. Not really a skill thing, pure luck.

Also, I had an 8 month deadline to make it work because there was a baby in somebody’s belly that wasn’t planned well 😂😂

[Michael Koper @michaelkoper]

@yongfook Those Claude subscriptions are paying itself back quite literally!

[Michael Koper @michaelkoper]

@brunotorious @tailwindcss The page is live already at https://t.co/0cMqdFBXjM.

As you know I'm not great designer, so you can judge the design knowing it is created by someone that sucks at design 🤣

[Michael Koper @michaelkoper]

I'm not really sure how it works but I absolutely love ui dot sh (how do you write and pronounce this tho? 😅) by @tailwindcss.

I'm not a designer, but all the people I gave my redesign preview link said it looks really good!

Best $120 I spent this year so far 👍

[Michael Koper @michaelkoper]

@brunotorious @tailwindcss Most things just look decent at first try. I like that they create a version picker in the design itself. You can say things like:

/ui create 4 versions for this testimonial and let me pick one.

[Michael Koper @michaelkoper]

@BenjaminHouy Yeah it is something like that. I think under the hood it is almost the same. I used to have a cofounder and he was the ‘administrador’ and I had to become that after I bought him out. I believe it is something like 50/month more expensive for social security

[Michael Koper @michaelkoper]

@BenjaminHouy Yes

[Michael Koper @michaelkoper]

@BenjaminHouy I would only pick Spain if you live here for longer and want to stay for longer time. Otherwise, I don’t think it is really worth it to open a business here. Not the easiest country. I think a bit easier than France or Germany tho 😅

[Michael Koper @michaelkoper]

Spain has its pros and cons I guess. It isn’t easy to start one. Quite some paper work. You need a good accountant (which I have and can recommend).

You probably need a NIE, which isn’t hard to get for a French person. You need a Spanish business bank account, which surprisingly not that easy.

When everything is done it isn’t that hard. Accountant does almost everything for like 189/month.

You have to become a freelancer, which is like 300/month for social security.

[Michael Koper @michaelkoper]

@BenjaminHouy They don’t realise that we put CC upfront just to let people like these out 😅

[Michael Koper @michaelkoper]

@yarotheslav Something called Claude Code. It is like a bit text box where you can just mention what you'd like to change 😉

[Michael Koper @michaelkoper]

@BenjaminHouy Haha 4 hours is old news nowadays 🤣

I like it!

[Michael Koper @michaelkoper]

@yarotheslav https://t.co/jJLJMLIiqk_jason

[Michael Koper @michaelkoper]

@jessethanley @LogFitz6 We did it a lot. My back still hurts tho 😂

Kids arent sleeping when they are asleep. They practice some kind of fight sport

[Michael Koper @michaelkoper]

@rmcastil @MostlyTechPod @jessethanley Haha yes!

[Michael Koper @michaelkoper]

wtf? 🤣

[Michael Koper @michaelkoper]

Speed plus developer happiness == 💰 💰 💰

[Marc Lou @marclou]

🚨 Ruby on Rails has taken over NextJS 🚨

and Vercel is still just above Cloudflare

n = 3,658 startups

[Michael Koper @michaelkoper]

@victor_bigfield SEO and integration marketing.