Engage.net
Mike Rubini's path to Engage.net was forged in failure. His first startup attempt involved investors who never put pen to paper—no contracts, no written terms, nothing tracked. They claimed to invest about €200,000, but it was all "shady," as Mike admits. "It was just my first rodeo," he explains. When the startup didn't work out, he walked away with hard-won lessons about doing things the right way.
In December 2017, Mike launched Engage.net—an e-commerce competitive intelligence platform. The core idea was simple but powerful: scrape sales data from thousands of online stores and infer insights about what products were selling and trending. This let drop shippers answer the million-dollar question: what should I sell? Mike built it as a pure SaaS product with a freemium model, posting Google Sheets of trending products in Facebook drop shipping communities to attract initial users. He was the sole full-time founder, handling all development himself.
By January 2018, just one month after launch, Engage.net was generating around €600/month in revenue. Mike's growth channel was entirely organic and zero-cost: "I've been posting in Facebook groups and doing other stuff outreach. That's basically free stuff." His first customers came directly from these posts in major drop shipping Facebook groups. He started with a free plan, then moved to trials, then to demos only. His pricing evolved into two tiers: €20/month (the most common) and €97/month.
By the time of this interview (roughly January 2019), Engage.net had scaled to 74 paying customers generating €3,000/month in revenue—a 5x jump in just over a year. Mike was profitable, netting about €300/month, thanks to keeping costs low: just two part-time Filipino contractors doing customer support. However, churn was his biggest problem—a brutal 15% per month. The issue was clear: his low-end market was flooded with newbies who didn't stay. "There are a lot of newbies in the market who are just starting out," Mike explains, "and they don't really need the product."
Realizing the low-end drop shipper market was a leaky bucket, Mike pivoted his strategy upmarket. He removed free plans and trials entirely, shifted focus to enterprise e-commerce brands (the "high end"), and started cold outreach to big companies like Gym Shark and Under Armour. Using Hunter.io to find emails and LinkedIn to identify decision-makers in customer insights and marketing teams, he began reaching out directly to enterprises.
At 27 years old, Mike is all-in on Engage.net, deciding to let his two other bootstrapped companies (Scrapbook.net and FBradar.com) fade. The company is bootstrapped, profitable from day one, and he's hunting for product-market fit in the enterprise segment. His experience taught him a crucial lesson: "Take care of yourself first." The scrappy Facebook group strategy got him to €3k MRR, but enterprises—and better unit economics—are the real prize.
- •By starting with a free/freemium model in high-intent communities (Facebook drop shipping groups), Mike could rapidly validate product-market fit and generate initial revenue ($600 in month one) without paid acquisition costs.
- •The discovery that his low-end market had 15% monthly churn revealed that serving beginners was unsustainable, forcing a strategic pivot upmarket where enterprise customers have higher LTV and retention.
- •Building the product himself as a solo founder and outsourcing only support to low-cost contractors kept burn minimal, allowing the company to reach profitability ($300/month net) while bootstrapped and giving him flexibility to pivot.
- •His deliberate shift from organic community posting to targeted cold outreach using Hunter.io and LinkedIn to identified decision-makers at large e-commerce brands allowed him to move from a saturated low-end market to an underserved enterprise segment.
- 1.Identify a specific high-intent community where your target users already congregate (e.g., Facebook groups, Reddit communities, Discord servers), and post genuine value (e.g., free data, insights, or early product access) to attract initial customers with zero paid acquisition cost.
- 2.Track cohort retention and churn rates by customer segment from day one; if you see unsustainable churn in one segment (like 15% monthly), explicitly decide to deprioritize or exit that segment rather than continuing to serve it.
- 3.Use email finder tools like Hunter.io combined with LinkedIn to build a targeted list of decision-makers in high-value customer segments, then execute systematic cold outreach campaigns to validate whether your product solves problems at enterprise scale.
- 4.Keep your initial operating costs as low as possible by handling core product development yourself and outsourcing only non-core functions (like support) to lower-cost contractors, preserving runway to test multiple go-to-market strategies.
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