Yes, I quit BlackTwist.

I also:

• broke my 508-day posting streak on Threads
• sold my 50% stake in the project
• and stepped down as a co-founder.

Here’s my life update.

TL;DR: It was one of the hardest decisions of my life, but I came to it with peace of mind 💜

I’ll be honest with you.

This journey almost made me burn out twice over the past 9-10 months.

And since I know what it feels like to be there, I had to remove myself from the equation before it was too late.

But first, let me share a few words on why I disappeared.

I broke a 508-day posting streak

If you’ve followed me for a while, you know I’ve always been the guy telling people consistency is everything.

For a long time, I posted once or twice a day, maybe half an hour engaging with people, then I’d close the app and move on without even checking the numbers.

Threads felt like a breath of fresh air.

The journey okay-ish. (Low stakes are fine when you’re not asking much of them…)

Then, in January, I wanted to prove I could be credible in this space if I put real effort into analyzing / planning / iterating instead of just “posting & hoping.”

Being known there made sense on paper. I co-founded BlackTwist, a scheduling and analytics tool built for Threads creators, so building a proper presence on Threads was basically part of the job.

And it worked! Looking at the chart, you can really tell when things switched for good.

What I underestimated was the cost…

Writing in batches to keep up both quality and quantity ate a huge chunk of my weekends. And once the content got better, so did the engagement, which meant hundreds of comments to read and answer every day.

Between a demanding full-time job and a startup to grow, my personal time shrank.

I stayed up late to finish work I hadn’t gotten to during the day. I stopped taking time off. I kept telling myself it was temporary but struggled to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

To keep my head above water, I cut down to one recycled post a day for about two months, without engagement, figuring a lighter version of the same routine would be enough.

(Incredibly, nothing broke and BlackTwist didn’t lose its edge)

However, the damage was done. My mental energy had already dried up, and at some point, I had to admit I was the one keeping myself on that treadmill, which meant I was also the only one who could call myself out of it.

And since I couldn’t justify the ROI anymore, I stopped.

I went AWOL.

508 days of posting in a row, “gone.”

Quitting BlackTwist and selling my 50% stake

A few years ago, a severe burnout knocked me out of the game for a while.

It took me almost a year and a half to bounce back and build 2 SaaS products from scratch (one was shut down, the other is BlackTwist, which I co-founded with my friend Luca).

Financially, though, it was a stretch. I tried different things to stay afloat, but nothing really picked up, and money got tight enough to keep me up at night.

I was about to launch yet another project when a post about my “failures” went viral. A guy saw it, offered me a job, and just like that I could breathe again.

The next 6 months were superb on all fronts. New challenges, BlackTwist growing from $700 to $2.5k MRR, the idea of building a team to scale, traveling again after two years…

For the first time in a long time, I went back to living instead of barely surviving.

At some point, I thought I had made it.

I thought I was on top of the game, that I could juggle between the two “easily.”

Yet, that peace didn’t last.

As my commitment to the company grew, so did my responsibilities, which meant longer hours at work while building on the side with a co-founder.

Two demanding things running in parallel. More nights up.

(I couldn’t see it back then, but I was burning the candle at both ends.)

Working with someone else means you have to think and behave like a team, plan ahead, and make time to review the work, especially when you’re remote and async like we were.

You cannot just disappear when you are tired or have had a bad day. Someone is “waiting” for you out there.

So I kept pushing and showing up, even when it meant running on really low capacity, hoping that sooner or later everything would line up.

That’s co-founder life, I get it.

Then early 2026 came, BlackTwist hit real headwinds, and the temperature rose to levels I’d never handled before.

In a couple of months, we’d lost some of the advantages that came with being first to market, a partner who used to help with distribution left to build a competing product instead, and new players showed up and undercut us on price.

None of it was catastrophic on its own, but together, well…

Growth flattened out, and the plateau made us anxious to move faster (sometimes a bit too anxious, sometimes a bit too fast).

And we started drifting.

New ideas, new features, new directions, often before the previous ones had a chance to land.

See, I’m someone who needs a plan and some predictability of what’s next. At least a little bit. Throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks is not really my style, let alone when there’s not much left in the tank.

Marketing had always been my lane. My day job capped how much I could give, so I was heads-down on the one channel I had bandwidth for.

(The Threads push was my growth lever for BlackTwist.)

Meanwhile, more and more experiments popped up in my area.

We didn’t always see eye to eye on what they should look like, and every new one was one more thing to keep up with and make sense of.

I spent more time reacting and catching up than getting anywhere.

Week after week, it piled up.

I tried to build toward something sustainable, but some days I felt like dropping everything.

I was tired of the plan changes, of agreeing on a direction and then watching it shift, of the pressure that comes with building something alongside someone else when your rhythms don’t match and nobody planned for that friction.

The weight I carried with me every single day, the constant thinking, was wearing me down.

I was running on fumes, on a road I’d already traveled once.

So I did the hardest thing.

I told Luca I couldn’t go on like this.

We had two different visions for BlackTwist, and I didn’t have the time or the energy left to make them fit.

I couldn’t keep giving BlackTwist what it needed, not at the pace either of us wanted. That’s on me as much as anything else in this story, and I’d rather own it than dance around it.

(I have huge respect for people who can balance a full-time job and their startup.)

We agreed on a buyout, and I stepped down as a co-founder.

…

Walking away from something you built from zero feels weird.

It took me months to accept it (and to finally write about it), but I closed the circle, and that’s what matters. I know I gave my everything, which is why I’m super proud of what we created.

Together, we took BlackTwist from 0 to 5000 users and $2.5k MRR, had a lot of fun along the way, and met plenty of cool creators out there.

Being part of such a great duo has been a marvelous experience I’ll bring with me onward.

And I’m cheering Luca on from the sidelines now.

BlackTwist is in good hands.

Where does that leave me?

Posting less, for sure.

I’m in no rush to find the next adventure, and spending time on social platforms is not my priority right now.

I need to rest and reset. I’d rather figure out what a sustainable version of all this looks like, slowly, than burn myself out proving a point nobody asked me to prove.

But I’ll be back.

Just wanted to let you know I’m okay.

Truly yours,
Mattia ✌️

PS: If you’re on your own treadmill right now, chasing a streak or a number that costs you more than it’s giving back, this is your permission to get off it. You’re allowed to. (Nothing bad happened when I did, and I started sleeping again.)