Oliver Meakings

I'm the founder of Senja.io, a bootstrapped SaaS that helps you collect, manage and share customer testimonials. 

Senja helps you collect testimonials using automations, and share them as images, widgets, popups, Walls of Love, links and videos.

I'd love you to try it: Senja.io

Co-Founder

Co-founder of Senja.io. Collect, manage and share your testimonials.

Olly Meakings

I want to spend $120,000 on marketing

$20,000/month over six months

This will be my biggest ever marketing bet at Senja

But I want to scale from $1,000,000 to $2,000,000 ARR and need to take bigger bets

My brain is telling me to try and scale something measurable - meta ads, Google Ads, cold outbound

But my gut thinks I should focus on the hard work of building relationships with power-users and influencers of our ICP

Less measurable, slower to ramp-up, but a genuine opportunity to find and persuade the right people to use Senja, and get to success

This work would then act as the foundation of future marketing activity

So I'm torn

What would you do #BuildInPublic?

Building a bootstrapped SaaS in public, without the BS

I got roasted by 250 people

I knew my post would be controversial, but I had no idea it would also totally change my thinking

I thought people would focus on the measurable vs unmeasurable marketing question, or discuss head versus heart when making strategic decisions

Instead some very smart people focused on me fixing fundamental issues with the product and our product-led growth (now) before sequencing in paid (later)

Senja is product-led but I've drifted way from this over time because our churn and TOF sign ups have met and I have been looking to throw money at the problem

I'm starting to realise that paid will compound existing issues, whereas (unmeasurable?!) relationship building will not only drive TOF but assist throughout the funnel -> activation -> retention -> referral -> churn

We help our customers collect and share video testimonials and stories, and tell them this is how to grow, so it's critical that this is the foundation of our own marketing

Finally I need to look again at our product growth loops as we're uniquely positioned to grow from them IF enough news customers are getting to success

Our tool creates (awesome) assets for our customers that can drive awareness and TOF but only if they are being shared

Thanks to everyone who commented and especially to Olya Grovel 👩🏼‍🔬 who challenged my key assumptions

This is exactly why I LOVE #buildinpublic

I’m hiring my first marketer for Senja

Where should I look?

I'm hiring at Senja!!

Let's start 2026 getting the world's best creator educators on Senja!

I'm looking for someone to manage concierge migrations.

You will lead our efforts to find the best creator educators, tell them about Senja, migrate them to our platform, and ensure they get to success.

If you’re interested, application in comments below.

Your annual reminder that #buildinpublic is for this:

→ Accountability
→ Reflection
→ Helping others through sharing
→ Building community
→ Hiring

Not this
→ Getting rich quick
→ Doing marketing
→ Getting likes on X

The most rewarding part of sharing my journey has been having a ritual to reflect on my progress.

And then sharing it in a way that can help others.

I know a lot of people see #buildinpublic as a way to market their business, and that's a nice second-order effect.

But fundamentally it's about sharing, helping and democratising information.

I'm particularly inspired by those who continue to do it at scale, like Joel Gascoigne at Buffer ✨

I have $12,000 to spend on Meta ads

I want to run 3 cycles of $4,000 of ad spend

Who should I talk to about Meta ads for SaaS?

Most testimonials are filler

Not because they're bad, but because they're untested and unmeasured

You collect them, edit them, and share them on your sales pages

But you have no idea if they're actually helping buyers to make a decision

What if your leads could tell you which testimonials were most helpful?

And you could use that information to show more of the most helpful proof in your marketing?

Over time, you could discover
→ Which stories resonate
→ Which formats work
→ Which proof belongs above the fold

And which testimonials should be hidden

This is something I've been exploring at Senja in our widget playground

Visitors can actually upvote the proof that was useful to them

What do you think?

Would visitors actually leave feedback on a testimonial? 

#buildinpublic

Kicking off 26 with some great news - another native integration live!!!

You can now find Senja inside Umso

Instantly add your customer testimonial widgets to your Umso landing pages

This type of integration Senja's customers get to success in other tools

And it increases the discoverability of Senja across the web

Plus, it's amazing to see Senja inside tools I love and use

* Born in Argentina, with Polish roots, lived in Israel and based in London since 2011.

*Building Dolphin AI 🐬 with Charlie Day. Dolphin is the CX Insights Copilot to make sense of customer feedback at scale. Thinking with long-term vision + Acting with short-term urgency.

* In 2020 I lost all my work, so I moved into the startup world and founded HARKALIVE: an online platform for dance classes - built two products from scratch: a subscription platform & a two-sided marketplace.

* Pre-pandemic: 10+ years experience in the entertainment industry. Founder & Producer @Upstage: production company for events and theatre where I produced 300+ events and 10 theatre productions.

* Succeeded & failed, but always adapted fast.

* I like to compare the role of a Producer to the role of a Product Manager - a glue between different teams and stakeholders, internally and externally, obsessed with customer needs, and business impact.

* Random fact: I teach Israeli Folk Dancing and I'm an award-winning choreographer and instructor.

Let's have coffee or Zoom-coffee!

Ilai Szpiezak

We sold $300k in 60 days. 
Fully bootstrapped.
Two months ago, we ran a lifetime deal on AppSumo.

The outcome?

- 5,000+ new users
- Over 100 5-star reviews
- A full year of runway 💪

Lifetime deals feel scary.
How can you know what will happen to your startup when you don’t even know what you’ll have for breakfast tomorrow?

But if the definition of a founder is “staying alive,” 
we did what we had to do to stay alive. 

And I’m so fricking proud of what we’ve built so far.

No VCs. 
No “Harvard.” 
No pitch decks.

Just us, a Chrome Extension, and our customers.
People are loving Pretty Prompt.

And saying things like:
"The best tool I have purchased over the years".
"Paid for itself in the first week."

Full story in the comments.
Here’s to the next 12 months, fully backed by our customers 💪

Building Pretty Prompt | Ex-Producer turned Founder |🎗️

25,000 users later, we’re going back to where it all started.
Launching Pretty Prompt 1.0 on Product Hunt on Jan 31st 🚀

We’re bringing back the “Grammarly for prompting”, powered by everything we’ve shipped over the last 8 months.

We’re still a small, fully bootstrapped team.
Building in public. And Learning fast.

If you like supporting scrappy products early, follow the page and show up on launch day 🧡. 

Just getting started: https://lnkd.in/efE3v3p6

My little brother, Shai, is 12. 
And he just launched his first business. 🦸

We call it SUSHI-SHAI.
Homemade sushi, he makes and sells around the neighborhood.

First day: 8 orders. 💥

When I was in Buenos Aires, we built the foundations together:
- A small website using Pretty Prompt + Lovable
- A piece of paper with costs and profit per roll 🍣
- A rough idea of what it should feel like

None of that was the point.
The point was sitting at the table, figuring things out.
Building things together.

I spend most of my time thinking about users, metrics, growth.
This felt different.

He probably won’t remember the website, or the prompts.
But he’ll remember the moment someone paid him for something he made.

A few things I hope stay with him:
- Big things start small
- Clarity > cleverness
- Start niche. Grow later

I didn’t just help him build a website.
I helped him believe he could build something of his own.
And Pretty Prompt made it easier.

He’s my superhero.
Super proud. 💪

Tomorrow. Jan 31st. Launching Pretty Prompt 1.0 on Product Hunt
Give us some love and follow ⬆️ 
(It's not just me saying it, listen to Charlie 💪)

I’ve got good news and bad news for Pretty Prompt.
Good news: we hit 7.94% week-over-week growth 📈
Bad news: now we have to beat it 🫠

Here’s the context:
For the last few months, our average weekly growth was 3–4%. Last week, we doubled that.

Consistently growing 7–10% week over week means you’ve unlocked something that actually works.

The math:
- Say you start with $1,000 MRR
- Grow 7% weekly
- You’ll end up with $400k+ ARR by year one, $13M ARR by year two 🤯

That’s the good part.

The bad part?
Now we have to sustain it. 

Keeping 7% weekly growth over time is super hard. But it’s also one of the most powerful things you can do in tech.

If you haven’t, go read “Do Things That Don’t Scale” by Paul Graham. Aim for 5–10% weekly growth, and do whatever it takes to keep it alive.

That’s why I’m sharing this graph. No polish. No vanity metrics. Just how we track weekly growth in a simple spreadsheet.

If it’s useful, I’m happy to open-source the template. Drop a note, and I’ll send the Google link.

A few extra thoughts from the trenches:
1. A hockey stick looks more like a staircase when you zoom in

2. Our North Star is customer love. Right after that: MRR. Cash is king

3. Two months ago, we launched a limited AppSumo campaign. In 60 days, we sold more than in the previous seven months combined. I’ll share a full breakdown next week

People are loving Pretty Prompt, just go check our reviews 🤩.
If you haven’t tried it yet, now’s a great time.

Onwards 🚀

We keep shipping...
Introducing Refine V2 🚀
The most requested feature since we launched Pretty Prompt last May.

People loved the original.
But it was basic. So we leveled it up. 💪

Refine V2 is like a mini co-pilot for your prompts.

Before you hit “send,” it asks follow-up questions, 
to make sure you don’t miss anything.

With Refine V2, you can:
- Select multiple answers
- Add custom inputs
- Refine deeper with more questions

Users seem to be loving it:
“The ‘Refine’ mode is the best part. It’s saved me so many clicks.”
“You quietly start wondering how you worked without it.”

If you try it, I’d genuinely love your feedback 👇

Closing the week with a small pause and a couple of real wins… 🙏
Milestones:
25,000 users
350,000 prompts improved

Wild to write that.

I’ve been bad at sharing releases since flying to Argentina.
Over the next few days, I’ll post updates on what we’ve shipped lately.

Starting with 5 quality-of-life features 👇
- Save prompts in 20sec → Save prompts from any site, straight to your Library.
- Save from History to Library → Found a good prompt? Save from your History.
- Last used login method → See which login you used last.
- Pretty Prompt for Gems → Works on Gems like it does on Gemini.
- 14 new integrations coming soon → The goal: Work wherever you prompt.
(Lovable, v0 by Vercel, Base44, bolt.new, Grok, TypingMind, and more)

The biggest win this week wasn’t a number or a feature. 
It was reading this: “Pretty Prompt is my secret prompting weapon.”
Thanks Nick Christensen 🙌

More updates soon.
Back to building.

I felt super proud today reading people talk about the Pretty Prompt website.
Stuff like: “Perfect homepage.”

“Not a single person on the planet can misunderstand what they do.”
“Positioning 10/10.”
“I’ve never seen a Chrome extension work this smoothly.”

I built it myself.
Just a laptop, Cursor, and a lot of iteration.
(Plus some help from my co-founder, Charlie!)

It made me realize that positioning is just as hard as building the product.
Getting to PMF is also getting to Positioning-Market-Fit.
They grow together 🤝

Here’s what I’ve learned so far, mostly by trial and error:
- Say what you do in 3 to 5 words. If that’s unclear, nothing else matters.
- Social proof beats complex websites.
- Show, don’t tell. We chose a 60-second demo over a “features” section.

I try to think like a new user landing on the page. I’d ask:
- Does this work where I already work?
- Are they legit?
- Can I try it without paying?
- Do I need to sign up to just see it?

Most of the homepage is just our answers to those questions.

I don’t think there’s a perfect formula.
But hearing people say they “get it” in under a minute and become users feels like a small win.

I just recorded a new demo video.
Link in the comments if you’re curious. 👀

Trying something new: raw, short-form, mobile-first.
I wanted to showcase how to turn a simple prompt into a Pretty Prompt in Lovable for a stunning slide deck website. Web in the comments 👇

New in the Pretty Prompt web app!
1. Export saved prompts
2. Refine V2 (coming soon to the extension!)
3. 10x speed

A little better every day ✨
Blog 👉 https://lnkd.in/eE6j4g3g

I love Magic the Gathering.
Used to play when I was younger, still a fan today.
Wanted to become a pro once… my dad didn’t let me 😅

But now I get to build stuff for MTG with AI ✨

Most people think prompting is just typing something into AI and hoping for the best. Wrong.

The difference between a generic response and one you can actually use comes down to how you ask and the context you give.

LLMs are probabilistic. They guess.
Better context maximizes the chance they guess right.

Clear context = aligned outputs.

Here’s a real example of a terminal-inspired marketplace I built for MTG. Pretty Prompt helped get it right, and saved credits.

Long live (Pretty) context engineering.
Any other MTG fans here 🎴?

#magicthegathering #lovable #prettyprompt

5 review lines that made me smile this weekend:
1. “Probably would have saved me at least $1000 this month alone if i had it before. If you are vibe coding just buy it!”

2. “If you’re a beginner, it’s honestly a superpower. And if you think you’re good at prompting? (Yes, you.) Same. I did too. It’s like having a second brain that translates what I’m thinking into something the AI can actually execute properly. The real magic for me is speed.”

3. “Pretty Prompt doesn’t try to be clever. It just makes you better at using the AI you already rely on.”

4. “From the first time I logged, it felt like the product understood exactly what I was trying to achieve and helped me get there faster, cleaner, and with far less friction.”

5. “Pretty Prompt has quietly become one of those tools I did not realize I needed until I started using it daily”

People sometimes ask me why Pretty Prompt.
I just point them to what users say.

Still a lot to learn. Still a lot to build.
And still the best strategy: making users happy.

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Olly Meakings

Ilai Szpiezak

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The Battle

Olly Meakings

Ilai Szpiezak

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Olly Meakings's LinkedIn Performance

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