2012–2024: When the money arrived

At some point in the late 2010s, a new line item appeared in my monthly costs: money paid to Google so that people searching for the name of my own product would find my product. It started small. By 2023 it had peaked at €500 a month.

I want to make sure the mechanics of this land, because it sounds too absurd to be literal. Competitors had begun bidding on the keyword “webtranslateit.” Nobody typing that word into a search box was an undecided buyer weighing options. They were my customers trying to reach the login page, or someone a customer had told, use WebTranslateIt, it’s good. The ads sat above my own result, dressed as answers. My choice was to outbid them on my own name or watch some percentage of people click the top link without reading it. So I paid — an escalating monthly fee, for years, for the right to be found by people who were already looking for me. The bidding on my name grew fiercest not in the boom, but in 2023, when the category itself had started to shrink.

Google, of course, collected from both sides. The competitor paid to ambush; I paid to defend; the auction house took every check. I eventually looked into owning my name in the one place I could — the trademark registers — and got a lesson in how even that is priced. €200 for France, ten years. Each additional territory, €200 to €1,000. Worldwide protection: roughly twenty thousand euros, which I could not afford. So I chose three territories and left the rest of the planet legally open. Keeping the name I had built was not a right. It was a subscription.

The money arrives

It didn’t happen in one day. Around 2012 — the same year GitHub, my existence proof, took its first venture round — capital discovered localization. The logic was sound, from capital’s point of view: every startup was going international, continuous deployment had made spreadsheet-emailing untenable, and a whole industry needed workflow software with recurring revenue. That is the kind of sentence that raises funds. And so it did, at company after company, in rounds that grew from millions to tens of millions.

The tone of my inbox changed with it. In 2010, competitors wrote about craft and collaboration. By late 2012, a funded competitor was writing to inform me of plans to take 80% of the entire market on the strength of a huge new funding round. Read the shape of that claim slowly, because everything about the next decade is inside it. Not we’ve built something better. Not customers prefer us. The claim was: we have money, therefore we will take the market. In the world of 2010, that sentence would have been a non sequitur — funding didn’t parse translation files or keep servers up. In the world it announced, it was simply an accurate description of the new rules.

None of these companies needed to be profitable. That is not a criticism; it is a description of the strategy. Venture-funded SaaS in that decade was priced on growth, and growth could be purchased: hire content teams to carpet-bomb search results, build fifty integrations, hire enterprise salespeople, and buy every click in the category at a loss, because the loss was the investors’ problem.

Here is what that does to an auction. Google Ads doesn’t price a keyword at what a customer is worth. It prices it at what the most subsidized bidder will pay. When your competitors’ cost of capital is a term sheet and yours is your own bank account, the clearing price rises past the point where a profitable business can participate. I ran the numbers more times than I want to admit, and they always said the same thing: at these prices, every customer acquired through ads would cost more than they’d ever pay me. People describe this period of SaaS as competitive. It wasn’t competition in any sense I’d recognize. Before, we both shipped and customers judged the results. Now the contest was over which balance sheet could absorb losses longer, and I had entered it needing to make money.

I made one strategic decision in response, early, in writing, in a family email. The obvious counter-move to subsidized competitors was to cut prices. I refused, and my reasoning, verbatim from 2012: there are two kinds of customers — those who buy on price, and those who buy on the quality of a product, whatever it costs. Mine were the second kind. The low-cost clients who found fourteen euros a month too expensive, I preferred to let go to the competition. It reads almost quaint now. It turned out to be one of the most consequential decisions of the eighteen years: it’s why the customers who stayed were the ones worth keeping, why the revenue survived everything that followed, and why the business never entered the race to the bottom that subsidy always wins.

Winning the wrong game

The strange part — the part that took me years to see clearly — is that through all of this, I was still winning the old game. The product held up. Customers who left for a shinier funded competitor had a habit of coming back after the first serious import job or the first support ticket that went unanswered for a week. Churn stayed low. By 2021, WebTranslateIt was doing about €25,000 a month, the best it had ever done, without a single ad click I didn’t overpay for.

By every metric I had been raised on as a developer, this was success. And I was exhausted in a way I couldn’t explain.

Life, meanwhile, had not waited for the market to become fair. My daughter was born in 2015, my son in 2019 — squarely in the middle of these years, so that all of it was happening to a man who was also becoming a father twice over. The business was the only income under a family of four.

I understand the exhaustion better now. Peak revenue meant peak everything: every sale was also me doing the onboarding, the support, the roadmap that competitors with forty employees were mining for ideas. But underneath the workload was something more corrosive: the growing knowledge that effort and outcome had come apart. Early on, working harder made the product better and the better product won. By the late 2010s, I could work as hard as I wanted — the channels were owned, the auctions were priced by other people’s investors, and the category’s story was being written by whoever had the largest content budget. There is a particular kind of tiredness that comes from playing a game well after the game has stopped mattering. I had it for years before I could name it.

Two exits had presented themselves along the way — the customer’s offer in 2010, and in early 2012 a call with the best-funded company in my category, whose CEO a customer of mine had vouched for, and where the opportunity on the table turned out to be an acquihire: fold the product, join the winner, take the badge. He was pleasant, exactly as advertised, and then, in the least dramatic ending imaginable, neither of us followed through. (Of all the emails competitors ever sent me, the one I answered was the one that arrived carrying a trusted person’s word-of-mouth.) I stayed where I was, for reasons that felt obvious at the time and got harder to reconstruct as the decade wore on: the product was mine, the revenue was real, and I had won every contest I could see. At the peak, keeping WTI looked shrewd. Around 2021, drained and boxed in, it looked like vanity.

Force majeure

On a morning in late February 2022, about a thousand euros of my monthly revenue ceased to exist. Nobody churned. Nobody was unhappy. Russia had invaded Ukraine, the sanctions came down, the payment networks suspended operations, and every Russian software company paying for WebTranslateIt was cut off from Western payment rails between one billing cycle and the next. These were good customers, some subscribers for years. They didn’t leave; the world’s plumbing was shut off between us. There was no counter-move. Four to five percent of my revenue, deleted by geopolitics, in a week. And I want to be careful with proportion: I lost a line item; my Russian customers lost their connection to the world’s software economy; Ukrainians were losing their homes and lives.

Nine months later, ChatGPT launched, and the ground under the entire category began to move. Translation management systems existed to orchestrate an expensive, scarce resource: human translators. Then a general-purpose AI started producing translations at near-human quality for pennies, and the assumption dissolved. Not the whole product — software still needs string management, versioning, context, deploy integration — but the spend flowing through the category began to deflate. The funded competitors saw it too: their marketing pivoted almost overnight from “manage your translators” to “govern your AI,” now selling the cost collapse itself.

And 2023 — the year the pie visibly began to shrink — is the year I chose to push for growth. I had never really stopped believing the old rules deep down: work harder, build better, and it comes back to you. I hired help — a British developer, and I loved how I found him: he was a WebTranslateIt user. I spent fifty thousand on him, and together we did something unglamorous and vital: migrated WTI across a decade of framework history, from Rails 3 to Rails 7. A sixteen-year-old codebase came out the other side modern, securable, maintainable. That was the part of the plan that worked.

The growth part hit the wall at full speed. The auctions were more impossible than ever — this was the year the bidding on my own name peaked. A decade of venture-funded content teams owned every search result that mattered. And beneath both, the AI deflation meant I was trying to grow into a market that was contracting. I ran campaign after campaign into that configuration. Nothing converted, and every flat month read, from the inside, not as the structure is unwinnable but as I am failing. Structural walls are invisible from inside. You cannot see the subsidy behind the auction price or the decade behind the search ranking; you can only see your own effort going in and nothing coming out. And a builder who has spent his whole life on the equation effort makes things better will conclude, wrongly, that the broken variable is himself.

It cost me at home, too, more than I’ll detail here. My wife was working on WebTranslateIt with me then — marketing, accounting — which meant the stalling numbers weren’t something I could leave at the office; they sat down to dinner with us. We were two people absorbing a market failure as if it were each other’s. We came through it, and part of how we came through it is the rest of this story. But 2023 asked a price from the person standing closest to me, and I want that on the record.

Fuck it

The turn, when it came, didn’t feel like wisdom. It felt like profanity. At some point in 2023 I looked at the whole board at once — the ransom on my own name, the auctions priced by other people’s investors, the category deflating under everyone’s feet, the campaigns converting nothing, the tension at home — and something in me said, with great clarity and no elegance: fuck it.

Fuck the growth fight. Not the product — the product was good, newly modernized, loved by the customers who had it. But the fight for new customers was being fought with weapons I would never own, over territory that was shrinking anyway, at a price being paid by my health and my marriage. I stopped bidding. I stopped campaigning.

It wasn’t surrender — nobody took anything. The customers stayed, because the file handlers still worked and the support emails still got answered fast. The revenue stayed, easing rather than collapsing. What I gave up was the fight for growth, which I can now say with the confidence of hindsight and arithmetic was unwinnable at any level of effort, by anyone in my position, in that year. What I kept was a profitable product, a modernized codebase, eighteen years of hard-won judgment, a repaired marriage, and — for the first time in years — attention.

The first place I pointed that attention was not at a business. It was at myself. Somewhere in those years I had stopped being a person with a body and become a support queue with legs, and the withdrawal made room to reverse that: a coach once a week, training three times a week; fast hikes in the mountains above Málaga; sleep treated as infrastructure instead of leftover. The energy that built everything that came after was manufactured in those months. I got so far into it that for a while I seriously considered making fitness YouTube videos my next act. I’m glad I didn’t — the world needed another mid-forties European explaining protein timing like it needed another translation management system — but I note it because it shows how genuinely open the question was.

When the search sobered up, I pointed it at a question I hadn’t seriously asked since 2008: if I were choosing a market today, knowing everything the last decade taught me — what would it need to look like? The answer was very specific. No ad auctions, because auctions are won by subsidy. No search-ranked distribution, because content compounds for the funded. A market that buys on trust and relationships, because trust cannot be outbid. Deep integrations and switching costs, because easy-in had proven to mean easy-out. Boring, unsexy, invisible to venture capital. And ideally, powered by the very technology that had deflated my first category — because if AI was going to dissolve markets, I wanted to be on the side of it, in a place where it created value instead of destroying mine.

I did not know it yet, but I had just written the specification for a container full of blueberries.

Blackheath, London, 20 August 2026.

In this series
← 2007–2012: Building it
2024–2026: Starting again →