I reached $10k MRR with my AI SaaS product in 1 month. AMA

Twitter, HN and PH are the main ones. Once it gets on these platforms, there will be ripple effects. A lot of people would automatically find out the product. I remember many saying that they found me on PH and some saying they found me on HN.

These days, people are coming mostly through Word Of Mouth. People who are following this space already know now that something like SiteGPT exists...

Coding would be the easiest part among everything else. Everything is about distribution.

I would say to try and get the working product to the hands of the actual customers as fast as possible.

You can always iterate later once you see actual customers using it.

Once someone actually uses the product, the product roadmap will get built on its own based on what that user needs. Everything becomes super clear after you get actual paying customers. At least, that's what happened in my case for all my products.

It’s neither of them. It’s more complicated than generating a summary and less complicated than fine tuning.

It really is!

I don’t think it’s as simple as that. We can’t just conclude that if the product is good, people will share it…

There are so many factors that won’t be in our hands when we launch. I just got lucky. Right people were there at the right time when I launched the product who retweeted it. If I launch another product again which is as good as the current product, I can’t say for sure that I would get the exact same result. I don’t think it’s as predictable as that.

In my case, the main thing that helped me was the product went viral on Twitter. It then went viral on HN and PH. These things can’t be timed even if you plan for them. It just happened like that in my case. Each one of these things compounded the effects of others.

Overall what I’m trying to say is, even if I tried, I don’t think I can replicate this again with another product.

I’d also like to know how this happened.

I use Paddle and it handles everything.

Right now, my cost for running both Feather (my other SaaS product) and SiteGPT combined is around $3k-$5k per month.

I am not sure about the individual costs as I pretty much use similar hosting and similar databases for all my SaaS apps, so the costs that I have is the combined cost.

Thank you!

I wrote my first line of code in 2015. I think I started doing web dev one year after I started coding.

So I have been doing it for quite a while now (more than 7 years).

My tech stacks have changed quite a bit during this time. I remember using Django, Ruby on Rails, Laravel for most of my early years.

But today, I use Javascript and Typescript for everything. To be even more specific, my current tech stack is Remix. I have started using Remix for everything now.

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Regarding your other question, what stack to build and iterate on the product fast, I would say, choose the stack that you are already familiar with. There is no one good tech stack that is universally better than others. I think you can get very far with almost any tech stack you choose.

I’m not sure what you mean… planning to grow it, build it and improve it.

I’m getting constant feature requests and improvement requests from the customers, so just going to focus on what the paying customers want. It’s as simple as that.

I am not sure what else is left to say here...

Before what? When I started this journey 3 years ago, it was zero.

one.

Everything has been organic so far. I haven’t tried engaging with popular channels/Twitter profiles. I have been building in public for so long now, it’s my second nature now. I don’t even think about it. It’s just a normal thing that I do.

Right now, I think I have a little over 200 customers.

Yeah, I usually don’t look at competitors when working on a product. I don’t know if it’s a good thing or a bad thing. To this day, I still don’t know what all things the competitors are doing. I just launch what I think is the minimum usable version, and get it to the hands of the customers as quickly as possible. Once actual paying customers sign up, the product builds itself based on their feedback.

While I was building this product, I found out similar products exists and I have also seen similar products got launched during the 2-3 weeks I am building. I didn’t know how big or how small they are doing. I did not see any point caring about them. I knew I wanted to launch it and I was going to launch it. In the worst case, it would just be 3 weeks of wasted time. In the best case, well… we are witnessing the best case scenario right now.

I don’t have any MRR projections. Churn is very high for AI products. Unless I address that, it will always a leaky bucket and MRR won’t grow.

In terms of traffic volume,

Twitter >>> HN > PH

Yeah, I don’t know any other kind of marketing. For the first time ever, I tried sponsoring a newsletter to promote the product. Even though I got 500 visits from the newsletter, I did not get any sign ups. I get way more than 500 visitors just from one of my tweets. So don’t think this works.

I’m still trying to figure this out. For now, my goal is to retain the existing customers.

Twitter

Yes, I am still struggling with this too. The person I hired hasn't worked on anything real yet. I am still trying to do the knowledge transfer to that person. He will be working on an actual real task in a few days.

I am still figuring this out. For now, the person hasn't worked on anything real yet related to SiteGPT.

No, I mean just launch it as soon as possible. Just launch it.

For SiteGPT, one day, I decided to work on it, learnt everything I needed to build the product, and within 2-3 weeks, I have a product ready, which had a lot of bugs, but I just launched it on Twitter with a tweet.

It had a LOT of bugs.

The next week or so, I spent every day a lot of hours, making the product stable. You will experience some kind of bugs only when you reach a certain scale.

During this time, I had to stop a lot of bad actors doing a DDOS attack almost every day on SiteGPT. The initial few weeks were very crazy. I had a lot of sleepless nights.

But yeah, eventually everything became stable. When I say get it into the hands of users as early as possible, I meant, if you have the coding skills to ship things fast, then just ship it, and worry about everything else later.

There is nothing like a launch month.

The pace has certainly slowed down, but I am still getting new customers every day.

But there is no match for how good it did during the first few weeks of launch.

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I don't have any regrets about the launch. Even if I tried, it wouldn't have gone any better than how it did.

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I launched it through Twitter.

This is the launch tweet 👇

I am part of a lot of communities on Slack and Discord.

But one thing I consistently come back to and stay on is Twitter. There is nothing else like it when you follow the right people and curate the feed in the right away.

Without Twitter, I wouldn't have made anything on any of my products.

I have very very few large corporations as customers. It's more small businesses than corporations who are using it at the moment.

Right now, Twitter and Google are my main acquisition channels. In Google, people are directly searching for "SiteGPT". Almost all of the traffic I get from Google is through these kind of searches...

I can’t ensure anything…

So far, it’s going ok. It’s a lot of usage, but since the product is already doing well, I can afford to pay for the usage…

I also didn’t have any free plan or free trial for this exact reason. The product became so viral during the launch time, it would have cost me several thousand dollars, if I had a free plan.

I think it’s around 20%

Have to check again.

Right now, my dashboard shows the churn is 10%, but it takes 2 or 3 months to get the exact churn rate.

I haven’t done anything extra for PH launch. It was an on the spot decision for me at that time. On that day, I felt like launching it on PH, and I went to PH, filled the launch form, and clicked on Submit. That’s all I did. There is no launch video, no launch email, no DMing people to support the launch. It’s just fill the form, click submit.

i want ask : with this product, are you an individual entrepreneur or have your own small team to reliaze it

I am not using Langchain.

Cloudflare.

That's the magic of product-market fit. People go "uhu mmhhmm interesting" when you tell them about your form handler but go "wow super cool, actually I know someone who needs this" when they hear about the ai website chatbot.

I'm not trying to shit on your product but people often underestimate just how much easier it is with a great product that people actually want to immediately buy.