Orel Zilberman told his boss he was quitting in August 2023, and two days later he was jobless with no plan. His first year solo followed one belief: ship as many products as fast as possible until something hits. He built more than ten SaaS products, a Unity game, and a mobile app, and posted daily on LinkedIn and X. The result was zero dollars and fewer than thirty non-paying users. The problem, he later admitted, was that he built in isolation. No direction, no feedback, no sense of what was working.

Around 600 days in, having spent close to $70,000 and earned nothing, he hit another burnout and considered going back to a job. A tweet from Tibo, the maker of Taplio and TweetHunter, got him thinking: if those tools worked so well for LinkedIn and X, why was nobody building the same thing for Substack? He gave himself a hard rule. Build one product for six months, and if it did not work, he would quit and look for a job.

WriteStack started life as a personalized Substack article outliner, first called ArticleGenerate, then WriteRoom. He spent almost a month building something sophisticated before doing what he had always skipped: asking users for feedback. Nobody actually struggled to write articles, they struggled to find time. But the same conversations surfaced a real pain, staying consistent with Substack Notes. So he pivoted the whole product toward generating and scheduling Notes. On April 6, 2025 he took his first ever payment, from a creator named Kacper Wojaczek.

Growth came almost entirely from DMs. He sent as many honest messages as he could every day, never pitching, just talking to creators and helping where he could. That trust turned into subscribers. A live Zoom call with Michael Simmons exposed how rough the UX still was, so he stopped adding features and spent his energy fixing bugs and confusing flows instead. By his second-year mark in August 2025 he had close to 70 paying subscribers and about a week between bug reports.

Over the following year, organic Substack discovery, Google traffic, and his own building-in-public posts pushed WriteStack to more than 360 paying customers and roughly $9,300 in monthly recurring revenue by May 2026, when he publicly reported the product was running at $110,000 a year. He had also dropped every other social platform to focus on Substack, the same platform his product served.