Getting fired and using it as motivation to build a successful niche portfolio

Fernando Pessagno got fired in 2023 and used his newfound free time to build niche tools. Since then, his portfolio of design products has brought in over $500k in revenue.

Here's Fernando on how he did it. 👇

Getting started

I’m Fernando Pessagno, a solo founder from Argentina currently living in Sweden.

I run a small group of SaaS products in the design space: aiCarousels.com, ResumeMaker.Online, and GeneratePPT.com, along with PreviewMyProfile.com, a free tool that funnels users to the rest of the ecosystem.

Previously, I spent ten years running my own web design studio in Argentina. On paper, things seemed fine. I had clients, income, and a proper career. But I was burned out from boring client work and felt super disconnected from the work I wanted to do.

I created ResumeMaker.Online. At first, it was just a silly side project to reconnect with the fun of building and improve my coding skills. In 2018, it even won Product Hunt’s Product of the Week, which showed me that these “silly projects” could become something bigger.

But, coming from design, I struggled to believe I could make a living from coding and shipping my own products. After closing the studio, I went to work at tech companies abroad, first at Envato in Mexico, then Clarifai in Estonia, while still “playing startup” on the side.

I left that job in Estonia and got a job in Sweden with a huge pay cut to be with my Swedish girlfriend, who had just had two failed ACL surgeries. I moved mainly for her. The company knew this from day one. They promised me a stable job and a real vision for design.

Then, in 2023, after a year of good work and positive reviews, they decided design was no longer a priority and fired me the day before my vacation. Pretty shitty move.

It left such a bad taste that I said, “Fuck this corporate bullshit.”

Instead of using those vacation days to recover or apply for new jobs, I launched the MVP of aiCarousels.com. Shortly after, I relaunched ResumeMaker.Online as a proper SaaS.

That's when I went all in. It's been three years, now, and I've generated $500k+ in revenue.

The closest thing to a dream job

I was motivated by a mix of knowing the design pain points well and a deep, lifelong need for autonomy.

Since school, I asked teachers if I could do group assignments alone. I'm not sure what that says about me, but I've always liked working solo, fully responsible for the results. I was probably unemployable since first grade.

My 9-to-5 jobs benefited me in many ways. They taught me a lot, exposed me to how larger SaaS companies operate, and enabled my relocation to Europe. I do not regret them. But I loved what those jobs gave me, not the actual job itself.

I really wanted to own the whole thing: the decisions, the wins, the mistakes, the stress, all of it. That level of ownership feels right to me.

But more than anything, I wanted to build something truly mine. Working solo in my quiet corner, relying on myself, is probably my closest thing to a dream job.

Going all in

Even with all that motivation, going all in was the hardest thing I did. So much advice tells you not to quit your job too early, not to be stupid. I get it. I am not telling people to be reckless or ruin their lives.

But honestly, thank God I got fired.

Knowing myself, I could have dragged that half-in, half-out phase for years. I already had a massive signal back in 2018 when ResumeMaker.Online won Product Hunt’s Product of the Week, and even then, I still did not get it. Or maybe I got it and did not have the guts to trust myself. I do not exactly regret it — maybe I was not ready. But I was definitely blind to what was possible.

A lot of people live there for too long. Not because they are lazy, but because fully betting on yourself is scary as hell. So you stay in this safe limbo where you tell yourself you are building, but your best energy still goes to your day job.

Once I had the pressure to survive in an expensive country like Sweden, everything changed. I worked differently. I focused differently. The energy was totally different! My products stopped getting the scraps of my time and energy and stopped being treated like a cute little beer-money side project. I NEEDED to make it work.

So I’m not going to give fake macho advice like “quit your job and escape the matrix”. But I will say this: Maybe some people should consider quitting their job, especially if they are still young, have some savings, and feel stuck in limbo. Going all in creates a focus and urgency that is very hard to fake.

The fucked up part is this path usually takes blind, dumb, youthful optimism, and that is exactly what fades as you get older. I started late, and if life had not pushed me hard, I’m not sure I would have ever done it.

Also, I'll say this: If you are not ready to make that jump, then at least try to fabricate pressure. Put a deadline in public. Tell your friends. Make it harder to pretend you can always do it later.

Focusing on simplicity

I built the first version of ResumeMaker.Online because my sister needed help with her resume. When I looked at existing tools, most felt bloated and unnecessarily difficult to use. So I built the opposite.

My design background and a persistent belief informed this: Most people dislike designing and are not good at it. Even some designers hate design when it comes to boring, practical stuff like resumes, pitch decks, or LinkedIn carousels. I would know, because I’m one of them! This made the market feel so obvious to me.

As a solo builder, I believed constrained products offered a better chance: fewer, but better, features. I never wanted to build a bloated monster platform that tries to do it all.

You can see this everywhere. Resume builders slowly turn into weird job platforms full of upsells and distractions. Canva cannot be deeply useful for one thing because its interface stretches across a million different use cases. Presentation tools also do this, either by awkwardly forcing AI into legacy products that were never designed for it, or by drifting into website builders or whatever investors think sounds bigger, instead of staying a simple presentation tool.

Many design products are massively overbuilt. Most users do not care about the number of features. They are not impressed by a giant settings panel, thinking, "Wow, this has 37 options, amazing." They just want a decent result and to move on with their lives.

Knowledge workers do not get paid more, hired more, or get better outcomes because they spent another hour tweaking drop shadow blur or some tiny design setting. That is why I have always been more interested in building sharper products that know exactly what they are, make smart tradeoffs, and help people get good results fast without drowning them in buttons and sliders.

A simple stack

My tech stack is very simple. My latest product, GeneratePPT.com, uses JavaScript and PHP. But I’m not very ideological about the stack. Especially nowadays, the stack matters a lot less.

Simpler stacks also work more easily with AI. For AI itself, I’ve been trying Codex this week, but generally I use whichever provider feels best for the job at the time — Claude, OpenAI, or Gemini — which I think most of us do now anyway.

Additionally, Outseta handles auth, CRM, and payments. Sure, you can try building all of that yourself, but I’ve never seen the point in wasting months rebuilding infrastructure that already exists and works well. 

Outseta takes minutes to integrate, saves many headaches, and its team is genuinely awesome. Recently, during a bad-faith domain dispute that I ultimately won, the other party pressured and threatened them, but they still stood by me instead of backing off.

I can attest that they support their users like real partners, not like some cold software vendor. That mix of a great product and that level of support is pretty rare to find.

A resilient portfolio

My business model is simple: a 100% bootstrapped portfolio of SaaS design tools for non-technical users.

I grew revenue by solving the same pain point from different angles. I never wanted to build one giant, bloated platform.  This also makes them easier to market. When a product is simple and has one clear value proposition, people understand it and know if it is for them much more easily.

I prefer to build smaller, sharper products that share the same type of user and feed each other.

I believe this made the business more resilient. Instead of betting everything on one product, I built a small ecosystem where each product helps the others grow. It's a much calmer way to build as a solo founder.

Doubling down on what works

I’ve grown the business through a mix of building in public, SEO, free tools, affiliates, influencer marketing, and direct user contact.

With aiCarousels.com, building in public during a 10-day challenge across YouTube, X, and LinkedIn helped early on. I’m naturally introverted, so it felt awkward as hell. I can't say it directly translated into sales, but I think it helped build trust and made the product feel less like a random tool with no face behind it. Many users Google the founder behind a product, so a personal brand matters, even if not in a super direct or measurable way.

Building simple but useful free tools also worked really well. That always felt more natural to me. I'd rather build something than spend all day posting on LinkedIn. So I created free tools around the products, and even side sites like PreviewMyProfile.com became funnel entry points into the ecosystem.

That strategy still works, but it has become less exciting now that everyone uses AI to copy each other. A VC-backed competitor recently copied some of mine and even forgot to remove copy praising aiCarousels.com, which was funny. So yes, it works, but it's also getting noisier.

My approach isn't very sexy. I mostly try different things, see what moves the needle, then double down on what works. Sorry if I can't offer an amazing tip! I can only set expectations straight by saying this usually takes many small efforts that slowly stack up over time.

Design for growth

Overall, though, I believe a great product multiplies marketing efforts. The best marketing is a great product.

If the product is good, almost any strategy works. Talking about it becomes easier. People understand it faster. Word of mouth spreads more naturally. SEO converts better. A good product feels easier to market. And if you know the product is genuinely good, you don't feel like a scammer spamming nonsense. You feel more comfortable presenting it to people because you believe it helps.

If marketing feels brutally hard all the time, the uncomfortable answer is often that the product isn't strong enough yet. I know this because I've done the same thing myself: I've coped by blaming reach, algorithms, bad luck, and insufficient marketing knowledge, because that feels better than admitting the product might not be useful enough yet.

Talk to your users

Support has been super valuable. Talking directly to users shaped the products a lot. Some unhappy users became real evangelists just because I replied like a human and actually gave a shit. I dropped the fake “we” pretty fast. It was always just Fernando on the other side. That closeness is a huge advantage when you are small. 

Nowadays, I can DM users directly, ask for feedback on new ideas, show them early tools or updates, and get honest reactions fast. It became this nice little testing ground built on trust. And the cool part is you can pay that goodwill back too, giving them free access, early access, or little perks for helping shape the product.

With how shitty it has become lately to share things publicly, get real feedback, or get any reach on X, having that direct line to users is gold.

Pick a lane and stick to it.

Sticking to a lane helped me a lot.

Almost all my products, including the ones that failed, are different forks of the same thing. Same general design space, same user type, same taste, same core problem to solve. So when one project fails, I am not back to zero. I carry the lessons, useful bits of code, the insights, and the taste into the next thing. It compounds.

That is a massive advantage as a solo founder. People hear “multiple products” and imagine total chaos, but it is less chaotic when the products share so much. When I improve one, I usually improve another too. It feels more like building an ecosystem than juggling random, disjointed bets.

Building for non-experts also helped. I do not have B2B experience, but B2C has worked very well for me because it forces you to help regular users. A lot of tech people live too deep in their own bubble and forget that most people are not excited about the latest AI agent-driven automation workflow. They just want to stop screaming at the computer and get a good enough result.

That has been a good market for me, because it is not a tiny niche. It is the majority of the market! Even if there are big competitors, the market is so huge that there is still plenty of room if you make something that feels simpler and easier.

You need real domain experience

Do not start a random idea just because you saw it here on Indie Hackers, on Starter Story, or in some YouTube video about a guy making stupid money with it.

I mean that.

People are over-romanticizing indie hacking online (I’ve been guilty of that, too). It's easy to tell the nice version after something works and fall for clickbait titles like “I made $500,000 in 10 days.”

But interviews like those are the 1% success stories. They can inspire you. They can also mess up your expectations.

So no, I don't think you should just start and ship anything.

Yes, AI makes building faster. Sure, now you can ship something in a week. But there are no shortcuts for what comes after that: growing it, marketing it, supporting it, understanding the users, staying in the market long enough to matter. That part is STILL hard as hell.

So if you choose badly, this can easily become worse than a 9-to-5. And you lower the odds of success!

Look, I'm not going to shame someone who is under real pressure to put food on the table and decides to build a copycat version of whatever seems most likely to make money. I get that. Push through if you must.

But if that's not your situation, then ask yourself honestly: Did you really leave a 9-to-5 just to work even more hours in a market you don't understand, for users you don't relate to, on a product you have no real feel for?

So here's my advice: Transfer real domain experience from your life into the SaaS world. That's how it becomes less of a gamble and more of a calculated risk.

I'm not saying “follow your passion.” I don't even like that advice much. I'm saying pick something where you understand the users, the pain, the language, the tradeoffs, the taste, the signals. Something where your real life gives you an edge.

Quit zombie projects sooner

Get better at quitting zombie projects sooner.

I think perseverance is a double-edged sword. It matters (a lot!), but if you apply it blindly, it can destroy you.

You only have so many years, so much energy, and so many real attempts left before this game starts eating your money, your relationships, your health, and eventually your confidence. Until one day you wake up thinking, “Maybe this isn't for me,” and quit.

Funnily enough, the worst thing that can happen with your product isn't always hitting zero MRR. Zero is painful, but at least it's a clear message: it’s dead.

A much worse outcome is ending up with a zombie project that has low but non-zero MRR after a year of nonstop grinding.

Real traction has a certain feeling. When something has early traction, it doesn’t feel like you’re dragging a lifeless body uphill, constantly pumping life into it to keep it moving. When something works, it feels alive, like you’re barely pushing. It feels like the product is carrying you, instead of the other way around.

If it doesn’t have that feeling, kill it, pack up the lessons, pivot completely, or move on to your next idea.

What's next?

This year I plan new versions of ResumeMaker.Online and aiCarousels.com, which excites and scares me because the changes are meaningful. I don't want to screw up something that already works. So I will move with ambition and caution.

At the same time, the future feels uncertain. AI is moving so fast that I don't think anyone knows where this all ends and what tools will still make sense a few years from now.

I’ve also received offers to buy some of my products, and I considered them seriously. I’m not closed to the idea of selling one day, but right now I still feel I have a lot left to do with them.

I’m 40 now, and I don't feel I’m losing steam, but I also don't feel the same fire to chase endless new ideas. I feel more strongly about focusing on what already works, making the business stronger, automating more of it, and protecting my time and attention.

That is probably the real goal: Not just more revenue, but more freedom over my time. That is the metric I care about most.

Lastly, even if I’ve been candid here about the harder and uglier sides of this path, and maybe criticized a little how this industry sometimes paints itself, I still want to say this clearly: For me, it has been so worth it.

So thanks to Indie Hackers for letting me speak honestly about both sides of the journey.

Learn more

You can learn more at:

• aiCarousels.com

• ResumeMaker.Online

• GeneratePPT.com

• PreviewMyProfile.com

You can also follow me on LinkedIn and X.