Liftoff Labs: Month 5 - The Month I Debugged My Brand
How I stopped blaming myself for slow growth and started fixing the system.
This is part of the Liftoff Labs series, where I share real-world build-in-public deep dives, playbooks, and solo builder strategy lessons each month.
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🧭 TL;DR (Builder’s Digest)
Problem: Felt stuck and discouraged by slow newsletter growth after months of effort.
Action: Transitioned from focusing on product strategy to brand strategy, and refactored the entire vision for Solo Dev Saturday to be more inclusive.
🧠 Key insight: Realized my core message was valuable, but my narrow framing ("for devs only") was a bug. Finding brand-audience fit is just as important as finding product-market fit.
Solution: Wrote a new welcome post and reframed the newsletter to be inclusive for all builders, while keeping my unique developer's perspective.
Result: A new sense of clarity, energy, a defensible brand strategy and a concrete plan.
Key takeaway: Your brand is a product. Sometimes it needs a refactor.
📊 Time & Tools Breakdown
Estimated hours: ~20 (very low dev time, very high thinking and strategy time)
Primary tools: Gemini (for strategic sparring), Substack, Canva
Major focus: Brand strategy, content planning, and writing the welcome post.
💸 Revenue & Expenses
Expenses this month: $37
mindsetrefactor.com domain to use for a landing page: $12
Still paying Railway $5 to host my backend and database
Paying for Gemini Pro: $20
Revenue: $0 (still not a point where I’m actively selling)
🧱 Builder Playbook: Your Brand is a Product
This month was a turning point.
My growth has been slow for months. I had a period of low activity while building, but lately I’ve been putting in the work, yet seeing minimal growth.
The feeling was brutal.
I had a previous newsletter that grew faster, even though I felt the content was less valuable. I started to believe the problem was me. That maybe I actually had nothing valuable to say.
Instead of just pushing harder, I decided to treat this feeling like a bug.
I started debugging my own brand.
The Situation: I had a newsletter for "solo devs" but my best ideas were universal lessons about mindset and building alone. There was a clear mismatch.
My hypothesis: My narrow positioning was acting as a gate, turning away the very people who might get the most value from the content.
The Action: I decided to stop seeing my developer background as a limitation and start seeing it as my unique lens. The solution wasn't to abandon my identity, but to reframe it. I wrote a new welcome post, "You Don't Need to Be a Developer to Think Like One" which is the cornerstone of a new, broader vision.
The Outcome: This shift has unlocked a new level of clarity and energy. I now have a content strategy that feels both authentic to me and welcoming to everyone. Now it’s time to execute on it, and see if my hypothesis was correct.
🧠 Lessons Learned (and Advice to Past Me)
A stagnant metric is data, not a failure. My slow growth wasn't proof that I was a failure. It was data telling me that my "product" (the brand) had a positioning problem.
A clear "why" makes the "what" easy. Now that the brand vision is clear, coming up with content ideas feels effortless and exciting, not like a chore.
If you feel stuck, change the system, not just your effort. I was trying to solve a strategy problem by working harder. The real solution was to pause and fix the strategy itself.
⏪ What I’d Do Differently
Debugged my brand strategy 3 months ago. I spent too long assuming the problem was my effort level, not my core message.
Understood that "niche" doesn't mean "exclusive." I could have been speaking to a broader audience from day one.
🧰 The Builder's Toolkit (July Edition)
Gemini: Invaluable as a strategic partner for brainstorming, challenging my assumptions, and formalizing my brand vision.
Canva: For creating a consistent visual identity for new social media content.
🧠 Favorite framing from this month: "Is this feeling a bug in me, or a bug in the system I've created?"
🎬 This Month's Top Reels
As part of the new direction, I've started creating short-form video. Here’s the first one I filmed this week. In the future, this section will include the 3 best.
1. My First Reel: Why I'm Really Doing This. A short, honest take on the fear of building in public and the value of documenting the struggle, not just the wins.
📅 What’s Coming in August
✅ Consistently execute the new 3x weekly Reel schedule.
🤝 Focus on outreach and connections.
🧵 Write weekly posts that are aligned with the new direction.
🎯 Execute the new content strategy with consistency.
If I had to summarize August’s goal:
Execute the new vision. Ship content, not just code.
🧑🚀 Final Thought
The most important product you'll ever build is the story you tell about yourself.
This month, I shipped a new version.
Until next time, stay steady and keep building 🧱
— Rasmus