Hey,

Elvis here. For most of you, it's been over a year since my last email about "How I Used AI Agents to Scale PressPulse to $10k/mo in 6 Months”, or my last post on Twitter.

You probably wondered where I went. (ok let's be honest no one cares.)

But here I am, January 2026, with a story I need to tell.

The short version: I scaled PressPulse to $17k/mo at its peak, realized I was building the wrong business, watched part of it crumble when big changes happened to HARO, and decided to start over in 2026 now after celebrating baby #2.

The long version is more interesting.

What Actually Happened

In early 2025, I stepped back from everything.

My wife was in a high-risk pregnancy with our second child, and I had a 3-year-old who needed his dad around. In September 2025, our baby boy arrived. It wasn't the right time to be grinding on a new launch.

During the year, I had a lot of time to think:

About what kind of business I actually want to build. About what kind of life I want to live. About all the mistakes I made getting PressPulse to where it was - and why hitting $17k/mo still felt like I was losing.

Here's what I realized:

I was building the wrong business.

The 4 Mistakes That Cost Me

Mistake 1: Platform Dependency Will Kill You

In November 2023, I launched PressPulse.ai. Throughout 2024, I sent 200k+ cold emails to scale it to $17k/mo.

The quick growth came from building a tool for an existing audience—people who already use HARO.

Smart, right?

Until HARO decided to shut down. (kind of, then it got bought out and revived)

Even though we've already diversified with other platforms, we still lost ~10% of our MRR overnight and more in the following month. One decision by a company I had zero control over nearly tanked everything.

Lesson: Never build your castle on someone else's land.

Mistake 2: Never Bootstrap a Two-Sided Marketplace

To save the business after HARO died, I shipped a two-sided marketplace to fill the void.

I thought I had 5,000 people on one side already. Recruiting the other side would be easy.

Wrong.

The market proved I knew nothing about the other audience (journalists). Selling to journalists required lots of networking I didn't have time for. The project demanded full-time hustle and probably VC money, and I was a part-time builder bootstrapping with kids to feed.

Rob Walling warned about this—two-sided marketplaces are brutal for bootstrapped founders. I learned it the hard way. (He did say in his book this doesn't apply if you have one side, but I probably underestimated the word had)

Mistake 3: Building a Business You Don't Enjoy

PressPulse was a mixture of SaaS + agency.

At the time I had two agencies running - the PressPulse agency building HARO links for clients, and a cold email agency. Both had steady leads. Both made money.

But as they grew, I became a manager. Overseeing work. Chasing clients. Making sure everyone was happy.

The more I did it, the more I hated it.

I love writing software. I don't love managing people. And both agencies were trading my time for money - at a worse rate than my $300k/yr developer job.

If your side project pays less per hour than your day job and feels like a second job you dread, it's the wrong project.

The agency + SaaS model is great for bootstrapped founders, but trying to expand the agency beyond the 1-2 core people I enjoyed working with was a huge mistake.

Mistake 4: Solving Too Small of a Problem

This might be the biggest lesson of all.

One of my main goals is replacing my income from my $300k/yr developer job so I have more freedom.

But if the ceiling of your business is too low, you'll never get there.

A niche SaaS sounds smart until you realize there aren't enough customers in the world to hit your target. You've built yourself a cage with a very low ceiling. (I saw this way too much on Twitter - screenshot extension, habit tracker, boilerplates)

Here's what I've learned: solving a hard problem might feel 2x as hard, but the reward is 100x.

And now in 2026, with an army of Claude Code + Codex + Gemini agents, the ceiling of what a solo founder can build just exploded. The same person who could only build a small tool two years ago can now build something that competes with well-funded startups.

The question isn't "what's easy to build?" anymore. It's "what's worth building?"

How to choose the right project to work on

After all those mistakes, here's the framework I'm using now:

1. Focus on skills first. Every project should either make money or teach you something valuable. Ideally both.

2. Find a big enough market. Don't solve a $1k/mo problem when you need $20k/mo. Estimate the ceiling before you start building.

3. Remove as much risk as possible. Platform dependency, legal risk, regulatory risk - cut as much as you can. Enterprise value is profit times longevity. If it won't last, don't bother.

4. Play the long game. Find a business where you can win slowly. Something you can chip away at daily without needing a full-time sprint to get off the ground.

5. Accumulate assets, not hours. MRR. Skills. Audience. Content. Things that compound over time instead of resetting every month.

A good example is ScreenshotOne, built solo by Dmytro Krasun, currently at $20k+ MRR.

It's a simple API for website screenshots. Big enough market (web scraping). Low maintenance. Stacks MRR without daily babysitting. Customers can stay for years.

No platform dependency. No two-sided marketplace dynamics. No trading time for money.

Just a slow-burn winner.

What's Next

PressPulse is still alive, but I've been working on something new for the past few months.

In 2026, I'm applying everything I learned to scale a new SaaS to $10k MRR - and sharing what I learn in the trenches with you. There’s some interesting stuff in the pipeline for you as well.

I'm also doing a little rebranding to “Elvis’s Newsletter”. It’ll no longer be about just cold emails but all the tech entrepreneurship stuff I'm figuring out as I go. (But I'll surely be sending lots of cold emails)

No agenda. No schedule. Just a place for my longer-form thoughts on building businesses as a solo founder. Things that I wish my younger self knew.

If you want to follow along on the behind-the-scenes of how I build and grow my next project (hint: it's launching soon), stick around.

Or unsubscribe if you don't. Whatever works.

Talk soon,

Elvis

p.s. I also reworked the website for this newsletter. You can find all the past issues here. (and there's a fun easter egg with the opportunity to earn a free backlink)