Go-to-Market on Build in Public

Automating Instagram is a nightmare!

Sun, 05 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Google’s Play Store review process is pure torture

Sat, 27 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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, …

AI can’t replace a great marketing team (but sometimes it’s better than nothing)

Wed, 24 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Klaviyo: Much more than a Shopify plug-in

Tue, 23 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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

LinkedIn isn’t working

Fri, 19 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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.

How to plan a time-based launch 🚀

Wed, 17 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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:

Pricing: 🎨 Art + 🧪 Science + 🪄 Alchemy

Tue, 16 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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).

The freemium trap (or why free trials don’t work)

Sat, 13 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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).

Entitlements are easy (until they’re not)

Tue, 09 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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.

How to (not) do paywalls

Mon, 18 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

As I pointed out a few weeks ago: The web, as it's designed today, is not ready for “Agents” of any kind—AI-driven or just plain old automation scripts. Why? Because there’s no agreed-upon way for machines to interact with websites on behalf of a user.

Case in point: Paywalls.

Publishers are getting more creative in protecting their content from scraping, and rightly so: no one wants their work stolen by AI companies or repackaged by Google. But at the same time, they want to provide a good user experience for those who pay.

The ABCD rule doesn’t cut it anymore

Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

There was a time when the golden rule of consumer app development was as simple as ABCD: Always Be Collecting Data.

The strategy?
1️⃣ Grow your user base as fast as possible.
2️⃣ Track every interaction, every event, every click.
3️⃣ Figure out how to monetize the data — usually through targeted advertising, if you couldn’t think of anything more creative.

But that game is changing. Consumers are more privacy-aware than ever. Regulators — especially in the EU, California, Japan, and a few other regions — have stepped in. And both founders and investors are realizing that data-harvesting at scale is not a sustainable or ethical business model.

Scaling down screen recordings with ffmpeg is fast, easy, and super useful

Thu, 24 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I use the free version of Monosnap to record short feature videos for poketto.me—the ones I post here, on X, and on Bluesky. It works great, but the default encoding produces videos that are far too large for other contexts—especially email.

Rather than fiddling with different encodings, I use the command-line tool ffmpeg to scale down the videos. A typical Mac screen recording often has dimensions well over 2000×1500 pixels—when half (or even a quarter) of that would easily do the job.

Don’t attach yourself to outcomes

Wed, 23 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This one’s a bit more philosophical—but stay with me: There are things in life we can control, and things we can’t. That distinction lies at the heart of Stoic philosophy, most famously articulated by Epictetus in the first century BC.

What does that have to do with product development?

A lot, actually.

When you’re working on a small, independent project like poketto.me, it’s easy to grow frustrated with a lack of resonance. LinkedIn posts don’t get the traction you hoped for. Journalists don’t reply. Mozilla doesn’t respond, even after you’ve tried to nudge them on all imaginable platforms,. It can feel like you’re putting something good into the world—and the world is simply ignoring it.

High-quality screenshots? is your friend! 🖼️

Sun, 20 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Taking good screenshots of a web or mobile app is an art in itself:

🤨Which screens do you show?
🤨What demo data should appear?
🤨How much (or how little) functionality and complexity do you reveal?

For poketto.me (the landing page), I chose a fairly minimal set of screens. But I still wanted them to look polished—whatever that means.

Turns out, BrowserFrame.com makes this super easy:

➡️ Upload a raw screenshot of your app
➡️ Pick from a range of realistic browser window styles (Chrome, Safari, Edge, etc.)
➡️ Download a slick, framed version—complete with browser chrome and a subtle drop shadow

The Noah-principle (still) doesn’t work

Fri, 11 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

“Build it and they will come” is allegedly what God told Noah when he wondered how all the animals would find the ark.

As builders, we often fall into the same trap — assuming that once the product is done, users will magically appear. And when they don’t, it’s not just disappointing — it’s exhausting and demotivating.

Turns out, even launching something small (like poketto.me) requires way more go-to-market work than expected. And honestly? That part’s less fun than building.