How Elitza Vasileva took own.page to #2 on Product Hunt as a solo founder

Elitza Vasileva builds own.page, a tool for making your own personal page, as a solo founder. On Product Hunt she went up against a big company launching the same day, finished #2, and got over 500 signups in 24 hours and about 2,000 in three weeks.

None of that started with the launch. It started a year earlier, with posts on X that nobody read.

How own.page started

Elitza is from Bulgaria and studied informatics in Austria, both her bachelor's and master's. After her master's she decided against a standard 9 to 5 and wanted to build something of her own.

With a colleague, she joined a university program where you build an idea and pitch it to investors at the end, with pitch decks, financial plans and the other startup basics. That's where own.page began. For her the problem was how little creativity social media allowed. For him it was how hard it was to make a small portfolio or website for yourself.

They made a lot of mistakes. They focused too much on the product, pivoted a few times and even tried physical products, so the whole thing got delayed. They got funding that paid for the first prototype. Last year she and her cofounder split, and she has run it alone since.

X was the biggest amplifier

She started posting seriously about a year ago. At first it felt like talking into the void: she shared updates and nobody was reading them.

She kept going, and she studied what other people were posting: which formats worked and what grabbed attention. Then one post went viral, about 2.4 million views, and it had nothing to do with own.page. Her product was in her bio, and many new people signed up because of it.

She took it as momentum to ride. She promised herself she'd post more often, keep people engaged and push more updates. More people found the product, other sites mentioned it, and she started copying what bigger builders did, like SEO and blog posts.

When a competitor shut down

Then one of the biggest competitors, bento.me, closed after being acquired by Linktree. own.page actually existed before Bento did. Her early mistakes had just slowed it down.

She treated the shutdown as an opening and wrote a blog post on what to do after Bento, comparing the options and making the case for own.page. To date it is the blog post that has brought her the most users, because Bento's users were looking for somewhere to go.

How she launched on Product Hunt

She'd never launched before, so she found a hunter, also through X. His most important tip: you have to get featured, or nothing else counts.

If you don't get featured, then everything is pointless, no matter how many votes you get.

You can't control much of that, she says, except preparing every asset days in advance instead of the night before: visually appealing images and the maker comment written ahead of time. Her launch wasn't featured at first. She contacted Product Hunt and they fixed it.

Timing was the next decision. She and her hunter picked a Monday, because big products usually don't launch then. A big company launched that day anyway. She now thinks that helped, because the competition pushed her harder than she would have pushed herself, even though she didn't take first place.

The launch brought over 500 signups in the first 24 hours and about 2,000 in three weeks. Sales came later, because own.page is freemium and harder to monetize. She was online the whole day and barely slept.

Have strategies who you want to contact, not just blindly launch there and think everything will magically happen.

Community beats a big team

She also tried LinkedIn, reaching out to people from incubators and to founders she already knew. It didn't bring much. What worked was the community she had built on X, and timing: she launched during a hacker residency, knowing the people there would support each other.

So community's the biggest factor, I believe.

If you're a solo founder up against a big team, in her words, you need that community behind you.

Why hacker residencies help solo founders

She only heard about the hacker residency because she was on X. Solo founders build alone, and even with a community online, she missed being with people in person and hearing what they were working on.

At the residency she felt she was among her people: founders who knew the same struggles and spoke the same language. They were at very different stages, from her stage to people at hundreds of thousands in MRR, and she says she could learn something from every one of them and got a lot of feedback on her product. She's going to another one soon, run by Thomas from Uneed.

What she'd do differently

Looking back, her biggest change would be speed. Since going solo, what has helped most is constant experimenting without overthinking it: try cold outreach for a few days, and if it doesn't bring results, move on to SEO or to posting more on X.

When she and her cofounder were both perfectionists, they spent a lot of time on details that probably didn't matter to customers. Talking to customers would have shown them that.

What you think would be nice to have doesn't mean it's the one that actually is what the user needs and what they will actually pay for.

So she'd launch much faster, try things faster and talk to as many people as possible.

How she reverse-engineers viral posts

Part of her inspiration was Eliana, who does very well on X. Elitza studied what Eliana posted, what worked and why. At the time, posts comparing where you started with where you are now (followers, MRR, anything) did especially well. The algorithm has changed since.

She didn't copy the posts. She watched what was going viral and made her own version, because she had her own story.

I have a story to tell which is different from everyone's story.

If you tell that story so it's easy to understand and touches an emotion, she thinks people will follow. That's what she believes happened with her viral post.

Be authentic

Her last piece of advice: even if the biggest account on X tells you what to post, don't do it if it isn't you. Even the posts she drew inspiration from, she made through her own perspective.

People in the end will follow your authenticity and your uniqueness and not, you know, some copycat.