48% of top 50 GenAI web products in a16z’s list are completely bootstrapped
a16z has published a ranking of top 50 GenAI web products by monthly visits. Here’s a summary of key findings:
- 80% of the top 50 GenAI web products didn't exist a year ago
- A whopping 48% are completely bootstrapped, with no outside funding
- Only 5% of the companies on the list are part of big tech companies like Google.
- Most companies on the list have grown organically without paid marketing.
- The top 50 list is an almost even 3-way split between companies that
- (1) trained their own proprietary model,
- (2) fine-tuned an existing model, and
- (3) built a consumer UI on top of an existing model (e.g., “GPT wrappers”)
- Consumers are willing to pay for GenAI. 90% of companies on the list are already monetizing, nearly all of them via a subscription model. The average product on the list makes $21/month (for users on monthly plans)—yielding $252 annually.
- General LLM chatbots represent 68% of total consumer traffic to the top 50 list. Alongside ChatGPT, this category includes Google’s Bard and Quora’s Poe, all ranked in the top 5.
- However, two other categories have started to drive significant usage in recent months—AI companions (such as CharacterAI) and content generation tools (such as Midjourney and ElevenLabs). Within the broader content generation category, image generation is the top use case with 41% of traffic, followed by prosumer writing tools at 26%, and video generation at 8%.
- There's room for new winners - most categories don't yet have a runaway success.
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GPT Wrappers are possibly the simplest SAAS idea at this point of time. Most of them do solve a real world problem and their selling points are largely on UX and the prompt in itself. How well can you design the input flow to the output, with as little additional input from the user as possible.
Yeah, no kidding they’re mostly bootstrapped, ChatGPT did all the initial investment and now they’re probably going to be the biggest profitable platform since Amazon.
Incredible to see such rapid innovation and adoption in the GenAI space. The organic growth and bootstrapped success stories are particularly inspiring. Thanks for the summary Mariam🚀
Yeah, loved this report. Thank you!
"GenAI evolves rapidly; 80% of top 50 products new within a year. 48% self-funded, 5% big tech. Organic growth, varied approaches. Chatbots lead, new opportunities ahead."
Inspiring for builders to bootstrap instead of looking for VC funding.
Inspiring for me too. I'm working on a product that also belongs in one of those categories above, so I have a feeling the this new space is good for us indie hackers
Yeah, defintely. And that too without paid marketing.
No paid marketing FTW! I'll keep up my marketing efforts in that vein as well
Interesting insights!
Interesting insights!
These are definitely inspiring for builders looking out to build Gen AI web products.
No wonder that over 40 (out of these 50) gen AI tools came into picture after ChatGPT's exponential growth.
Would love to know -
btw, subscribed to your newsletter. They're amazing. @Wyeem
Interesting!
Or, should I say "inspiring" for most of us here :)
How do you envision the landscape of GenAI web products evolving in the next year, given the rapid emergence and growth of new entrants in the past year?
User Experience is differentiator for GPT wrappers. The AI isn't the core offering, but whatever problem they are solving is and AI happens to be best way to solve it.
The universal truth is if you solve someone's problem well, they'll pay for it.
That's awesome. Question: how did most of these bootstrapped companies launch and get customers? Did they use landing pages to test an idea at prelaunch to get signups?
Let's see if anyone dives into this and publishes another report on this.
There's a really great bootstrapped founder I am following on X, building NeuralFrames in public. https://www.neuralframes.com/
Most of these founders don't need funding because open source tooling and usage based make it sustainable.
Very insightful and inspiring information for anyone looking to start something in the AI sector! Great job!
I also have a newsletter called Quick Byte (https://quickbyte.tech) that hits on AI & tech topics. Would you want to do a cross-promotion?
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