How going viral on X helped this solopreneur reach $15k/mo with his native AI apps

Solopreneur Daniel Nguyen, 35, almost gave up on indie hacking after three of his projects failed to take off.

Then he struck gold with Bolt AI: a native AI client for Mac OS. With support from the indie hacking community — and a tweet from Pieter Levels — he grew his product into a thriving SaaS. Now, he makes $10k/mo in one-time sales and $5k MRR.

He took me through his journey so far 👇.

The first dollar

I love building things on the internet. I earned my first dollar online roughly 15 years ago when I sold a plugin for open-source forum software Invision Power Board.

I dropped out of college to start an online business providing WordPress consulting services. It reached $100,000 in revenue before I eventually shut it down. I then joined multiple startups as a founding product engineer.

My core expertise lies in product engineering, which I define as 50% product-focused and 50% engineering-driven. I am mostly self-taught.

I strongly believe that being a product engineer increases the chances of success for an indie hacker.

When I was starting, I primarily learned from blog posts, forums, and official documentation (lol yes, some developers do read documentation). It's amazing how much faster you can learn with the help of AI these days.

Three projects that never took off

My first indie hacking attempt was selling WordPress themes and plugins. It failed miserably. Turned out consulting and selling products a require completely different sets of skills.

Next, I built an uptime monitoring SaaS called StatusBoard. I got a few customers from my network, but I never actually spent time promoting it. I shut it down after six months or so.

In 2022, I joined Twitter (now X) and found the indie hacking community there. I got huge inspiration from @levelsio, @tdinh_me, and @damengchen.

I launched my first product, KTool, a productivity tool for Kindle users. I spent quite a lot of time sharing its progress on IndieHackers.com.

But after a year, I couldn’t find a way to reach ramen profitability. I only had another year’s worth of savings and I was feeling quite depressed about its growth.

I knew I needed to freelance to extend my runway and to stop me falling into a full depression.

The product that did

I decided to learn about generative AI and the OpenAI API in the hopes it would help me find a good freelance gig.

I landed a couple of interesting opportunities, but more importantly, I found a new product idea: BoltAI, a better way to use AI on macOS.

BoltAI is a native, high-performance, all-in-one AI client designed for power users, allowing interaction with multiple AI models via a chat interface or inline within any app. Users can enter their own API keys and only pay for the services they utilize.

Unlike other clients, BoltAI integrates deeply with the operating system, enabling users to perform tasks significantly faster.

I launched the software in May 2023, and it now serves more than 7,000 customers. I’ve updated it over 100 times, constantly improving the platform based on customer feedback.

The native app is built using Swift, SwiftUI, AppKit, SQLite and Sparkle. The website uses TailwindCSS, NextJS, Cloudflare Pages and Cloudflare Workers, and the documentation is on Gitbook.

For payments, I use Lemon Squeezy and Stripe. And I use Simple Analytics for web analytics and Bento for emails.

The tech stack has largely stayed the same since I started. “Don't fix what’s not broken” ;).

Maximizing for happiness

In the beginning, the only revenue for BoltAI was via license sales: a one-time payment with a free year of updates.

Over time, I gradually increased the price from $19 to $79. At $79, my monthly revenue is slightly lower than at $39, but I’m a lot happier: fewer refunds, fewer support queries, fewer “bad fit” customers.

With half the customers, I can provide better and faster support, and I’m happier.

As a solo founder, it’s not always about maximizing revenue. We need to optimize for founder happiness too.

Today, BoltAI’s second source of revenue is the Setapp platform, which unlocked subscription revenue from Setapp customers.

The Setapp team invested a lot of time promoting BoltAI on their platform. A side effect of this was that many customers purchased software licenses separately. So, it was a huge win for me.

BoltAI itself has also led to other products. A customer once asked if it was possible to possible to chat with a PDF natively on Mac.

I found the idea interesting, so I decided to build it. PDF Pals has since reached 700 paid customers (~$25k in revenue).

Next, I plan to open up BoltAI to teams. I’ve been building new features for teams and, in the future, I’ll start charging a subscription for business customers.

Going viral on X

Initially, I mostly promoted BoltAI on my X account. I built it in public and shared new features every week. It works well enough since many Twitter users are AI enthusiasts.

Growth was slow in the beginning, but then BoltAI went viral (thanks to a retweet from Pieter Levels).

But I quickly explored other channels: AI directories, pay-per-click marketing, and free tools. I recently saw some success from SEO (mostly from help articles).

Targeting AI enthusiasts alone doesn’t work in the long run. So, I talk to the most active customers and built more features specifically for them. I then share my progress with their community, and growth picked up again.

I later built ShotSolve, which allows you to ask AI about screenshots you take on your Mac, a lead magnet. So far, it’s brought 1,700 visitors to BoltAI.

Buying back time

Beyond profitability, I think indie hackers generally go in one of two directions. 

You either continue to grow the business solo and enjoy the freedom that brings. Or, you build a team to scale the business further.

I plan to build a small team later this year. I’m good at hiring and leading a small team so this would play well to my strengths. 

Hopefully, this will allow me to buy back my time this way and spend more time with my family and my hobbies.

Battling self-doubt and being grateful

For me, the hardest thing about building a business is managing my psychology.

Every day is a battle with self-doubt, angry customers, critical bugs, keeping up with the competition…

And as a parent, I also need to put all of that away and try to be present with my family.

It’s no small feat to build an indie business while raising a family. I’m grateful to my wife, who has been incredibly supportive throughout the whole journey.

A lot of my customers also send support messages personally. I’m grateful for all of that 🙏.

Thanks to the indie hacking community, I’ve had so much support from other founders.

Sometimes all you have to do is ask. Want a discount for your SaaS? Send an email asking for it. Need advice from a seasoned founder? Send a personal message asking them. Want to work four days instead of five? Ask your employer.

I’m surprised that it works most of the time.

If I could start again

I suck at advice, so I won’t give any. But here’s what I’d do if I started again:

Firstly, I wouldn’t start with a SaaS. I would follow The Stair Step Method of Bootstrapping and start with simpler products, with one predictable organic marketing channel. 

I would charge from day one. To me, paying customers are the only validation I can trust.

I’d start finding my ideal customer profile as soon as possible. This was my biggest mistake. I thought I could do this once I had enough customers. But it’s not easier with more. To be honest, I’m still working on this.

I’d always “think in funnels.” Would this task improve acquisition, activation, or retention? Is it my top priority right now?

Indie hacking should be 20% learning, 80% doing. I think most indie hackers are smart enough to understand the fundamentals of sales and marketing. But putting them into practice is a completely different story.

The only way to get better at it is to put in more practice: send more product update emails, write more blog posts, post more educational tweets.

Getting started is always the hardest. The fear of failure is strong. Rejections hurt. I would try to get past that “first scary moment” as fast as possible.

It’s not as scary as it seems.