Yes, I’m still alive.

Saying that I’ve not been consistent with my content production might be a total understatement by now. But I’m less than 2 months away from buying back my time to continue pursuing my projects (including this newsletter) while I still dedicate a good chunk of my time to my clients.

Here’s how I’m rationalizing my total lack of consistency:

1) I moved to a new house a couple of months ago

It’s a lovely 3-floor detached home on the outskirts of Viseu. Still, only the last weekend, I had the time to organize my new home office properly.

The light of this space is incredible (the window on the left was closed; otherwise, it’d be super bright everywhere), which gives it such a great vibe!

I think that the reason why I get excited about it is that designing an office is where many of my interests in technology, design, and self-improvement come together.

Focus is something I struggle with, so having a place designed with intentionality is key for me to be able to do my best work. There’s a lot of inspiration from channels like Matthew Encina and Never Too Small, which I think is worth mentioning. This is also a project I get to do with my wife: check, check, check.

2) Interim Head of Marketing for Impala Studios

I’m once again doing Growth for apps full-time, which allowed me to learn new tricks and test my current skills. I’m also getting to work with many interesting folks, which is pretty cool.

Interestingly enough, I’m also leading a Marketing team again. I’m still processing it and comparing this experience with my previous one. This is something I definitely want to write about in the near future.

Now that things are progressing, I should gradually return to my consultant role, which will also give me headspace for my projects. There are still a few weeks in front of me, though, and things are far from perfect, so there’s a lot yet to be done.

It’s a pretty special moment when you start to see everything falling into place after months of going through the numbers, bouncing ideas off with people, putting a plan on paper, and then actually going for it.

3) Easy App Reports got to $5,000 Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR)

We were stuck at $4.2-$4.4 for almost half a year now, so what changed? How did we break the ceiling?

Well, we started playing with ads again – but this time, it’s actually paying off. That means we’re operating on a slightly lower margin, sure, but also that we’re able to sustain a stronger pace of growth.

This project could be so much more though, so if you ask me about it I’d probably start naming all the one hundred things we should be doing in order to make a bigger impact on the market.

Still, there’s a psychological barrier I’m breaking here, which I think might be the most important outcome here. You know, I’ve helped clients go from 6 to 8-9 figures in revenue a year. But, the truth is, I never managed to do that for myself.

The funny thing is, because I could see this product growing as big (if not more) than other companies I worked for in this past decade, now I actually believe I could replicate this success again in the future. Not that I didn’t believe in it before, but now I can see what it takes and what it feels like, which certainly hits differently.

Am I the only one?

From “I can’t get enough of it” to “I can’t stand people hearing people talking about it”

From “this is great and works like magic” to “oh, this is just another gimmick”

From “this will save my job” to “this can replace my job”

From ”the future will be awesome” to “the future might be fucking terrifying”

How are YOU feeling about it, by the way? I always love to get replies to this email, so, you know, don’t be a stranger.

ps: am I doing this meme thing right? 😛

💬 Quote from the book Cashvertising

“When you get someone to think deeply about something, and you persuade them to arrive at a conclusion, they will adopt their decision as a result of their own thinking, protect it, and defend it (against competitors, for example)”

– Cashvertising, Drew Eric Whitman

Resurfaced using Readwise

TikTok made me sign up – but I regret it

AdCreative.Ai: I tried using it for my Google Ads retargeting campaigns, and I must say I was deeply disappointed. While I understand that the issue might be that my expectations were too high, I still think they could do a much better job at not promising what it can’t deliver.
There are certainly many people out there who like AdCreative.ai a lot, by the way, I know. Still, I’m not sure I’m giving it another shot anytime soon.
What went wrong in my case:

The AI-generated texts are… Well, I was going to say not great, but in my case, it was just wrong. After spending a couple of minutes adding context about what Easy App Reports is about, our goal, and who the customers are, I got an unusable placeholder text as output Humm…

You still have to design your creatives yourself. From watching their ads, you instantly get the feeling that it has an AI-powered creative generator – but it just feels like a gimmick.

It’s not clear what size of the images you need to upload, and there’s not much you can do with the cropping.

You can only do one copy option and one image at a time. Not sure how I’d scale that.

Then it outputs 100 different banner options from which 90%+ is either awkward or wrong, so you have to pick what you want to use manually anyway.

As a SaaS entrepreneur myself, I don’t like sharing negative feedback about another tool in public.

As a marketer who writes to other marketers, I feel you’d appreciate the heads-up.

📊 Data viz tip

How to build (good) funnels on GA4: Simo Ahava is a well know figure in the web analytics world. I’m always learning something from him, and this time he goes beyond again by sharing a relatively simple trick on how to build a proper funnel report on GA4, which is pure awesomeness.