Logbook

It's been a while. Almost a week break from the last log. Actually, I had daily logs offline and was planning to enter them here too, which I usually do like 2-3 days, but now it's one week already because of many changes in between.

Finance & Accounting: We closed last month slightly in minus as there were additional yearly payment switches that affected our cash flow.

Kit of Happiness: Created the Next.js app for Kit of Happiness. It was the best call, and we're waiting for LemonSqueezy approval for digital payments - an easy solution instead of Gumroad or other solutions.

New Priorities for This Year: Overall, new priorities shaped for this year. As Kit of Happiness seemed like more of a long-term idea, we decided to focus on the ones we already have audience and trust with: Temettu and Mockup Generator.

Meanwhile, we're building and seeding the new ideas like Listpie, Stampie, and Kit of Happiness.

Then I got sick and didn't have any energy to do any reporting or active development. I was thinking to enter all daily logs one by one, but I realized I was going to do them just to do them. Instead, I already got the momentum needed with the daily logs with 70+ subsequent entries, and also made up my mind for this year from a career-wise perspective.

Now I need the perfect focus on the actual work. Here I will write some time to time, maybe more dedicated learning notes, as here is also a playground for me and for us.

Mockup Generator goes out of Beta! After 2 years of partial work on MockupGenerator.Co, we received great feedback and also good revenue, and we decided it's time to focus on it properly by removing it from Beta. We will try to increase the revenue and value we give so we can sustain it better and dedicate more time.

To mark this milestone, we added a 48 hours badge for users to give them a chance to grab the lifetime deal discounted, and prepared a newsletter to our 1000+ subscribers there.

Later we will increase the price, and work on adding more mockups and functionality while trying to find a good balance of monetization there most likely introducing yearly package too in addition to one month pass. So we can experiment with 3-tier package.

After keeping it slow and the new decision with moving away from Shopify for our shop idea, I felt relieved and wanted to take a bit of a break from the rush of making things work and focus on something I truly enjoy: making lists! It's snowing in Berlin today, which makes it even more perfect for staying inside and doing creative work.

I really enjoy creating lists in Listpie and making them more beautiful these days. I added 14 lists so far, but not all with images as I added this functionality later.

Now slowly I want to make them all visualized before adding new ones.

Hopefully later it will give me a nice API that I can build a mobile app easily, which will be a salute to my very first app I built almost 10 years ago while learning Swift.

Today we decided to stop the initial ad experiment we were running with Kit of Happiness. It gave us the initial insights we needed. It gets the interest, and can have easy outreach, but before building the trust and conversion it's losing money at this stage. For 40 bucks and a few days with some tweaks, it gave us the learnings we needed.

Interest is there, we just need to fulfill this properly to have conversion. This is why we made a few additional decisions:

• Shopify charges 33 euro/month for us and comes with friction with a not-customizable theme. As we're developers with already some comfort tools, it blocks us from doing the things we do and makes us depend on another person, which did not work for us.

• As there is only one product for us at the moment, while building the base and organic growth, we decided to not give this money to Shopify and build a custom solution we got used to with Next.js.

• Google AI Studio already did a pretty good start. Next, I will just tweak it and the listing copy and publish it soon, maybe with Gumroad redirect for sales for quick iteration and later build a full sales flow with Stripe.

This decision already feels good as I was sad to spend this money for nothing at our stage. So basically, without any pressure, we can explore this idea more freely and in a way that we want, and more interactive as we can build and do any integration we need ourselves.

Today I woke up with a bit of a hangover from last night's celebration, so I needed to take it really easy. Welcome 2026!

We're still struggling with conversions in Kit of Happiness. After all the tweaks we've tried, adding more story, free samples, improving the landing page, it's becoming clear that this isn't something we can fix with small adjustments. It actually needs lifestyle content to build that trust and connection with people. We're not fully ready to commit to that level of content creation yet, so I'm parking it a little until we're fully ready to take it back.

Instead, today I did a little creative job myself and I really enjoy creating lists in Listpie these days. After watching the series finale of Stranger Things today, for me it was an okay finale. I was curious to see the series with the best finale, because I remember a few myself as well that I was more satisfied with — the closure or unexpected events that really stuck with me.

I added this list and also expanded list items with images as well, as it gives a more engaging and visual experience. There's something satisfying about making lists that people can actually use and enjoy, and adding visuals makes them come alive.

Building on the story-telling work from yesterday, I'm now adding a free sample option to reduce the friction of buying for people who are interested but not trusting the brand yet.

The Meta ads are bringing people to the site, and we're adding more story to help them understand what we're about. But there's still that final barrier: taking the leap to purchase from a brand they've never heard of.

A free sample removes that risk entirely. It lets people experience the quality and care that goes into the kits without any commitment. If they like what they get, they'll be much more likely to come back and purchase a full kit.

This is about removing barriers rather than just adding more convincing copy. Sometimes the best way to build trust is to let people experience it themselves, risk-free.

Not sure if it will work out, but still it's one thing we could do and try it out.

After yesterday's analysis of the Meta ad results, I realized we need to build trust and social proof. The ads are bringing people to the landing page cost-effectively, but they're not converting because we're a new brand without a story yet.

Today I started tweaking the landing page of Kit of Happiness as the first step and the product listings to give more story behind them. Instead of just showing what the products are, I'm adding context about why they exist, what problem they solve, and the thought process behind each kit.

This is the first step in building that trust layer — helping visitors understand not just what they're buying, but the purpose and care that went into creating these kits. It's about making the brand feel more human and less transactional.

After analyzing the first results from Meta ads, it's pretty cost-efficient to reach out to interested parties with almost 7 cent for a landing visit, but we could not get conversion: that's the problem.

The ads are doing their job: they're bringing people to the site at a reasonable cost. People are clicking, they're landing on the page, but then they're not taking the next step to purchase. It's that gap between interest and action that we need to bridge.

It seems like as a new brand, we don't have social proof yet and that was the expectation too. When someone lands on a page for a product they've never heard of, from a brand they don't know, there's a natural hesitation. No reviews, no testimonials, no track record, just a product and a promise.

Now building the trust will be the next step. We need to find ways to make people feel more comfortable taking that leap, whether that's through better storytelling, social proof, or removing barriers to entry. The traffic is there, we just need to convert it.

Today I started experimenting with Meta ads for Kit of Happiness.

The first listing is ready with updated terms and conditions. I placed a test order to see how the purchase flow works, and it sent me separate download links with the assets confirmed — everything looks good.

Learning from Temettü Pro launch

I learned an important lesson here: our pro upgrade wasn't working in production due to a missing environment variable. We did all our upgrade tests in staging, but missed checking production.

This time, I made sure to test the actual purchase flow end-to-end before launching anything.

Small Meta ad test

Now I've set a 10 euro/day listing in Meta to understand the conversion demand — really small testing. Usually we don't do any paid advertisement for validation, but here it's ecommerce and we want to learn this side too.

Tomorrow I'll be working on content marketing with videos while this Meta experiment also proceeds with initial findings. It's a dual approach: paid ads to learn conversion, and organic content to build awareness.

Today was the weekend, but it was interrupted for me with a doctor appointment that took nearly the whole day.

At night, I took it easy watching How to Get Away with Murder and played around a bit with lists.

Tomorrow is the first day with full focus on projects, still keeping it with vacation spirit since this week I have vacation at work too. It's a nice balance: time to work on things I care about, but without the pressure of work deadlines.