Zero to $64,000/Month in 3 Months With AI

From a recent interview on Indie Hackers…

Just a few months ago Yasser Elsaid was in his 4th year of college, interning at FAANG companies like Meta and Tesla. Then he placed his side hustle in front of the tidal wave that is OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

The timing worked out. The chatbot company he bootstrapped, Chatbase.co, is already doing a mindblowing $64,000 in monthly recurring revenue. His traffic hasn’t dipped since the initial launch. He just hired two employees to help with the overwhelming demand. And no: he didn’t pass all of his university classes. Nor does he care.

Chatbase lets you train ChatGPT on your content and then embed a chatbot on your website. Visitors to your site can interact with the chatbot, which provides responses based on your content 🤖

Yasser launched the first version of Chatbase with this tweet in early February.

He says in the IH interview…

Chatbase actually started as a “ChatGPT for your PDFs” tool. It was the easiest and most obvious use case. You just uploaded a PDF, then you could chat with its content. The MVP for this version took me about two months to build. I tweeted it to my 16 twitter followers…

My tweet went viral. I didn’t even have a pricing page yet. Anyone could upload as many documents and send as many messages as they wanted. As soon as I saw the traction, I stopped doing anything university related and focused 100% of my time on Chatbase. I knew I couldn’t mess up this opportunity.

I ended up failing two classes, but it was 100% worth it!

By May 11th Yasser was reporting $60,000 in monthly recurring revenue, despite his office consisting of only 2 chairs and a can of Red Bull 🤯

A few things that have helped Chatbase do really well…

• “being really early in the market”
• “taking advantage of all the hype around ChatGPT”
• “twitter and AI influencers posting about it” (source)
• “posting to relevant subreddits”

Yasser has a post about marketing on Reddit 👈

One tip he shares there…

People are much more likely to upvote a product if it is free. Here is a very cool trick you can do!

Add a ‘?ref=reddit’ in the link to your product, then hide the pricing page if that ref exists.

Chatbase has four price plans, ranging from $19 to $399 per month.

But it’s also available as a $29 lifetime deal on AppSumo (aff link) for the next week or so 😱