I told myself I wasn't ready to monetize even with D30 retention at 50%... but the thing that wasn't ready was me.
Early signals of PMF are already here.
A user drew fan art of our companion on week 2 purely based off her imagination. Another sends him a good morning text. Every single day.
But I never took that leap to test monetisation, until last night.
I signed up for the Codex x Stripe event because I wanted to be in a room full of engineers with a two-hour build window.
Just to stop letting myself off the hook and build out Maibel's payment integrations.
I walked in thinking I was there to observe and learn.
I walked out having built live under time pressure for the first time.
Dobby running ops, Codex open through VS Code to monitor my CLI, two portable screens for my staging environment, GCP secrets, Cloud Run, Supabase config... all in play.
Payment gating on Telegram is a whole access control layer for individual users, with separate permission states.
Combine that with the constraint that our companion cannot be the one to enforce the gate.
He doesn't do pricing conversations. The architecture has to protect the relationship even when access changes.
(TLDR; it's not just a simple button config.)
When we hit the time limit, my integration was still broken.
My builds were green, secrets were in, but Telegram's stale callback kept blocking the end-to-end test every time I tried to validate the flow.
I had confidently (naively, perhaps) volunteered to present. I even wrote my name down on the board.
But as the demos went on, the flow kept breaking at the final step.
Time was running out. I told myself it was fine - if it wasn't ready, I didn't have to demo.
Then Gabriel looked up one final time: "Anyone else have anything cool to share?"
My hand shot up. I don't fully know why.
My heart was palpitating as I fumbled to get my screen share set up.
🇸🇬 Yong Quan Tan sitting next to me gave me the assist I needed and urged me to share.
So I did.
In a room of 40 builders (only 3 of us women), I demoed Maibel live for the first time.
The lore behind Evren's selfies. His macro tracking abilities. The interactive story paths users unlock when users complete habit missions.
An ending flow I had spent so much time refining, linked up to the Stripe payment feature.
When I finally exhaled, I was buzzing.
Then Anton started wrapping up and through all the noise in my head, I almost missed him say my name.
I had won.
As he handed me my prize, he told me I had built something women needed. That he saw the niche.
But the swag and $1k in Stripe credits weren't what I came for.
I wanted to show up when I didn't feel like it. To build live when I wasn't ready. To raise my hand despite the fear.
Payment integration for Maibel, shipped on staging in a single night. Going live.
My word for this year is audacity. I chose it deliberately.
I used to think readiness was a feeling.
Last night taught me it's a decision.
Hi, I’m Mabel.
I’m the founder of Maibel. I write about emotional AI, women’s wellness and learning to build the things I wish existed.
More about me