Lama Fi

Filippo Barattini had already built a successful business making money from a manga reading app that accumulated over a million downloads. That app, monetized through ads, was generating $7,000-$8,000 per month in his best months—enough to give him financial runway. But after a few years, he wanted something more meaningful. He co-founded Sturpey, a financial modeling tool for SaaS companies, with two co-founders (splitting equity 55-45 with his co-founder John). Sturpey was doing $500 ARR across 100+ customers at roughly $9.99-$10/month per customer. Yet despite having products in market and customers paying, Filippo noticed a critical blind spot: "Most founders don't know why people are canceling."

Instead of manually emailing churned customers and waiting for responses, Filippo's engineering team built a lightweight solution internally. A simple code snippet on the website would intercept the cancel flow, show a modal, and run a quick survey to understand why customers were leaving. This took just one week to build. "We have a good engineering team," Filippo explained. But packaging that internal tool into a generalizable product for other SaaS founders took longer—roughly 2-3 additional months.

The product itself is elegant: a code snippet installed on a website triggers a confirmation modal with multiple-choice and open-ended questions when a customer tries to cancel. With the same snippet, Lama Fi also enables LTV boosting and upselling by scoring users based on actions (e.g., every time someone posts on Instagram, +5 points; at 50 points, flag as an upsell target). This bundled approach differentiates Lama Fi from competitors like ProfitWell and ChurnZero, which focus primarily on churn analytics.

Lama Fi launched pre-release around 3-4 months before the interview. Filippo had 5 to 10 early users testing the code snippet, with 5 customers actively paying $69/month each—generating $350/month ($4,200 ARR). So far, the tool had collected roughly 20 survey responses from churned customers.

When asked how he was acquiring customers, Filippo was candid: "That's where I suck at quite honestly." He acknowledged that his expertise building and scaling a manga app through app store optimization didn't directly transfer to SaaS. The difference, he noted, is that app stores have structured marketplaces with clear ranking mechanics, while SaaS growth requires a different playbook.

What was working: stickiness. Filippo observed that churn is a persistent problem for any SaaS company—"if you have a SaaS business, you have churn every month, like that's just the name of the game." Once a customer installed the code snippet and started using it, retention was strong because the problem Lama Fi solves is evergreen.

With Sturpey, Filippo had discovered that the second most common cancellation reason was "I don't know how to use it"—a clear onboarding/documentation problem. The team responded by rolling out YouTube explainer videos (one minute each) on key pages. This insight-to-action loop demonstrated the core value of the tool itself: understanding customer problems drives product improvements.

What wasn't working: acquisition. Unlike his manga app, which benefited from app store algorithms and passive discovery, Lama Fi required active outreach and customer education. Filippo admitted this wasn't his strength.

Lama Fi is completely bootstrapped. Filippo and his two co-founders agreed upfront that "neither of us will get anything from the company until it starts making revenue, significant revenue." Filippo's manga app revenue ($7k-$8k/month at peak) gives him the financial cushion to explore without immediate pressure.

The team is small (3 people: Filippo and one engineer in Italy, plus co-founder John in the US) but nimble. They're running both Lama Fi and Sturpey in parallel, essentially in a friendly competition to see which product the market rewards more. The plan is to iterate quickly, validate product-market fit, and see which product scales. When asked if he'd consider selling one of the products, Filippo declined: "We kind of like what we do. We started both of them because we like the problem. And so we enjoy the building process."

At 25 years old, Filippo embodies the scrappy, multi-product founder mindset. He built Lama Fi in months, not years, and is moving fast enough to learn whether churn reduction is a repeatable, scalable market—or just a nice tool for his own use.