From $300 to $2,500 MRR: My 2023 Journey as a Solopreneur

I wanted to recap my journey as a solo entrepreneur this year. It's been a good one, even though I didn't reach all my goals. I started out at around ~$300/Month. About a dozen or so projects later I am at $2,500/Month.

This year started with excitement about the LLM wave. Having been in AI since 2017, I wasn't new to the field, but the impact of ChatGPT's release was a game-changer, signaling it was time to dive in.

Overall I launched 4 serious products that are making me money.

1st Product: GPT Hotline

Shortly after ChatGPT's launch, I introduced GPT Hotline, a simple ChatGPT interface on WhatsApp, using Twilio and the GPT-3.5 API. I was the second person to do this and capitalized on the hype. It peaked at $900 MRR, becoming my most profitable product.

Despite its success, I was aware of its vulnerability to commoditization by WhatsApp - which has happened. Yet, it still earns $400 in monthly recurring revenue (MRR), proving the longevity of such products.

My advice? Don't let the threat of big companies commoditizing your product deter you, but be mindful of the time you invest.

2nd Product: YOU-TLDR

For my second product, I revamped YOU-TLDR, a YouTube summarizer app I had previously built with my brother. The technology at the time was limiting, but recent advancements allowed for significant improvements.

Its success hinged on SEO (because it was an old domain). Initially bringing in $300 a month, post-redesign, it soared to $1800 and now consistently earns $1900 monthly and 100K+ visitors per month to the site.

Although YouTube is going to make this a similar feature, I remain undeterred (long tail). This may not grow but hopefully can keep brining me revenue for a while!

3rd Product: PlainScribe

Transcription and translation were serving me well, so I decided to build a polished B2B app focused on this. I wanted to move away from the subscription model and, much like DHH, I felt there was a demand for a pay-as-you-go model.

I created PlainScribe, a straightforward app where you can transcribe and translate your files. The UX was really nicely designed (imo), and I was hopeful that its simplicity and beauty would attract users.

Unfortunately, this didn't work out as I had hoped. To date, PlainScribe has made about $900, but that's non-recurring revenue. I'm steadily gaining more users through SEO and hope to turn this around if I can land some big clients.

However, I have invested in some SEO and hope that I can land a few major clients.

4th Product: Shorts Generator

My fourth and final (serious) product was Shorts Generator. This was my most technically challenging and ambitious project. I was very apprehensive about building it and it took me a good month to reach a point where I could get myself to even start developing it.

As a classic 'idiot engineer,' I fell in love with the technology here, and I don't regret it. Shorts Generator is designed to be the easiest way to transform an idea into a short video in minutes. We built a pipeline for:

• generating a script
• generating audio
• generating scenes
• and stitching it all together for a cool video with captions and transition effects

I'm really proud of it and use it myself. It had a great start, making $100 on the first day and another $100 the second day. However, like many of my projects, it dipped afterward since marketing isn't my forte. It's currently at $260/month, which isn't bad, but I'm hoping to 10x this.

Aside from these main projects, I developed several free tools and apps, including

• GPT Minus 1: Fool GPT by randomly replacing words with synonyms in your text

• Tiny LLMs: Browser-based AI models for a wide array of tasks

• Tweet Enhance: Level up your tweets with AI-generated reactions and optimized alternatives

• Tuber Times: The YouTube Newspaper that transforms your favorite videos into riveting articles

• Replicover: Find the hottest AI models on Replicate

• GPT Calculator: Calculate the token count and cost of your GPT Prompt

You can check these projects and more out at Hacky Experiments. I also talk about my process for building out apps so fast there.

Overall, this year was successful. I began with around $300/month in MRR and have now reached approximately $2,500/month. While it's great progress, I need to make at least $10K/MRR to feel financially secure (I live in Seattle which is a very high cost city...also I like Whole Foods f*** ramen).

I have to keep my head straight and remind myself how if you had told me I would crack 1K a month last year I would be ecstatic. Progress is slow but can takeoff anytime if you keep trying.

Here are some lessons I have learned along the way

1. Distribution > Product. We often hear this on here, yet it's so hard to internalize. It truly is all about distribution. There's a lot of grift in the IH community, and it's not because people are ill-intentioned. It's because once you have distribution, you're playing the game on easy mode. This is a game I haven't cracked, so I don't feel equipped to give advice except this: if you can build an audience, please do. It's more important than your product. If I were half as likable as Marc Lou, I'd be making 20K a month by now.

2. Invest in SEO. If you don't have distribution, this is the one thing you should absolutely do, even for projects going nowhere. YOU-TLDR sat half-dead for years before taking off out of nowhere. And with AI-generated blogs, there's no reason not to pump out articles based on relevant keywords. It should only take you a few hours to days. Develop a system (a script) around this, where you can generate articles from keywords (I might share this in another article).

3. Go big. It's something I've struggled with and am trying to get better at. I don't want to speak for anyone else, but I realized that I often used smaller projects to hide my inadequacies. "Oh, this is just a side project, it's simple and easy, blah blah." What I was really afraid of was not failure, but success. Part of me was afraid of taking on bigger technical/gnarly challenges. All this to say, it is much better to build a $50/100 per month enterprise product versus a shitty $9.99 to-do list app. Go big. Most people won't do it. Hard things are easy and easy things are hard.

4. Move fast. I have a system that allows me to build out apps fast. I believe speed is more important than ever in todays accelerated world. If you get an idea move fast and build out an MVP to test it out.

5. Focus. Ok. I am breaking the practice before you preach rule here but focus is important. It is almost certainly true I would be a lot more successful if I had focused on one of my projects that were showing promise instead of moving on with my shiny objects syndrome. Let's try to add gasoline on a fire we've managed to start rather than moving on too quickly.

Anyways hope this was useful. If you want to reach out or connect I hang out and troll on Twitter.

Here's to a fantastic 2024. Keep hustling!