With $325k in revenue since we launched, we just spent the last 1.5 months totally re-building our product after revenue growth started to slow.
We've taken everything we've learnt and applied it to our updated product.
Here's why we did it and what we've built...
❓ 6 reasons
$100k ARR.
A milestone I wasn't sure if I'd ever hit as a founder. Definitely not one I'd hit within 2 months of launch.
So it's Friday and I'm going to be shamelessly proud of what
@mike_heap_
& I have built with
@usemyaskai
.
Not possible without
@pinecone
@bubble
@OpenAI
Big shoutout to
@microacquire
and
@agazdecki
. I sold a business, that was built in a few months, in <2 weeks for the same amount of money my salary was last year. Thank you for teaching me something I just didn’t know was possible.
Just finished my build for
@bentossell
's AI Hackathon
Create custom AI models in minutes, with no code
✅ Upload training data
✅ We convert & optimise for
@OpenAI
✅ We create your custom fine tuned model
✅ Guides on how to use your model e.g. Zapier
Boooom 🔥 🎉 🔥
Second startup SOLD on
@acquiredotcom
in <6 months.
I'll say it again,
@agazdecki
and team have built a phenomenal product.
Now it's time to be 100% dedicated to 🛠️ with
@mike_heap_
Journey and lessons learnt 👇
@mityasmusin
Oh damn, you’re not holding back here!
As much as I’d like to disagree, found myself nodding along to these points.
Always good to remind ourselves that the Twittersphere and PH world are such small microcosms with a big echo chamber effect.
Grimoire — superior coding assistant — rightfully flying high in the GPTs Trending section.
When
@NickADobos
first started sharing this, I was pretty sceptical.
Been using ChatGPT +
@cursor_ai
& struggled to think how a GPT (just a new prompt) could offer much more. I was wrong
I was sceptical of no-code tools like
@bubble
, having been at a startup with 5 engineers.
But after building a no-code tool — where anyone can create their own AI-powered Q&A and then embed or integrate via API with — I'm starting to think, what can't be built on
@bubble
@OfficialLoganK
My AskAI
Embeddings + GPT-3.5 Turbo = seriously super smart and awesome Q&A tool.
Upload anything, ask questions like you’re speaking to an expert.
Turns out OpenAI's new GPT knowledge retrieval ain't so good!
Adding 20 webpages (that you have to convert to txt files) to a GPT and comparing the answers to a GPT that can connect to an AskAI — the answer quality is v different.
GPT + files only answered ~50% of questions.
It unfortunately says so much about the culture and pace of product development at
@bubble
that they’ve released no AI powered features within the Editor for no-code builders.
Like seriously, what are they doing?
@mukul0x
If people are interested in building one of these Q&A services themselves, but aren't very technical, I just launched a no code embeddings tool called AskAI:
You can build your own AI Q&A, with any content in minutes and then share it anywhere on the web.
OpenAI's new GPTs are great in many ways. But their knowledge retrieval powers are 💩 (sorry).
Today we're launching a new integration at
@usemyaskai
so you give your GPT access to an unlimited external knowledge base. This means significantly better answers, that are 2x faster
You just can't thank customers enough when they take the time to leave a meaningful, honest, VIDEO review about your product.
Thank you, Zack 💙
(shout out to
@SenjaHQ
for making this video in 1 click!)
@rachel_l_woods
Annd if you want to have an AI Assistant in your Slack that's trained on your company's docs/data, check out
Great for internal support teams to quickly get answers from existing documentation.
@TheRundownAI
Thanks for the shoutout
@rowancheung
@TheRundownAI
If anyone wants to build their own AI Q&A, powered by ChatGPT, with only your content, in <3 mins.
Check out
You can then customise and share your creation anywhere you can think of!
Klarna’s AI chatbot handles two-thirds of their customer support requests
Klarna just dropped some jaw-dropping results after launching their new customer support AI chatbot last month.
The chatbot already does the work of 700 full-time agents, handles 65%+ of their support
🎉 Product Hunt Launch Day! 🎉
Today we launched TweetMe.
THE AI Tweet writer that's actually trained on 250+ of YOUR tweets, no generic 💩
So you can brainstorm new content faster and save 1,000s of hours
Link below 👇
(p.s. 1st 10 tweets are on the house...)
@mike_heap_
🎉 Today we're live on
@ProductHunt
launching our TRIO of integrations 🎉
Notion + Google Drive + Slack = Your team's NEW AI assistant.
Trying to find an answer in your docs is probably one of the biggest time wastes there is at work.
@Saboo_Shubham_
We built My AskAI.
In <2 mins, you can add any content (docs/webpages) and ask it questions. Powered by the ChatGPT API.
Create your own expert or knowledge base.
This can all be done with no code, and you can share it anywhere on the web afterwards!
What's interesting about
#buildinpublic
is that it's always MRR & ARR being shared. But never profit (gross). Why do you think this?
The sceptic in me thinks that's it's because these numbers aren't so rosy. But the realistic answer is that these numbers aren't known as easily.
Big shoutout to
@microacquire
and
@agazdecki
. I sold a business, that was built in a few months, in <2 weeks for the same amount of money my salary was last year. Thank you for teaching me something I just didn’t know was possible.
My favourite (and very Stoic) quote from Marc’s last post “Living for 6 years with $1,000/month taught me a lesson: My happiness comes from creating, not consuming.”
To know what makes you happy is a rare but great thing.
And I couldn’t agree more. My happiness also comes from
The last 2 years changed my life
- I launched 17 startups
- I got 55K followers on 𝕏
- I send a newsletter to 7,000 readers
- I reached $65,000/month at 91% margin and 0 employee
- I met tons of new friends
I'll share my solopreneur story tomorrow →
Cont.
- AI models are soooo much more powerful with proprietary / internal data (data that ChatGPT doesn't know or doesn't know very well)
- Get
@mike_heap_
or a clone of him as your co-founder
Spent yesterday adding the new ChatGPT-3.5 Turbo model to AskAI.
The results are 😲🤯
Check out the comparison of GPT-3 answering a question on 15 uploaded blog posts vs. the NEW ChatGPT-3.5 Turbo model.
👀
@bentossell
"the next wave of startups are about to have an upgrade"
@steventey
@intercom
@eoghan
Also love how aligned the incentives are with this!
But, they assume a conversation is resolved by default, unless the user requests to talk to a person.
In reality, many users will just bounce with a bad answer from an AI assistant.
And on top of all of that. If your Fin
I want to show just how easy it is to make your own searchable knowledge base.
All you need is a bunch of links or documents on a topic, and <5 mins. I guarantee this will blow your mind.
If you're new to X/Twitter, here's a few accounts startup founders can learn a lot from:
@theandreboso
— Marketing advice, with actionable tips, strategies & hard truths
@fba
— SEO advice (SEO still foolishly considered unsexy & an afterthought, because of the patience needed)
I've never been prouder to launch something, than I am today with
@mike_heap_
.
And, I've never seen, first hand, the same level of extraordinary market-pull for a product — which has already generated $5k+ in sales before launching.
The new product? AskAI.
💯 Couldn’t agree more!!
3 years ago:
- desperate to raise a big VC round after raising $1.5m in a bunch of smaller rounds.
- paid a salary of $40k for 5 years (after quitting a job with 2x the salary)
- wanted to build a unicorn and a big team
Today:
- Running a $20k MRR AI
More and more founders I speak to are obsessed with cash-flowing Internet businesses.
These are the same people who were trying to create VC-backed unicorns in 2020/2021.
Now they want no hype, just a portfolio of businesses that pay them while they sleep.
We're now firmly in the AI goldrush.
The speed of projects being launched is just breathtaking.
How much more exciting is this than when Web3 was bouncing off the Twitter walls?!
There's lot of companies that helped make this happen, but
@OpenAI
, please take a bow 👏👏
Today, with you can build your own ChatGPT and ask follow-up questions. Limited only by your imagination.
- Fast, rich, formatted responses
- Upload as much content as you want
- Completely free, we'll even pick up your
@OpenAI
tab (no API key needed)
🚨 Folks, looks like OpenAI is facing another downtime across all the APIs today
If you're looking to be proactively alerted about any downtimes across OpenAI, Anthropic, Anyscale, we post real-time updates at
You can now completely customise the look of your AskAI. Fonts, colours, logos, header and of course...background gradients 😍
Create your own smart assistant for your business, followers or users, using your own content, with .
Making a chatbot for WhatsApp can REALLY suck.
- Planning out all those different flows
- Considering the questions users might ask takes forever
- Deal with different languages?!
- After all that, you also have to try and make it feel natural
Solution 👇
@abacaj
I think there’s one big way these companies can definitely build a moat.
Creating fine tuned (custom) GPT-3 models.
Train your AI model on a dataset that’s private or very difficult to pull together.
This is why we built
@NoCodeAIModels
— to make fine tuning easily accessible.
I'm hosting an AMA (Ask Me Anything) session on Reddit in the 70k-strong r/SaaS community, right NOW!
Ask me anything about building startups, AI or my current business, My AskAI. But, please be nice.
Small UX change in a key onboarding step led to a 40% improvement in conversion.
What did we do?
Instead of asking people to choose a free or paid plan after testing out their AI assistant, we put them on the free plan by default & take them to their Insights Dashboard instead.
We humbly think that allowing companies to create their own ChatGPT — that's tailored and trained for their use case — has the potential to transform multiple functions within a business, across multiple industries.
If you agree, try us out
Thanks 🙏
AI chatbots are naturally extremely popular, but not many people know how they actually work.
Understanding this can really help a business adopt one for tasks like customer support or an internal employee assistant.
Companies offering AI chatbots will describe their secret
This is a great summary of my life right now. Extreme highs and lows.
😢 Degraded OpenAI performance across core API and AI models, potentially affecting thousands of users
😄 Big Stripe payout for another month's hard work!
Emotions, up and down. Up and down. 🎢
After analysing 400+ side products — generating millions of free visits/mo — from the top SaaS companies, there are a 4 standout lessons.
1) Align with Target Audience and Keywords
Side products should address a common pain point or task for the target audience. They need to
We've painstakingly found and pulled data on 425 side products (tools) that are generating millions of free visits every month.
Free side products are:
Powerful awareness-generating hacks used by most of the top B2B and B2C companies.
A side product is a free tool that solves a
7 reasons why OpenAI's new GPTs 'knowledge' tool isn't going to work for most use cases.
Of course it'll get better, but it shows an age old point. You can beat the big guys if you specialise and focus on doing a few things really well.
It's launch day 🥳
So much has changed since our first launch.
Most proud of: the amount of personalisation & customisation you can have with your AskAI.
ICYMI: My AskAI is a fully customisable ChatGPT on your own data, that you can put anywhere - website, Slack, Zaps, APIs
One of the smartest decisions we made as a business on our path to ~$20k MRR.
Aside from eating our own 🐶 food (our customer support relying soley on My AskAI).
We literally save hours a day as a business.
More time for building the product. More time for marketing.
We turned off human customer support for free users and gave it to our AI.
It was probably one of the best things we have done.
When we launched My AskAI, we had human customer support and fielded hundreds of questions each week.
It was invaluable for getting early feedback
The work that’s gonna into this 🤯
I’ve never been more excited about releasing a product.
The $3k pre-sales alone has been crazy enough.
And the quotes from user research, a product builder’s dream 😇
For the last few weeks
@RaineyAllDay
and I have been grinding to make sure we can get AskAI ready
Tomorrow we're going live on Product Hunt 🎉
It's massive for us and we'd love your support, if you're happy for me to remind you, reply to this!
#buildinpublic
Learnings...
- B2C AI products are a HARD market (low rev., high CAC, v. competitive)
- You can prove demand for your product for free by just posting on Twitter, Reddit, PH & Discord communities
- Building micro-SaaS products & selling them on
@acquiredotcom
could be a job
I think startups raising in the next few years will show off how FEW employees they have, instead of how MANY. They'll showcase their human efficiency.
It's always been a point of pride on a company's site or pitch deck, "Look at our big team, we must be doing something right!"
@_justlilian
Gonna have to disagree.
To sustain $3k MRR is hard, you need to be at the top of your game, fending off competition & worrying about whether it’ll last.
$10m exit is clean. Even if you only get <20% (raised money or have co-founders).
You could start so many new things 😎
This is how I built a SaaS lead magnet, in 3 days, for
@weusekana
and
@atulord
.
Problem: Keeping track of your SaaS competitors pricing and offering is v v time-consuming.
Solution: Free instant email alerts whenever a competitor changes their pricing page.
@chatdoc_ai
If you want to take your 'chatting with docs' to the next level, check out . You can connect your entire Google Drive or Notion workspace.
I founded it in Feb and we have 35k+ businesses using it.
Sooo much good company info sits in Google Drive. But it's never easy to find what you want — a simple answer to a specific question.
What's the parent leave policy? What's our platform architecture? What's our sales process?
That changes today.
🚨 New My AskAI Integration 🚨
For those asking about the tech stack for this build.
-
@Replit
> Node backend (soooo easy to setup and launch an API ❤️)
-
@bubble
> Frontend
-
@stripe
> Payments
Just finished my build for
@bentossell
's AI Hackathon
Create custom AI models in minutes, with no code
✅ Upload training data
✅ We convert & optimise for
@OpenAI
✅ We create your custom fine tuned model
✅ Guides on how to use your model e.g. Zapier
Embeddings-as-a-service? Is that a thing? It is now.
🤯 Big update to our API docs for
@usemyaskai
The skies really the limit now with these.
- Create an AskAI
- Add files, links, text
- Update or delete content
- Retrieve content already added
Why don't more indie hackers use
@Amplitude_HQ
instead of
@googleanalytics
for low/no-code websites and web apps? Constantly amazed by how hard simple things are with GA.
IMHO: Amplitude's free tier is easily enough and it's such a powerful analytics/product tool.
Product Hunt just announced 2023's BEST products — voted by the community. Here's my favourite 9 winners and how they can help your startup.
1. ChatGPT (GPT-4) — Best overall product
Super-charge your team’s productivity on 100s of tasks with a ChatGPT Plus subscription for
@dennyboy888
@dannypostmaa
@heroku
@render
Simple. I don’t have the knowledge, time or patience to set up the same infrastructure manually on
@awscloud
.
These providers allow me to setup production grade infra, with all the bells and whistles, in hours with no knowledge of how the underlying AWS stack works.
Decided to spruce up our website's meta/OG image 🎨
Wanted to explain what we do (without too much detail), show off the brand, and sprinkle some social proof.
Thoughts?
The two things I'm most impressed by:
1. Allowing users to embed their creations on their own websites. No BE web services, just Bubble.
2. Allowing users to integrate, via API, with their creations. No BE web services, just Bubble.
Genuinely blown away these last 2 weeks.
New podcast ft. 3x exiter and ex-consultant,
@RaineyAllDay
Through his three exits, he’s learned a few things and has found the acquisition process quite repeatable made even easier on our marketplace.
Here’s a tip that he shared on the pod 🎙️🎙️
@OpenAI
released this...
A new, much cheaper embeddings model. Essentially the AI tech that allows you to build natural langauge search or ChatGPT replica.
I pitched 250 VCs. And, eventually, they all said no. This is a failure.
In my interview with
@danmurrayserter
on the
@secretleaders1
Podcast, we talk about failure.
@jamescalam
@pinecone
Thanks for sharing this, James. Somewhat reassuring that the same building blocks are in place for their retrieval tool as with other RAG powered apps.
Was expecting some novel pattern or new techniques!
Gonna checkout Canopy, as well! Looks cool.
I'm going to try & share daily insights from within the AI-trenches at
@usemyaskai
I want to share more about what it's like to build an AI company in today's, crazy, world.
AI is set to impact all of us in weird and wonderful ways. So I hope this is useful.
Day 1 👇
AI assistants shouldn't answer everything. If they do, they're lying 😏
But by training them to only answer if they're very confident they're correct, you sometimes end up telling users "Sorry, I don't know the answer to that question"
This is frustrating, and a deadend.
It's not about AI replacing jobs or people. It's about AI replacing tasks.
Short clip from
@theallinpod
with
@DavidSacks
and
@friedberg
discussing how AI, in customer support, can elevate (not replace) the work of team members.
God, I love the power of
@OpenAI
's ChatGPT.
Built a personal ChatGPT using
@BarackObama
's Wikipedia page. So it ONLY answers truthful questions from that webpage.
And then you can follow up and get an answer that a 5yr old would understand. Which is always delightful 🥰
This guy reached $18K MRR in 6 months.
He built everything with
@bubble
And grew organically to 37K users
Here is the story of
@RaineyAllDay
and a No-Code AI chatbot. 🧵
We could have kept both products, but we wanted a clean break and to fully focus on just one idea.
So we decided to sell it on
@acquiredotcom
and within a month, it was sold and handed over — finished today!
The product allowed you to dump in a formatted spreadsheet and train a GPT-3 model in under 5 minutes.
We didn't win the hackathon ☹️
But things started to take off.
@dannypostmaa
So so important to train your models — text or image-based!
I just launched a tool to custom train
@OpenAI
models with no code in minutes.
Just upload your spreadsheet and we take care of the rest.
Customer support can be extremely time-consuming & valuable for startups.
You can learn what your customers want. What they don't like about your product. Or just reply to the 5th "can't login" email of the day.
The good and the bad. It's easy to over-engineer customer support.
What a ride over the last 23 days.
Lessons so far:
- Explain in the simplest terms what you offer
- Offer and do only 1 thing well (initially)
- Don’t get bogged down with UX/UI details
- Test different pricing models (we’re on our 3rd!)
What kind of people do this? Use a service for 3 months (with a verified email) and then submit a fraudulent dispute through their bank to get their money back. No email to us 💔
Not even worth the battle or the time to pull together evidence to counter this.
As a founder/hacker/builder, this will never help you unless you’ve discovered alchemy.
Not telling people your idea because you’re worried it’ll be copied or — if you can admit it — because you’re afraid someone won’t think it’s a good idea.
Sharing = a more robust idea.
Giving specific instructions to the
@OpenAI
ChatGPT API is like telling a disobedient child to do something.
Ignore. Try again. Ignore less. Try again.
But, once you find the phrase that works. Magic! 🪄
@OfficialLoganK
@bentossell
We realised instantly how powerful fine-tuning was.
But we also realised how hard it was (esp. for non-technical people).
So we we set out to build a no code AI model builder.
@dannypostmaa
— Incredible serial founder, building a large AI business with v few people.
@marc_louvion
— Lots of lessons in how to quickly build & launch products. Will make you feel sloow.
@bentossell
— Extracting signal from the noise in AI news w/ clean & crisp summaries.
Your daily reminder that Toptal — freelancer marketplace with 1.3m organic visits per day!! — gets 10% of its traffic from a TomatoTimer tool.
Building free side products for your audience can be a really cost-effective way to attract new users and traffic.