Nusii is 10 years old
Nusii, my online proposal software SaaS for creative businesses, just turned 10 years old! I took this time to reflect and write a personal story about how it all started.
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 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 Nathan Powell, who had been contracting for them for a while. I was building small side projects with colleagues here and there, but nothing was serious.
Here an early picture of the Cabify founding team. I'm the 4th one from the left.
One day, Nathan gave me Rob Walling'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% ownership 😅). 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.
This is me and Nathan creating the new website (the one you are looking at right now)
Nathan 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 our 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://sketchtohtml.com. It was a service to quickly convert Sketch designs into plain HTML and CSS.
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, Brennan Dunn tweeted it out (https://x.com/brennandunn/status/539508054249988096?s=20). 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.
This is me multi-tasking fixing a bug in production with a baby:
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 before. 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