Filently

Pushed our pricing page live yesterday. Thought I'd share the messy reality behind how we landed on $9 / $29 / $79.

The short version:

Two days ago it was $6 / $24 / $39 (just converted from CHF because... that's what was in my business plan 🤷).

My co-founder Sophia wanted to go lower. Under $20 for the main plan.

Then she did the research. CAC math, payback periods, unit economics.

Next day: "I was wrong. We need to go higher."

What convinced us:

• At $6/month with ~$150 CAC, payback is 25+ months. That's not a business, that's a prayer.

• At $29/month, payback drops to ~5 months. Actually sustainable.

• Cheap prices attract customers who churn fast and complain loud.

Other decisions we made:

• Killed freemium before it existed. Solo founders can't afford free plans. Instead, we built a separate free tool (Clean_Name) as our top-of-funnel.

• Document-based trial, not time-based. 25 docs free. No expiration. You experience the value before you decide.

• Launch discount only on annual. Want that 4-months-free deal? Pay upfront. Cashflow > discounts.

• $799 Founding Member experiment. Lifetime access. Zero buyers so far. We'll see.

Honest take: I don't know if these prices are right. Might be too high. Might be leaving money on the table. But we shipped something, and we can adjust.

How did you set your prices? Did you start too low and regret it?

I renamed my startup a few weeks before launch.

Not because of a pivot.
Not because of feedback.
But because of a name conflict I could no longer ignore.

The product was called Fileo.
Turns out there’s another product with almost the same name, different TLD, low activity, but enough uncertainty to become a long-term risk.

At first, I tried to rationalize it away.

• “They’re inactive.”
• “Different audience.”
• “We’ll probably never collide.”

But the closer I got to launch, the clearer it became:
If this ever becomes a real business, this name will come back to haunt me.

So I did the uncomfortable thing early.

I rebranded to Filently.

What made the decision hard was not branding.
It was traction.

The old domain already had backlinks.
Organic traffic was starting to convert.
Waitlist signups were coming in consistently.

Changing the name meant throwing friction into a phase where momentum matters a lot.

If you’re curious what I’m building under the new name, it’s here:
https://filently.com

A few things I learned from doing it anyway:

1. “Early” is still late when things start working
Even pre-launch, you accumulate invisible assets: SEO signals, recognition, bookmarks, mental models. Changing a name resets more than you expect.

2. Risk compounds silently
The real danger wasn’t the other product existing today.
It was the uncertainty of what happens if both grow tomorrow.

3. Clarity beats optimization
I could have optimized around the old name for months.
But clarity now beats clever damage control later.

4. Rebranding is not just marketing work
It’s domains, redirects, copy, onboarding flows, emails, auth, internal naming, mental load. Everything touches the name.

Was it painful? Yes.
Do I regret it? No.

It feels lighter to build when you know you’re standing on solid ground.

If you’re early and something feels off but “probably fine”, it’s worth asking yourself one question:

Would I want to explain this decision to customers or investors in two years?

If not, fix it now.

Happy to answer questions about the process, trade-offs, or how I approached the decision.

Three months ago, I announced Fileo – an AI tool that automatically organizes documents into your existing cloud storage.

The first week was great: 33 signups. But most came from my personal network. After that? 1-4 signups per week. For six weeks straight.

Then I added one thing: A Founders Discount. 33% off lifetime for the first 100 signups.

The result was immediate. 7, 13, 10, 9 signups per week. Nearly 4x what I was getting before.

So why am I removing it?

Because it did its job.

The discount helped me reach 99 signups. More importantly, it helped me learn something: the majority of people on my waitlist are now strangers. People who found Fileo through Google, ChatGPT, X – not through me.

That's the real validation. Not my friends being polite. Strangers deciding this problem is worth solving.

What the discount taught me:

• Incentives amplify interest – they don't create it

• Your network gives you the start, strangers give you the truth

• A waitlist number means nothing without knowing who signed up

Why it has to go:

I don't want to build a business on permanent discounts. If Fileo delivers real value – hours saved every month, documents that actually stay organized – it's worth full price.

The first 100 believers get rewarded. Everyone after that pays for the product, not a promotion.

Have you ever used a discount or incentive to grow your waitlist? Did it attract the right people – or just bargain hunters?

Clean_Name is meant to be a free micro tool that eventually feeds users into Fileo. Right now it does one thing: rename a single PDF. No signup. Simple and useful.

My plan was to add more features: higher limits, more file types, bulk uploads. Still free, but with registration. That would turn it into a real product and give me a verified lead pool for Fileo.

But while working on this, I realized I barely touched Fileo all week. Not great.
At the same time, marketing a finished micro product is way easier than marketing an unfinished main product.

So I chose a pragmatic middle path:

I’m not building the new features yet. I'm first testing intent.
When someone clicks "Sign Up", they see a message that these features are coming soon. This tells me whether there’s actual demand before I spend days building.

First traffic. Then intent. Then features.
Until then, full focus on Fileo.

Curious how other builders handle this balance. How do you decide between pushing the main product and developing micro funnels?

Last week I had an idea that wouldn’t let go.

What if I created a super small, super focused tool that solves one tiny piece of the bigger problem I’m working on with Fileo? Something people can use immediately. Something that delivers value in seconds. And something that quietly points them toward the full product.

So I built Clean_Name.
A free AI tool that renames PDFs based on their content.
Drop a file, get a clean, meaningful filename in seconds.

Took me 2 days from idea to launch.
And it is live now at cleanname.io.

It is intentionally tiny.
But it already demonstrates the core of what Fileo does on a much larger scale. It gives people a taste of the document intelligence behind Fileo without asking them to sign up or change workflows.

For me this is a fun experiment.
Can a micro product become an acquisition channel for a bigger SaaS?
Can you compress the essence of your main product into something that ships fast and spreads easily?

Let’s see where this goes. Happy to share the results as they come in.

Curious if anyone else here uses micro tools as part of their marketing strategy.

When you build an OCR-based automation system, there’s a surprisingly tricky question hiding in plain sight:
How do you know if an uploaded image is an actual document — or just a random photo that happens to contain some text?

In Fileo, OCR runs on every upload — it’s the foundation for everything that happens next.
But to avoid wasting resources (and to keep garbage out of the AI pipeline), I needed a way to score how “document-like” a file is after OCR has analyzed it.

⚙️ Multi-Signal Document Detection

The solution: a scoring system that combines multiple signals derived from the OCR output to decide whether something looks like a real document.

1. OCR Confidence (60 pts)
Based on Azure Document Intelligence’s own recognition confidence.
Real documents typically exceed 90 %, while photos with small or distant text drop to the 60–70 % range.

2. Text Coverage (40 pts)
A custom metric: how much of the image area is actually covered by recognized text?
Computed from the word-level bounding polygons (Shoelace formula for quadrilateral area).
This turned out to be a great differentiator between structured layouts (invoices, letters) and arbitrary photos.

Final document score = 0.6 × OCR confidence + 0.4 × text coverage score
Threshold: 45 / 100 → permissive on purpose — better to accept one extra photo than to reject a real invoice.

🧮 Debugging surprise: coordinate systems matter

At first, I assumed Azure returned normalized coordinates (0–1).
Wrong.
PDFs use inches (e.g. 8.5×11"), images use pixels (e.g. 5712×4284).
That mistake produced glorious “3,473,650 % text coverage” results before I fixed the scaling.

📊 Calibration

I tested the system with different document types to find reasonable thresholds:

• Dense text (like book pages): around 49% text coverage → full credit

• Typical documents (invoices, letters): usually 5–15% coverage → accepted

• Photos with small labels or signs: below 1% → rejected

Turns out real documents almost never exceed 50% text coverage — margins, whitespace, and layout make a huge difference.

💡 Key takeaway

False negatives are far worse than false positives.
If Fileo misses a real document, that’s a failure — if it processes a random photo, no harm done.
So the guiding principle is:

When in doubt, process it.

Last week I changed just a few words on my waitlist page (see below) —
and suddenly, signups started coming in again.

The difference?
The week before: 1% conversion
This week: 6%

It’s a small thing, but it says a lot.
🟢 Great copy can really move the needle.
🟢 And there’s genuine demand for what I’m building with Fileo.

At the beginning, most signups came from my personal network — friends, colleagues, people who already knew me.
Now they’re coming from outside that circle. That’s a great sign.

Next step: drive more traffic and keep building Fileo.
Both take time, but seeing real signals like this keeps me going.

---

The change:

Old: "Join the Waitlist" – "Be among the first to experience automated document organization"

New: "First 100 Members Get 33% Off Forever" – "Join the waitlist now to lock in your founder discount"

It started simple: I asked Claude if I could upload files directly from the client to Google Drive.

"Sure, client-side upload works great."

I implemented it.
CORS error.

So I asked again – and now it said:

"Ah, no. That’s tricky, might even not possible. You’ll need to route the upload through your own server."

Alright then. Claude implemented the server-side version.
It worked… but felt clunky and inefficient.

So I rolled everything back and started fresh.
Claude was confident again:

"Client-side should be fine."

Spoiler: it wasn’t.

After hours of back and forth, trial and error, and several "it should work" moments, the real solution came from a 10-year-old Stack Overflow post.

Lesson learned: AI can write code and even debug – but sometimes you still need to be the engineer who knows how to google, reason, and persist.

The result: Fileo can now push PDFs directly into your own Google Drive, no server storage needed. 🚀

Anyone else been through this kind of AI ping-pong lately?

When I started Fileo, I just asked ChatGPT to generate a logo.
It was quick and filled the empty spot on my landing page… but it looked generic and gave me zero brand recognition.

I finally invested in a proper designer. The difference? Huge.
For the first time, Fileo actually feels like a real product.

Lesson learned: even early on, branding matters more than I thought.
It’s not just about looking nice – it changes how others perceive your project (and even how you see it yourself).

If you’re curious, you can see the new logo on fileo.io (or just check my profile picture here 😉).

How do you handle branding in the early days?
DIY, AI tools, or straight to a designer?

After years as a CTO I finally decided to quit and start building my own product.
It’s both exciting and scary – no salary, no safety net, just me and my idea.

I’m working on Fileo, a tool that automatically organizes documents in your cloud storage. But honestly, right now it’s less about features and more about learning how to navigate this new reality as a solo founder.

Curious: how did you handle the shift from leading a team to being on your own?
What was hardest for you in the first months?