Making $14,000 in MRR with a custom ChatGPT tool

I interviewed Mike Heap and Alex Rainey, the founders of My AskAI, a SaaS that allows you to create ChatGPT with your own data.

Let's dive in!

What’s your name, and what are you working on?

We are Mike Heap and Alex Rainey.

We’re working on My AskAI, a way for you to create your own custom ChatGPT that uses your own data to answer questions, all without code.

Once created, you can share or integrate it pretty much wherever you want using our embeds, APIs, and plugins. The result is that you and your team, or your users, can get answers to questions on your content wherever you are.

What inspired you to create My AskAI?

We had already launched an AI fine-tuning product as part of a hackathon for Ben’s Bites at the end of last year and had got a bit of traction with that, but found the learning curve for most to be a bit too steep.

We had also seen people making lots of side projects where they were creating “chat with this book/podcast”-type products and thought it would be cool to make a platform that would allow anyone to do it for whatever content they wanted.

At what point did you decide to devote more time to My AskAI vs. getting back to your job?

At the time I was looking for freelance work and Alex was exploring options having not long since sold his last company. After launching our fine-tuning product we then gave an option to purchase a deal on a new product (My AskAI) we were working on.

We got around $5k in pre-sales for the product prior to launching based on just a short description of what it would do. So we knew there was demand there.

We also thought that the AI hype train had already left the station, and we didn’t want to miss our opportunity to build some cool stuff.

So at the end of January we both decided not to look for other work and go all in focusing on My AskAI with a deadline of trying to hit ramen profitability by the end of May.

How did you validate that there’s a need for My AskAI?

Firstly, when we were helping people with AI fine-tuning products, we were getting a lot of requests to be able to create "query" bots, or ways to automate customer service.

While fine-tuning could do that, it was not the optimal solution. That’s when we decided to put up a pre-launch purchase product option on our site to see how many people would pay before we built.

We put up a short bit of copy and managed to get just over 50 people to sign up to a pre-launch at $99, which felt solid given it was around 2-3x our revenue for the product we had already built and had existed!

When did you start seeing traction?

We were lucky and saw it pretty much straight away.

From the pre-launch (thank you AI hype) and the users of the fine-tuning product, we were able to work the mailing list to generate pre-sales. Then we piggybacked on that for a Product Hunt launch, which went pretty well too.

How are you currently acquiring customers?

We’re currently trying a bunch of different things including newsletter ads, we got some initial users through Twitter and LinkedIn, and try wherever possible to implement product-led growth initiatives.

But right now our biggest single source of sign ups are word of mouth referrals, which is pretty nice as it means you are building something people would actually talk about and share with friends. Our biggest channel is actually organic through Google.

Tweeting helped initially, but Product Hunt has a reliable acquisition channel so we try and launch something there once per month. Newsletters aligned to AI also helped.

Was My AskAI the first successful AI project? Did you have any (un)successful attempts in building an API product?

We started off by building a University Personal Statement writing tool that was built with fine-tuning back in October and November of last year. We got it out and got a few paying users, but OpenAI actually told us to shut it down as it went against their ethics. (We still refute this, but it wasn’t a battle we thought was worth pursuing.)

We played around with a few ideas after that before building our No Code AI Model Builter fine-tuning product and launching that at the end of last year, that got some traction, we made around $3,500 in sales in a few months, but have now sold that so we can wholly focus on My AskAI.

How is My AskAI doing now in terms of revenue/paying users?

We’re at around $14k MRR, and just over 300 users right now.