Build in Public #6
The Direction Has a Name
I disappeared for months. And the reason is the best one I could have hoped for: Gabriele was born, my second son. He came a little earlier than expected and worried us more than I like to admit; then, thankfully, everything settled. Now we're home, he's doing well, and we're soaking him up.
But here's the strange part: while life slowed everything down, under the surface these have been the densest months since I started this journey. Because something happened that I'd been waiting years for: I finally understood which direction to give what I'm building.
And I'll be honest with you…
when the direction is clear, everything accelerates.
In a short time I went from three active apps to six apps in the works. In this post I'll tell you what changed, I'll introduce you to the model (which now has a name) and I'll show you the numbers.
Hey, I’m Marco. Welcome to One Million Goal 👋
I left my CPTO job to build a portfolio of AI-native apps toward €1 million in revenue, sharing the real numbers, experiments, wins, and failures along the way.
Revenue to date: €310,419 / €1,000,000
In the last update I promised you a longer conversation about the direction. Here it is. Three things in this post: first, the @creators model and why it changes everything; second, a tour of the apps on my desk, one by one; third, the numbers with a transparency call I should have made a long time ago.
From three to six apps
Let’s start from the beginning. For a long time I worked with the feeling of moving a lot without knowing exactly toward what. I was building, launching, learning… but the thread was missing.
Then the work with Virginia on Anapana led me straight to a realization. Over these months I understood something that changes everything: building is no longer the bottleneck. With AI at my service I can design, develop, and grow a product on my own, at a speed I would have called science fiction two years ago. What a solo builder always lacks, though, is distribution.
And who has distribution? Creators. Except most of them monetize it in the most fragile way possible: sponsorships, courses, PDFs. Things that live while you post and die the moment you stop.
The direction has a name: @creators
That’s how @creators was born… the venture studio where I build digital products together with creators. The deal is simple: I bring the product building and product growth skills, the creator brings the distribution. Depending on the audience and the work an app requires, we decide how to split the revenue; usually it’s 50/50. No upfront costs, no contract dressed up as a partnership.
But pay attention to one thing, because it’s the heart of the model: the starting point is never the creator. It’s their community. You start by understanding which problems that community actually lives with, and then you build, together with the creator, the right product to solve them. Value for the people first; revenue for everyone else after.
Inside @creators there are three paths.
The first is co-founding: together with the creator, we build the solution to their community’s problem. I build the product and grow it, the creator handles distribution and content. The apps launched under this model so far are Anapana and Finance Interview Prep, built with Marco Lecchi; the third one, with Andrea Passador, is on its way.
The second path is the affiliate program, designed for smaller creators (the ones who can’t yet guarantee co-founding-level distribution): they earn by driving conversions to the apps already in the program. If you have an audience of musicians, for example, you can promote Coco with a discount for your users and a percentage for you.
The third path is consulting: everything I learn in the field goes to work on the digital products a creator already has.
And here’s the part that excites me the most: the portfolio flywheel. Every app I launch is born with all the skills learned from the previous ones. Every app that’s live surfaces new dynamics, strategies, growth loops. And every discovery gets implemented across the whole portfolio, which then grows further.
So basically, I’m not building apps anymore… I’m building the system that produces them and makes them improve each other.
To hold a portfolio like this together on my own, with Anapana, Coco, HeyDoctor, and Finance Interview Prep live today and more on the way, I’m building a lot of automation: development, design, SEO where it makes sense, ASO, Apple Search Ads.
The challenge has always been the same since day one: using AI to maximize the impact I can bring alone, with the skills I built first as a developer, then as Head of Product, and finally as a CPTO.
What’s on my desk
Okay, let’s do the tour of the desk.
Anapana is still the flagship, the one I invest most of my time in. The work here is less visible from the outside, but it’s what holds up everything else. It’s also the prototype of the model: before co-founding even had a name, Virginia and I were already doing exactly this.
Coco is going really well and I’m evolving it: I’m adding translations and, above all, I’m using it as my personal lab to study distribution dynamics in the stores. ASO positioning, ASA spend, growth that comes only from the stores… no social, no content. It’s my toy, in the best sense of the word: what I learn here then travels to all the other apps. The flywheel, again.
HeyDoctor has only been a web application until now, and even so it already has 300 organic registered users, several of whom play almost every day. Translated: people coming back on their own to a product that doesn’t even have an app in the stores. That’s the signal I was waiting for, so I’m converting it into a mobile app: more complete gameplay, more fun, more within reach.
Finance Interview Prep, built with Marco Lecchi, is the first co-founding born inside the @creators model from day one. And with Andrea Passador we’re about to launch the next one.
Last thing on the desk, and it’s not an app: I’m working on a podcast with Matteo Marchesano. The name stays in the drawer for now, but I can tell you the why. Matteo and I use AI every single day and, beyond learning a lot, we’re putting ourselves on the front line to understand what the AI-driven future of organizations will look like. That’s why we want to interview people like us, who can tell us their own way of using AI.
The numbers
And now, the numbers. This time I want to be even clearer than usual, because there are two numbers and they should never be mixed up.
The first one, the Ammesso.it exit: €220,000. That’s the chapter before all of this. The sale of my first side project back in 2021. Ammesso was a project I carried forward as a solopreneur, with a couple of friends lending a hand at a few points along the way. I tell it as context, but it stays out of the goal counter: it’s an exit, not portfolio revenue. And a note of transparency here, because I made a call: until today I had counted this number inside the One Million Goal. I’ve decided to take it out. I want to keep the counts separate and treat as OMG revenue only what is truly generated as a solopreneur, with AI at my side. Yes… the counter drops by €220,000. But I’d rather have a smaller, honest number than a bigger, ambiguous one.
The second number, One Million Goal: €310,491. This is the number that measures progress toward the million. The aggregate revenue of all the apps in the portfolio, added up from October until today. So don’t read it as one month of explosive growth: it’s a change of scope, plus the real progress.
It’s not the million. But the direction is the right one, and for the first time it’s not a single app growing: it’s the system.
Reflections
Let me close with a reflection. I’ve always had a motto: family first. Since Gabriele arrived I work from home every day, I’ve cut my hours and trimmed everything I could trim… this content included. Those of you who are parents know: two small kids at home in August, with every daycare closed, is not a stroll.
The strange part? Fewer hours made me sharper. When time is scarce, bad decisions cost too much; so I stopped chasing every idea and started building the system that keeps working while I’m with my kids. And maybe that’s exactly why the direction became clear.
What’s next
But that’s where we’re at. In the next posts I’ll take you inside three things: the data on how Anapana’s metrics are doing, the tool workflow I use today (constantly evolving) and how I do ASO and Apple Search Ads. Give me time to put them together, though: the priorities today are my family and this business. The rhythm may not be constant, but what I share will always be true.
And before we wrap up, a question for you: if you’re a creator, which of the three @creators paths would you see yourself in? Co-founding, affiliate, or consulting? Drop it in the comments… I read all of them.
Impossible? Maybe... or maybe not.
That’s it for this week.
One Million Goal is my public journey to build a portfolio of AI-native products to €1 million in revenue. I share what works, what fails, and the systems behind both.
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See you next week,
Marco