From Userdesk to Shipped.club: Luca Restagno’s SaaS Journey

First Exits and Platform Risk

In 2017, software developer Luca Restagno was spending two hours a day commuting. He listened to podcasts about economics and entrepreneurship in the car and began imagining a life funded by an internet business of his own. In 2019, while keeping his job, he started building products himself.

His first business was Iterspace, built with a former colleague who was a designer. It let users record problems in web products on video and exchange feedback. Luca used his evenings and the time he saved by working from home to develop it. About two years later, in 2021, a buyer who had seen the product on Product Hunt connected with him and acquired the business. It was his first sale, before Iterspace had any revenue.

After that, he ran Hivoe and Inboxs, products that helped people manage Twitter direct messages. Their customers used Twitter to talk to prospects and make sales, just as Luca himself did every day. By early 2023, the two products had grown to about $4,000 in combined monthly recurring revenue. He began to believe the income might let him leave his job.

That plan was shaken when Twitter changed the policies and pricing for its developer API. Both products depended on Twitter features, so a decision by an outside platform put their survival at risk. Luca eventually sold both and had to look for a new source of income.

Presales Versus Actual Use

The next business grew out of a support problem he had experienced himself. While building and running three SaaS products, Luca found himself repeatedly explaining to customers information he had already put in website FAQs or user guides. For a solo developer handling both product and operations, those support hours were a direct burden. He came up with Userdesk, an AI support tool that would answer questions using existing documentation.

With Userdesk, customers could connect a website, Notion documents, or PDFs to build a chatbot, then add it to their own site. Visitors could ask questions in a conversation, and the operator could use explanations they had already written. The bot handled first-line support, with a person able to join the conversation when needed.

He prepared the landing page and payment flow before finishing the product. In a post published on June 15, 2023, he said he had sold twenty $69 lifetime deals in 24 hours from a single tweet. The product was then called Notionbase; he renamed it Userdesk later that month. After taking preorders, he began implementation using development tools and cloud infrastructure he already knew from his earlier products.

About a month later, when the product was ready to use, he invited the preorder customers. Few signed up and actually used it, contrary to his expectations. Luca thought some may have bought out of excitement for a new product from someone they knew and wanted to support. He had succeeded in collecting payments up front, but still needed to learn why customers would keep using it.

Something similar happened with subscription customers. On July 19, he shared that he had gained his first two paid subscribers over two days the previous week. But when he checked their usage, neither had installed the chatbot on their website. Adoption had stalled after payment, and he said he would ask them why.

An early launch tally he published on August 1 listed 300 new signups, 386 chatbots created, and five customers. While people were interested enough to try building chatbots, the path to regular use and payment still needed attention. He said he would collect users’ roles, intended use cases, and discovery channels during signup, then improve follow-up emails prompting them to install the bot on their websites.

A Layoff Before Revenue Could Support Him

In an interview published in August, Userdesk had $150 in monthly recurring revenue, and Luca said he wanted to grow it to $10,000 so he could go full-time. Late that month, however, he was laid off from his job. Userdesk was making only about $400 in monthly recurring revenue. With his paycheck gone well before the product reached his target, he tried looking for another job, then decided to give his own product a period of full-time focus.

In September, his first customer on an enterprise plan added $499 to monthly recurring revenue at once. Luca celebrated the jump while also noting that if the customer churned, total revenue would fall sharply. At that stage, one customer’s contract could visibly change the size of the business.

His existing audience also turned out to be a poor fit for finding new customers. Luca had built a following of about 20,000 on Twitter, but he later recalled that very few followers matched Userdesk’s target market. Most actual customers came from directories that curated AI tools. The sales channel that had worked for his earlier products did not automatically work for this one.

Users liked the product’s interface and ease of use. According to Luca, customers who had tried several similar tools rated Userdesk’s user experience highly. The development skills he had built across multiple SaaS products showed in the product’s polish. He now needed to identify the customer group and sales approach that could support ongoing purchases.

Shipped.club and the Financial Reality

In December 2023, Luca also launched Shipped.club. It was a code kit with common features such as login, payments, and email, helping developers start new SaaS products faster. He organized code he had accumulated while building several products into a reusable package and added documentation. He sold it as a one-time purchase.

Shipped.club brought in $2,700 in revenue during its first few weeks, and cumulative revenue reached $8,000 by early February 2024. Its main buyers were developers who wanted to build products of their own, a group that overlapped well with Luca’s existing following. He enjoyed explaining what he knew and helping other developers launch.

He still had to cover living expenses and taxes. When he worked through his finances in early 2024, his monthly expenses were about €3,000, while Shipped.club averaged roughly €2,500 in monthly revenue. Userdesk also generated subscription income, but Shipped.club needed a steady stream of new sales to sustain its revenue, and his bank balance was only enough for the taxes due that year. He began considering both selling Userdesk and returning to employment.

Narrowing Userdesk’s Market and Selling It

Meanwhile, Userdesk was becoming difficult to manage alone as customer requests piled up. In February 2024, Luca said its customer groups were scattered—SaaS operators, e-commerce businesses, agencies, and others—making it hard even to write a focused landing page. Each group asked for integrations and improvements tailored to its work. Even though the shared goal was support automation, their feature needs and workflows differed by industry.

The direction he outlined was to choose a target customer first, rewrite the landing page for them, and accept only feature requests that supported the same focus. That would require additional strength in both product and marketing, but he could not afford to pay collaborators. He also tried to find a co-founder, but finding someone whose goals, working style, and communication matched his proved difficult.

Luca sold Userdesk in March 2024. Its monthly recurring revenue was about $1,100, and it had not yet been on the market for a year. After listing the business on Acquire, he drew interest from around 20 potential buyers. He received multiple offers before completing the deal. It was the fourth product he had sold, after Iterspace, Hivoe, and Inboxs.

In April, he completed the transfer of the assets and returned to a job. Since his products could not yet cover all his expenses, he chose to secure a salary again while continuing side projects. He kept Shipped.club running and focused on helping developer customers he understood well.

The Userdesk story shows why the target customer has to be part of a small product’s scope. Even if the problem is defined narrowly as support automation, accepting requests from different industries can turn the product into a service too difficult for one person to operate. Luca’s next decision depended on finding customers he understood, a way to reach them, and a scope he could sustain on his own.