Mars 26 2025
Hi there, blog, it's been a while!
During the past couple of months, I've been quite busy.
My previous post, about the migration from WordPress to a custom static site generation process, stated that I partly did it to write more; I guess it didn't help much.
Anyway, now I'm here, and I have some news.
First, let me tell you that I haven't been idle this whole time.
I had quite a lot of ideas, and started exploring three different ones that I would consider worthwhile:
I tried my best to keep a "startup mindset" with each of these: either I could see a big potential out of them, or I stopped working on them.
Everything was fine and dandy, until I realized I was attached to two of these ideas: the eCommerce storefront and the contact form service.
I sunk a little more time in the contact form service because the "novel approach to product discovery" might in fact be an awesome idea, that I couldn't achieve all by myself, so I kept it around for when the time comes.
The contact form service is actually almost ready; it also has a name, ContactDock (it's not deployed yet, so you will probably end up on a parking page), but, doing the math, I don't see this driving any form of meaningful revenue.
However, I like what I came up with, and I plan on releasing it as soon as I have time to do so. It'll most likely be straightforward pricing: you pay for what it costs (mail services are surprisingly expensive).
Anyway, I had a bunch of things to explore by myself, but I also wanted to see if I could meet other people out there to form a good team.
If you aren't aware, YCombinator is a startup accelerator/fund, but they also have a service called "Co-Founder Matching", where people with ideas or skills could meet other people to, hopefully, start something.
Out of curiosity, I signed up and started receiving messages from people looking for technical co-founders.
I received fifty or so messages in total and accepted eleven; out of the eleven, I had a call with six, and several calls with four.
The good thing about this whole process is that we learn a lot about what other people are doing, but also about ourselves.
For instance, I was almost ready to try to work with one of them, but I noticed a bunch of "red flags" quite fast; these weren't "obvious red flags", like they tried to scam me or anything, no, these were internal red flags, the things that I'm not willing to accept for myself when it comes to a sane collaboration by my own standards.
Anyway, most conversations were good, and not a time-waster, but I felt like I didn't want to "marry" any of them, until Dan popped up.
Dan sent me a generic message, I took a brief look at his profile and project, replied with a generic message, and we hopped on a call.
He introduced me to FairKiwi, a browser extension designed to help people shop more sustainably by providing independent ratings on products while they shop.
The idea was simple and powerful: making ethical shopping effortless without forcing users to change their habits.
It seemed we were getting along pretty well, and I liked the way Dan thought about the project.
It was not about slapping a green label on things and calling it a day; it was about real transparency and helping users honestly, without the usual greenwashing BS.
I then met Chris, our third co-founder and SEO expert with a strong background in eCommerce.
Like Dan, we immediately hit it off; our vision for FairKiwi aligned, and we all wanted to build something meaningful, not just another throwaway startup.
We agreed to try to work together, and we moved fast: I dove into optimizing the extension and Chris rebuilt the website; FairKiwi started to feel like something real.
Then came the big question: monetization.
We all agreed on one thing: mindless monetization wasn’t an option; we weren’t going to throw in ads or chase quick revenue at the expense of user experience.
This discussion became even more relevant after the whole Honey debacle -- if you missed it, Honey, one of the biggest coupon extensions, was caught replacing affiliate links, and it led to a lot of scrutiny around how browser extensions make money.
For us, this reinforced our belief that we had to be cautious with monetization.
We want FairKiwi to remain a tool people can trust; no shady practices, no tricks.
But bootstrapping only takes you so far, and we still needed a way to sustain the project.
That’s when Chris showed us his process for handling SEO on eCommerce stores.
We figured out pretty quickly that many of Chris' SEO tasks were tedious and time-consuming, perfect candidates for automation.
Before being able to focus on his core expertise, he needed to go through many steps, from data import to filtering, then manually checking a bunch of different tools to know exactly what to focus on.
What if we could help him remove all the boring parts of his job, so he could have more fun?
I guess we could, and that's how we started working on our new baby, CartImpact.
There's not much more I could say about it than what's on the landing page; we're building the tool that will probably help every single eCommerce SEO expert, and, beyond that, probably every single SEO expert.
Dan and Chris conducted (and still conduct) a lot of customer interviews, and it confirmed that Chris' process was not a weird edge case, it's even the standard.
We already have several bricks ready, we're putting everything together and refining the product, our goal being to put it in the hands of our users as soon as possible.
Don't hesitate to add yourself to the waitlist, even out of curiosity.