We built a $12k/mo AI chatbot generator while exploring England with our baby

Gemma Vincent, 36, left the 9 to 5 behind after experiencing sexism at work. It spurred her on to start a design agency where everyone would feel welcome.

Next, she built an AI bot generator with her husband that's making nearly $12k MRR — all while raising a baby and touring the south of England by van.

Here’s Gemma Vincent on how she did it 👇.

Falling in love

I fell in love with coding at university. I studied interactive media production at Bournemouth on the south coast of England.

It’s also how I met Zef, who’s now my husband, best mate and business partner.

We met at an agency called The Unit in Brighton, before traveling around Asia, where we started dating.

We thought we shouldn’t work together and be together, so we left the company for a fresh start. It’s ironic because we now run two businesses as a team.

Saying no to sexism

I set up my design agency Pixelhop after experiencing sexism from a developer I’d worked with. I ended up having a really bad spell of anxiety and depression. I struggled to even leave the house.

This motivated me to start an agency where everyone felt happy and safe. I also wanted it to be remote. You don’t need an office to do amazing work.

Zef encouraged me to take the jump after coming home crying one too many times. So, I started Pixelhop on Valentine's Day, 2019.

Six months to a year after launching, I’d built a client base and Zef had joined me to help run the business.

We got most of our work through word of mouth. We've always worked hard, and we pride ourselves on quality, going the extra mile with little touches.

Hacking it together

We've always loved the idea of having our own products and we've started so many things. But we either get distracted by client work, or we see someone build a better version of an idea we have. 

We were more focused with our AI bot generator Chat Thing because it felt like a race against time.

We were having an existential crisis about our careers as developers with all the AI hype. It was a weekend project that soon became its own business.

We properly hacked it together to start with. We only thought a little about the user experience or the design. We just wanted to get it out — which I now 100% believe is the best approach.

Once we had a proof of concept, we went back and focused on the user experience and design. Getting the onboarding right has been a big job, but now we're happy with it.

We want to take the same approach for any apps we build in the future.

We started by just getting a basic page out where people could put their emails in to show their interest, we had over 2,000 people sign up on the waitlist within just a week.

Under the hood

To begin with, Chat Thing just let you create bots using your Notion pages as the data source, but we very quickly expanded it. We quickly expanded to other data sources such as websites, YouTube and more. 

The main use cases are customer support, app co-pilots, content generation and workflow automation.

We use Nuxt for the frontend of the site and a number of a APIs. This has mostly stayed the same since launching. But as we have scaled, we’ve split certain parts out into separate services so they scale independently.

The data synchronising aspect of the app is by far the most complicated part, and we have a job/queuing system that processes thousands and thousands of jobs per day, pulling in data from customers' different data sources and then transforming it into a format suitable for their bot to consume.

We offer various subscription tiers to cater to different use cases, allowing users to create chatbots that can handle and respond to messages, connect to data sources, and more.

The MRR shot up very quickly to nearly $12k, then it dropped a bit and has flatlined at nearly $8k for a while now. Which we're still working on!

Ever-changing AI

When we first launched, OpenAI was miles ahead of everyone else in terms of models. But the space has really expanded and now there are loads of great models to choose from.

We now support all major providers, which helped decrease our platform risk a bit. Customers love the choice — and if OpenAI is down, you can just swap your bot to another provider with a few clicks.

Function calling was another really big change for AI. It hugely expanded what these LLM-powered bots are capable of and meant we could take Chat Thing bots from simple Q&A tools to far more advanced helpers.

They can take actions on behalf of users, browse the web, interact with APIs and more. We implemented function calling as a new “Power-ups” feature and did a big launch in April.

Since then we have released a Software Development Kit that lets you create your own Power-ups on the front-end of your app. This makes it easy to create intelligent AI co-pilots for your app.

Selling a story

We aren’t marketers, that’s for sure. But we’ve learnt that we need to be selling a story rather than the features of the app.

Chat Thing is so powerful and versatile. But that's made it quite hard to market as It's hard to explain all the possible use cases.

It's frustrating when we see competitors doing way better in their MRR with lower-quality features. But they've had way better marketing. It's something we're still tackling.

We’re planning to improve our marketing skills and get someone on board to help. We also want to increase our product offerings.

Celebrity encounters

A standout moment for Chat Thing came one Sunday evening while we were cooking a roast dinner with our newborn baby. We got an email from Seth Godin, who we’ve always been big fans of.

At first, we didn’t think it was a legit. But it was actually him!

We emailed him back with a pic of the 3 of us and his book. He got us to build a bot based on all the years of his blog. That was a pretty awesome proof of concept.

Right now, we’re building our next app, "Right Then". In a nutshell, it's an app with recipes for parents to cook for their children; in the future, there will be other elements to it but that’s what we’re starting with.

A big goal of ours is ultimately to build up a product and sell it.

Just start

Start lean and scrappy, validate your idea. Don't focus on getting all the features out, focus on marketing (and learn from our mistakes)!

Your branding doesn’t have to be businessy or formal for you to be successful.

We've always tried to keep our brand fun and relatable. I think it's made us stand out from your average website. It gives us personality and helps us build good relationships with people and clients.

Keeping up

It can be hard being in such a fast-paced industry, especially now with AI. Feeling like you’re always on your toes, you’ve constantly got to learn and adapt to new things out there, otherwise you’ll just get gobbled up by other people.

But indie hacking has also given us the freedom to do what we want.

We traveled around the south of England in a camper van while we worked, and we fell in love with the Cornish coast.

We had our first baby, we got married, and soon after we settled in Cornwall. We’ve been here for almost a year, and it’s been amazing.