How a travel influencer and an indie hacker launched a voice AI SaaS in two weeks

Travel influencer-turned-indie-hacker Timo Nikolai, 26, knew he could automate simple sales tasks with voice AI. He partnered with software developer Josef Buettgen, 24, to make it happen.

They launched SetterAI just two weeks later and made thousands of dollars in presales. Now, they’re using social media to raise their profile, draw in new customers and grow their MRR.

They took me through their journey so far. 👇

Starting out

Timo: I started my first indie hacking project after leaving an e-commerce startup with lots of employees and overhead.

It's a super simple WhatsApp AI chatbot called Jinni AI. It went viral on TikTok and got like 100,000 users in the first month. Now, it has like 400,000.

I wanted more of a challenge than this simple chatbot for my next SaaS.

Josef: I'm a self-taught coder and decided to go full-time on indie hacking in late 2022.

I spent about a year on a startup without any major results. So I started doing the 12 startups in 12 months challenge. Three or four months in, Timo and I decided to join forces.

Voice AI technology

Timo: I’d worked as an appointment setter while studying. I’d call up sales leads and schedule appointments. After coming across voice AI, I thought, surely we can automate this process?

I'd met Josef at my co-working space and I knew he was a talented programmer. We started work on SetterAI in February 2024.

Two weeks later, we had an MVP and our first paying customer.

Validate before you build

Timo: I validated the idea before I even brought it to Josef. I made a landing page to get a sense of SEO traffic for this keyword. Then I added a waitlist button, a fake product demo video and a “book a demo” button.

I took all these calls to see what people actually wanted.

Next, we set up a proper landing page and got back to those old leads.

We asked customers for $500 refundable deposits to get hold of the product as soon as it dropped. Wait lists and demos are nice but when someone swipes a credit card, you know there's something behind the idea.

Growth hacking via YouTube

Timo: I was a travel influencer on Instagram at university. Still am maybe. I knew that if we could get attention on social media, we could convert those eyeballs into dollars.

We started a Youtube channel for SetterAI immediately and a lot of our leads have come from there.

We filmed a video about our application for Ycombinator, and that led to so many hits on our website. Not sure if it made any sales, but at least it's word of mouth.

Josef: Doing the application so publicly was also very reflective. It helped us to shape what we were working on. It puts you in a place where you really have to think about your business.

Under the hood

Josef: The core of the product is of course the voice AI tech. On top of that, we build integrations for tools like Calendly and Google Calendar.

At first, we wanted to build everything very manually. Just throw something out there to validate, then iterate fast.

But we ended up using some higher-level APIs for the conversational stuff, bringing together voice generation, text generation and transcription.

Learning from the ideal customer

Timo: Our biggest customer sells vacation homes online. He has an established lead generation machine, getting phone numbers and emails through Meta ads.

SetterAI works best for people generating leads like this. People that have say 5,000 plus or 10,000 plus leads coming in, but don't have the capacity to set up a call center. The AI can make thousands of calls simultaneously in different languages.

Josef: So far, SetterAI has made about 21,000 calls.

Growing the business

Timo: We now have a subscription model with a setup fee. The product works much better for them this way, and we can charge much more.

After that, customers buy call credits that expire at the end of the month.

We're thinking of including maintenance contracts so we can charge a little bit more whenever someone needs help.

Maybe we could integrate with WhatsApp to offer an appointment center. That could be an upsell, a cross-sell or maybe a lower-ticket offer to attract new customers.

In general, we charge too little for sure, because the return on investment for businesses is insane. An average meeting we book costs less than $5. Let's say you sell a home for $50,000. If you book meetings for $5, you're printing money, right?

Not a plug-and-play SaaS

Josef: The voice AI space is rapidly changing and it comes with a lot of unseen complexity.

You should expect a lot of interactions with customers in this space. It’s not the plug-and-play SaaS that just runs. It’s very product and sales-heavy by its nature.

But it's very rewarding. There’s huge demand and it solves major problems.

We got a dream testimonial from one of our clients about four months in. It was a pivotal moment for me. It made me very confident about this kind of product.

Parting advice

Timo: Your time is precious so focus on the most important task. Validate, put up a landing page, get waitlists and demo calls before you even start building.

And don’t forget to market right away. Open a TikTok account and release 10, 12 videos on your idea.

So many people start building for months — founding a company, incorporating — before having a single payment. That’s nuts. You could have made a thousand iterations in that time.

Josef: And don't worry too much about competition. There's so few stories of companies that actually go under because of competition.