Guest post by Andrei — Founder of ListifyAI
Most startup founder stories start the same way. Someone quits their corporate job, raises a seed round, moves to San Francisco. Mine starts with a wire stripper in one hand and a laptop open on the passenger seat of my van.
I’m an electrician. I still am. Every weekday I’m on building sites in London, running cables, fitting consumer units, doing the kind of work where if you get it wrong, something catches fire. In the evenings and on weekends, I’m building ListifyAI — an AI tool that helps Etsy sellers write better listings in seconds.
These two things coexist more naturally than you’d think. And the biggest marketing lesson I’ve learned didn’t come from a business book or a startup podcast. It came from sitting in my van during lunch breaks, reading Reddit threads.
The problem I kept seeing
I’d been selling on Etsy myself for a while — nothing dramatic, a side income — and I kept running into the same wall every other seller talked about. You make the product. You take the photos. Then you sit down to write the listing and your brain goes blank.
What do you even say? Which keywords matter? What does a buyer actually search for when they want your specific thing?
I’d spent hours researching this. Eventually I thought: someone should just build a tool for this. Then I thought: why isn’t that someone me?
So I built a first version on Bubble.io — a no-code platform — launched it, got some early users, started learning what people actually needed.
The reddit revelation
Here’s where things got interesting, and where I think most founders make a critical mistake.
I started doing what I now think of as “Reddit research.” Not posting. Not promoting. Just reading.
I spent weeks going through r/Etsy, r/EtsySellers, r/smallbusiness — hundreds of threads, thousands of comments. I wasn’t looking for feature requests. I was listening for language. The exact words frustrated sellers used when describing their problems.
What I found surprised me.
Sellers didn’t say “I need help with SEO optimisation.” They said things like: “I have no idea what tags to use,” or “I spend three hours writing one listing and it still doesn’t feel right,” or “I just need someone to tell me what to type.”
That last one stopped me cold. I just need someone to tell me what to type.
That’s not a feature request. That’s a human being describing their exact emotional state at the moment of maximum frustration. And it told me everything about how to position the product, what to say on the landing page, what the CTA should be.
I rewrote the entire homepage using the language I’d collected from Reddit. No invented marketing speak. Just their words, reflected back.
Conversion rate went up 4x.
I didn’t change the product. I changed nothing except using the language real people actually used — language I found by listening before I ever opened my mouth.
When to rewire vs when to rebuild
After about a year on Bubble.io, I hit a ceiling. The platform couldn’t do what the product needed to do. Every feature I wanted to add required three workarounds. Users were complaining about speed. I was shipping slower and slower.
Here’s the decision I faced: do I keep patching, or do I rebuild from scratch?
In electrical work, this question comes up constantly. Sometimes a house just needs a few circuits updated. Sometimes you pull back the plasterboard and realise the entire wiring is 1970s aluminium that’s been deteriorating for decades, and the only honest answer is: this needs to come out and be redone properly.
The second answer is harder to give a client. It costs more, takes longer, causes more disruption. But the alternative is patching problems that will keep coming back, or worse, waiting for something to actually fail.
I rebuilt ListifyAI from scratch on Next.js. Took months. During that time I couldn’t ship new features — I was heads-down rebuilding foundations. But when I came out the other side, everything was faster, more reliable, and I could build features in hours that used to take weeks.
The lesson I keep coming back to: the courage to rebuild is not the same as giving up. Sometimes it’s the most forward-thinking thing you can do.
Building a business that fits your life (not the other way around)
The thing nobody tells you about building a product while working a trade is that the constraints actually help.
I can’t work on ListifyAI from 7am to 7pm. I have sites to be on. I have customers who need the lights to work. So the time I do have — evenings, early mornings, weekends — has to count.
This forced a clarity I’m not sure I’d have otherwise. I can’t spend three hours in a meeting. I can’t get lost in Notion planning systems that never become action. Every session I sit down, I have to ship something. Document something. Improve something. Otherwise the day is lost.
I also can’t do things that don’t scale. Which is why the Reddit research approach was so powerful for me — one afternoon of reading generated months of better messaging. I couldn’t afford the inefficient version.
What I’ve found is that building a business that suits who you are isn’t a soft, motivational concept. It’s a practical one. If you’re an introvert who hates cold calls, build your acquisition around content. If you have two hours a day, build systems that compound over time rather than requiring daily heroics. If you think in problems rather than features, talk to your users obsessively before you build anything.
The business that fits your personality is the one you’ll actually keep showing up for when it gets hard.
What I’d tell someone starting out
If you’re building something on the side — whether it’s a product, a service, a creative business — here’s what I’d compress into a few sentences:
Listen before you speak. Before you write a single word of marketing, spend time in the communities where your potential customers already are. Not to sell. To understand how they describe their own problems.
Use their language, not yours. The words your customers use about their problems are almost always better than the words you’d invent. Find those words. Use them.
Build for the life you have. Don’t design a business that requires you to become a different person. Work with your actual schedule, your actual energy levels, your actual strengths.
Know when to rebuild. Patching a bad foundation is always more expensive in the long run. The hard decision early is usually the kind decision later.
Today, ListifyAI is used by thousands of Etsy sellers across the UK, US, and Australia. I still run electrical jobs during the week. I still read Reddit on my lunch break — though now I’m watching what sellers say about the tool rather than just the problem it solves.
The van’s a bit messier than it used to be. There’s usually a laptop and a notepad next to the cable drums. But that’s the business. It fits in the van. It fits in my life.
That was always the plan.
Andrei is the founder of ListifyAI, an AI-powered tool that helps Etsy sellers generate optimised titles, tags and descriptions in seconds. He’s based in London and splits his time between building sites and building software.
