I burned $500k of VC money

Do not index

Most of you know me from Tweet Hunter, Taplio, and the $8m acquisition.

Because that's when I gained many followers and started building my portfolio of businesses.

But what a lot of you don’t know is that before that, I had a very different entrepreneurial life.

Before bootstrapping became my whole thing. I raised about €500k for a kids' gaming startup called MagiCats.

Hired 20 people. Poured everything into it. This was THE ONE.

It crashed. Hard. It is the reason I've never raised again.

Now that I have resources, I relaunched it. But it failed. Again.

Here’s everything that happened and what I learnt from it 👇🏼

What happened the first time

MagiCats.io let kids build and share their own games. Think Lego, but for games.

People loved it. Genuinely. Kids were obsessed, parents were impressed, the product looked incredible.

But nobody paid.

We had a microtransaction model: buy gems, unlock skins and different assets.

My conclusion at the time:

An aggressive monetization model clashing with an educational, feel-good product

Team grew faster than revenue

We celebrated downloads instead of dollars

Classic mistakes. Every young entrepreneur has gone through this.

I wrote about the entire experience 1.5 years ago, you can click here to read it.

The second attempt, and the diagnosis falling apart

A few months ago, with resources this time and much better AI tools through Fable 5, I revived it.

This time I specifically fixed what I thought was broken. Stripped out the aggressive microtransactions entirely. One simple $20 license. Lean, fair, exactly what my own analysis said should have worked.

It still failed.

But this time, for different reasons…

What went wrong now?

1 - Audience mismatch.

Almost nobody following me has kids or wants a kids' game.

A big audience means nothing when it's the wrong audience. Distribution only works when it overlaps with your actual buyer.

And my audience is indie hackers trying to build a sustainable business.

2 - AI can build a game. It can't tell you if it's fun.

There are a ton of people vibe-coding games with AI right now. I'd bet 99.9% of them get zero paying users.

Building something people actually enjoy playing requires obsessive attention to tiny details, and no model can validate that for you yet.

Building games is a hobby. I don't think it's a sustainable business anymore, at least not for me.

This led me to do something very close to my heart:

I made the game 100% free!

This was never really about the business the second time around.

It was personal, something I wanted to see through regardless of the outcome.

Once it was clear it wasn't going to work commercially, making it free and hoping some kid gets inspired to build something felt like the right ending.

Play it here if you want: magicats.io. Free.

If your kids want screen time, now you know what to point them at.

This startup is the real reason I'm so vocal about bootstrapping. Not a philosophy I arrived at out of thin air.

I raised money, hired people, and watched something I believed in more than anything I've built collapse.

Reply and tell me👇🏼

Have you ever found yourself being confidently wrong?

Share it with me below. If I think many people will find it valuable, I will share that in next week’s newsletter.

Life of an Indie Maker

No new episode this week, but I have something better- I'd never heard of the guy before, it made my day seeing this.

I want to encourage anyone doing the same.

I will send 1,000 Revid AI credits to anyone doing the same with Revid and replying to this email 👇🏼

Tweet of the week

wow.

Until next week,

Keep building

Tibo 💻

P.S. Always validate your thinking with real market data. Thank me later!