How a Solopreneur Built and Sold Four SaaS Products

Luca Restagno’s Early Experiment: Iterspace

In 2019, while serving as a team lead and senior engineer at a fast-moving company, Luca used his leftover hours and the lull in commuting during the pandemic to build Iterspace. It aimed to give designers, developers and stakeholders a single spot to share mockups, track version history, and give feedback without chasing threads on chat apps. The concept resonated but revenue didn’t match effort. While a Product Hunt launch scored 70 upvotes, his co-founder had different priorities and they sold Iterspace. That exit taught Luca two things: set clear goals with anyone you work with, and make hand-offs easy by using separate project email addresses from day one.

Finding a Plug for Twitter DMs: Hivoe & Inboxs

By mid-2021, Luca was active on Twitter and saw people drowning in direct messages. He shipped two tools—Hivoe and Inboxs—to let users tag, auto-reply, template and analyse DMs. The pair hit about $4,000 in combined monthly recurring revenue. Then Twitter changed its API pricing overnight, wiping out margins and making the apps impossible to run. He sold both to HypeFury. This second sale underscored one fact: if you build on someone else’s platform without a backup plan, you risk losing it all in a policy update.

The AI Chatbot Play: Userdesk

In early 2023, with AI chatbots all the rage, Luca built Userdesk, letting businesses train bots on their own content and embed them for support. A $69 lifetime pre-sale brought in 20 buyers in a day, but when he rolled out publicly just a few of them activated. He realised his Twitter audience was buying out of loyalty, not fit. Positioning was broad, and his own profile didn’t match the target market. Despite hitting $1,100 MRR, he decided to sell on Acquire.com. The process walked him through LOI, due diligence and an Asset Purchase Agreement, and made future exits smoother.

The Breakthrough: Shipped.club

In December 2023 Luca launched Shipped.club, a Next.js boilerplate designed specifically for devs and indie founders to bypass common SaaS setup steps. By bundling authentication, billing pages, deploy scripts, and ready-to-edit code, it let users start subscribing customers in days instead of weeks. Within four months he sold $20,000 in licenses. This success came because he picked a niche he already knew—developers who need a reliable starter kit—and leaned on his reputation in that community.

Lessons Along the Way

Across four products and two platform exits, Luca learned to set co-founder expectations early, diversify away from single APIs, test positioning with the right audience, and build in public to get feedback fast. He also refined his exit playbook by standardising project accounts and documenting hand-off steps. Today he focuses on projects that fit his skill set, values and network—proof that founder-product fit can make or break early traction.