What I'm doing now
Updated · Luxembourg / Rome
A living snapshot of what I'm building, creating, and learning right now — updated whenever my focus genuinely changes.
Building
Kikko
The whole focus right now. AI family assistant for schedules and school communication — on the web since July, on the App Store since September 14. Both halves are live, which means building is no longer the bottleneck: getting it in front of parents is. So this stretch is a distribution week, not a feature week. Store-page wording, the search phrases a parent actually types, and conversations with the families already using it.
PairHabit
On the App Store. A couples habit tracker with shared micro-habits and reward stakes. Still the product I have launched the most, and deliberately not the one getting this stretch. A parent will type "school email calendar" into a search box; a couple does not type the reason they would install a habit app. Easier words first, then the same lesson comes back here.
Starvling
Closed on September 22. Launched September 8 as a launch directory where every listed product was a pixel creature losing HP around the clock, kept alive only by free daily feeds from real people. I wrote the kill rule before launch: a decision date and the numbers that would make me stop. It came in at 297 feeds, all fifteen listings had starved by September 16, and not one person paid. So the rule fired and I stopped. The site stays up — directory, graveyard, every tombstone — and I spent the next two weeks publishing the teardown instead of quietly deleting it.
Fatto
The landing page is live and the waitlist is open. Waiting its turn — Kikko gets this stretch.
Creating
Second-Act Builders
The Substack newsletter for 40+ professionals building AI products alongside careers and families. Field reports, playbooks, honest numbers — every other Thursday.
Building in public
Daily progress on X (@LucaCaponeX), plus LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, and Reddit. The Starvling teardown ran there for two weeks with the numbers attached — the failure got the same airtime the launch did.
Field Notes
Evergreen notes on this site answering the questions second-act builders actually search for.
Learning
Distribution — the skill I never built
I can ship a product in a weekend. I had no idea how to get one found, and after nineteen months of building I stopped pretending that was a scheduling problem. It's a different skill and I never practised it. Kikko is where I'm practising: SEO, store-page vocabulary, and a weekly routine instead of a launch-day push. I'd already worked through the marketing books and the YouTube channels that hold up, and built my own marketing agency out of them — this is the part where I finally run those playbooks against my own products.
Kill rules, and when to stop
Starvling was the first thing I shipped with its stopping condition written down in advance. Writing it took ten minutes in August; on decision day it turned what could have been an argument with myself into arithmetic. The surprise is that the hard part isn't the launch — it's deciding beforehand what result would make you walk away, while you still like the idea.
Deeper agentic workflows with Claude Code
Skills, subagents, and scheduled automation to ship faster in two-hour evening windows.
Swift and SwiftUI
Moving new iOS builds native after shipping the first apps with React Native. Getting Kikko's iOS app through review and onto the App Store was the proving ground.
Reading
AI Demystified — Antonio Weiss
Sharpening the mental models behind the tools I use every day.
$100M Offers — Alex Hormozi
How to make offers so good people feel stupid saying no. Applying it to how I package and price my products.
Open to
Fellow second-act builders
If you're 40+ and building in the margins, my inbox is open: hello@lucacapone.io.
Podcast and newsletter collabs
Happy to talk about non-technical founders shipping real software with AI.
Product feedback
Using PairHabit or Kikko? Tell me what's broken and what's working.
This is a now page. If you want the full story behind it, it lands in your inbox every other Thursday.
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