philip.jpg

philip.jpg (@pelloiafilippo) is Filippo, a 31-year-old solo founder from Venice, Italy, who quit a dev job in 2025 and now builds in public with an intensity that is hard not to like. This is our independent read of how the account behaves, in numbers. He did not write it, and it is not something he can change by claiming a product.

The play is build-in-public, run as a daily ritual. Every morning opens with "Good morning, builders!" Every week gets a goal list on Monday and a scorecard on Sunday. In between: transparent milestone updates, product build logs, and a constant drip of questions, about 45 percent of his roughly nine posts a day are questions, because questions pull replies. Then the grind underneath it all, around 188 replies a day to the same circle of builders. He does not hide the method; he posted it as a checklist: "engage with my mutuals, leave 15+ replies, reply to everyone who engages, repeat throughout the day. No growth hacks. Just consistency." And it works, in the sense it is designed to: he went from about 300 followers to over 2,700 in roughly a month.

Here is what makes him worth studying rather than just another grinder, and it is a genuinely honest thing: he shows the numbers that most people bury. He posted Focus Valley's seven-week report with nothing hidden, 78 users, 124 sessions, $0 revenue, 8 percent retention, and wrote "the product got better" anyway. That candor is the whole spirit of this site. So we will return it plainly. The growth is real and the work is real, but right now this is a growth story, not a revenue story. Everything he has shipped is free: Focus Valley is on a "$1,000 challenge" he has not reached, CutNoodle is free by design. And the audience he grinds so hard is other builders, the same peer-not-buyer mismatch this directory keeps flagging, sitting on top of products that do not charge yet. Put him next to Tom Otto, who runs the identical reply grind but sells a founder newsletter to the founders he grinds, and the gap is obvious: Tom's audience is his buyer, and he charges. Filippo has built the engine Kamil chases and Leo lacks the product for, and he has the products too. What is missing is the part where money changes hands. The plays are in the panel, and the products are below.