Go-to-Market

Anyone remember the 1990s? Back then, if you wanted to buy software, you walked into a physical store, handed over your hard-earned cash, and received a bunch of floppy disks—or, later, a shiny silver CD—in return. Today, most people don’t pay for the apps they use. Instead, consumers have internalized the notion that software is inherently “free.” We don’t expect to pay for online search, social media apps, fitness trackers, mobile operating systems, or even AI chatbots. How did that come about? The dynamics that led to the devaluation of software are numerous, but a few factors undoubtedly contributed. ...

This one isn't entirely related to poketto.me, but it's still an interesting lesson I learned the hard way the other day: If you want to build a "simple" app that automatically posts content to your Instagram account, it's much more difficult than you'd think. First, there's a GitHub project called instagrapi that seems to offer a nice Python automation library for Instagram. It can post photos, videos, etc. Looks good, right? Don't use it. Ever. It’s based on unofficial APIs, and using it — especially in a script running in a cloud environment — will get your Instagram account blocked almost instantly. ...

In TIL #14, I called getting an Android app into the Play Store “byzantine.” Turns out, I was being too generous to Google and too strict on the ancient kingdom of Byzantium. Here’s what really gave me headaches over the last few months: 🤕 Headache #1: The forms Before Google even looks at your app, you’re drowning in bureaucracy: ticking the “my app doesn’t process health data” box 12 times, pasting links to T&Cs and privacy policies, verifying your name, intentions, identity, blood type, shoe size, the maiden name of your mom’s dog, … ...

Marketing done well is so much more than cranking out ad copy or polishing sales slides. In all my corporate product roles—Fabasoft, Borland / Micro Focus, smec—I got to work with fantastic marketing teams. They shaped products, challenged ideas, and saw the bigger picture we tech-focused product folks often missed. With poketto.me, though, it was just me. So I leaned on ChatGPT, Grok, and Gemini more often than I liked—sometimes with good results, sometimes… not so much. ...

As I mentioned in GMail’s spam filter is pretty weird, reliably sending emails is harder than it looks. But email marketing automation is also one of the most powerful tools you can add to your stack. So, I went looking for a simple, cheap, API-based solution I could plug into poketto.me. Ideally: ✔️ Free for small usage (given my current revenue = zero) ✔️ Easy integration with my stack existing stack (Python backend, Posthog for analytics) ✔️ Scalable once I need more ...

For the last 91 days, I’ve posted one of these “things I learned when building poketto.me” every day here on LinkedIn. What was my motivation for that? 1️⃣ To reflect more deeply on the countless things I’ve learned. Think of it like a gratitude journal: by writing down the small technical quirks, process hacks, and organizational lessons, I hoped to make them stick better. 2️⃣ To help others avoid some of the many mistakes I've made. ...

Since early August, I’d been toying with the idea of taking poketto.me “out of beta.” But with travel planned for late September through mid-October, timing became critical. I needed to launch before leaving, so I set “early September” as the latest possible date—giving myself at least two weeks to handle any post-launch chaos. The first question I asked: What does “launch” actually mean? What’s different afterwards? Here’s what came to mind: ...

Finding the right price point—for anything—is part science, part art, part alchemy… and maybe a sprinkle of luck. Charge too little, and you leave money on the table. Charge too much, and you don’t close the deal. This trade-off is as old as commerce itself, but it’s especially tricky for intangible products like software—particularly when selling subscriptions instead of one-offs and purely product-led (without the benefit of a human sales manager in the loop). ...

Let’s face it: It’s hard to get a freemium model right. While thinking through pricing and packaging for poketto.me, I looked at a lot of other B2C apps—and most of them had some flaw, inconsistency, or irritation in their approach. One striking example is Strava. The fitness app is wildly popular (150M+ users worldwide) and valued at $2.2B. But their free-to-paid conversion strategy seems to be struggling. Why? 👉 The core value (activity tracking) is fully commoditized, with little room to differentiate (Garmin Connect, Nike Run Club, Apple Health, etc. essentially all do the same thing). ...

Early-stage products are all about uncertainty. With poketto.me, I started by building something I wanted to use — and gave it away for free. Then came early adopters asking for features, and eventually I began experimenting with monetizable “premium” features: personalized podcasts, news aggregation, summaries, contextualization, etc. That third bucket quickly gave me headaches. I needed a way to put usage guardrails around these features: 👉 to separate free from premium, 👉 to distinguish “beta” from production-ready, 👉 and to keep my future monetization options open. ...