Starting Again — Our Third Company
My co-founder and I are back at it and I couldn’t be more excited.
This is our third company together.
In 2013, we founded reFees, our first startup, in the fintech space. The idea was to leverage the lack of hidden fees on mutual funds to change the way people invest.
We were a team of four with different visions, made many mistakes along the way and after three years we parted ways.
Soon after, my co-founder and I teamed up again. Same mindset: ship fast, iterate, listen to users.
That one turned out differently (story for another post).
We bootstrapped the company with a strong double-digit growth for 5 years in a row, hit ~€ 4 mil/yr revenue with a strong profitability (it was a lead gen marketplace), turned down one acquisition offer just one year after starting out and ultimately sold in 2022 to one of the largest Italian martech companies.
It has been a life-changing event for both of us.
After a sabbatical and exploring ideas, we kept coming back to a problem we’d seen over and over: no matter how polished the UI or how thorough the docs, software has a learning curve.
And it’s the same for products we’ve built. Some users just never get past it, hurting adoption.
So, we asked ourselves: why can't people just use software by typing in natural language and perform the same actions instead of going through the UI? Let's try to remove this pain point!
We spent 2 months talking to people in our network (both tech and no-tech guys) and the feedback has been really positive.
That's how Pitch31.ai was born.
Here’s how it works:
Upload your OpenAPI docs (or import from Postman).
We create an AI Agent that you can embed in your SaaS.
Your users can interact with your software via chat in natural language.
Agents can chain multiple API calls, handle authentication client-side and auto-fix invalid payloads.
Think chatbot, but for doing things with your product, not answering support tickets.
We believe this will reduce (or even eliminate) the learning curve for any software and increase their adoption.
The MVP is live since some days, we are now trying to get the first users and feedbacks.
If you'd like to give it a try, we have a generous free tier, with no credit card required. And if you want to chat about the idea or give feedbacks, just drop me a message.
Thank you!
Congrats on launching Pitch31.ai and your third company — that’s a powerful testament to resilience, clarity, and execution. Your approach to tackling the SaaS learning curve with natural language interfaces hits a massive pain point I frequently see across early-stage B2B SaaS startups.
As a SaaS scaling coach, I work with technical founders to drive product-market fit, reduce churn, and optimize activation. And time and time again, I’ve seen how a clunky UI or overwhelming onboarding kills momentum — especially in self-serve SaaS models.
Pitch31.ai is solving for that exact friction. Empowering users to do without having to learn the UI first is a game-changer — it not only accelerates time-to-value but could significantly improve net retention.
I'm curious:
Which persona is resonating the most right now — product teams trying to improve onboarding, or growth leaders focused on activation metrics?
Following your journey closely — this has real scale potential.
Hi Robert, thank you for your comment. Our final goal is to allow SaaS platforms to embed our tool and let their users interact with the software (also) in NL. At the moment we are onboarding the first users (people that would like to centralize all their software in one central dashboard and interact with them from there). We are getting feedback and iterate and refine the product. Once the product is more solid, we'll start to reach out to SaaS platforms.
Man, what a story. That successful exit is super inspiring! Love the new idea too, the learning curve problem is so real. I'm curious: what's the main thing you learned from the first failed startup that you're doing differently with this one?
Looks great, good luck!
Thanks, Carlo. The first startup taught us many lessons, but the most important one (for me) is that the team is everything in the early stages. I didn’t know the two other founders well (we had never worked together before) and, although there seemed to be a fit between us, when the tough times arrived (as they always do), it turned out we had two different visions for the product. My current co-founder and I wanted to pivot to B2B because there was a clear opportunity, while the other two wanted to stick with the original B2C idea, which is very hard in the fintech space if you’re not well-funded.
So I’d say: before starting a venture that will take most of your time for the coming years, make sure you know your partners very well. Maybe work on some side projects together first, so you can see if there’s a good fit or not. Hope this helps!
Thanks for the super detailed reply. That's a really valuable lesson. As a solo dev, it's a great reminder of how important team alignment is for the future. Really appreciate you sharing the experience!