How To Make $228K MRR With AI Chatbots

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# The Creator

Yasser is a young founder of Chatbase, a company that creates custom AI for any website. He started as a college student with a bright idea. Two months before the release of ChatGPT API Yasser explored GPT3 API and found its potential. He built Chatbase in two weeks and launched it in February. Now, with over $228K MRR he’s planning to expand to $1M MRR.

Even after Open AI’s announcement of GPTs his business wasn’t affected and gained churn rate and new subscribers.

Chatbase’s team has only 7 employees and Yasser shared that he’s working 10-12 hours a day to keep up with a rapid growth of his project.

An inspiring example of when a night-long hustle transforms into a real business for a lifetime

# What he built

Chatbase is the easiest way to create a chatbot for your website. It allows you to create and train your own chatbot using your data. It enables you to add a chat widget to your website or interact with the chatbot through the API. Chatbase offers a range of use cases, such as customer support, lead generation, content discovery, ecommerce assistance, and knowledge base creation. The possibilities are endless!

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# From 0 to $228K MRR

Chatbase was probably the first “ChatGPT for your data” SaaS tool. From here, in Yasser’s words, it wasn’t hard to make it go viral. It had the “wow” effect and thrived on overall AI and ChatGPT hype going on.

But how did he managed to convert traffic into sales? Firstly, Yasser made a few tweets that went viral, like this one:

Then, big AI influencers started posting about it. Including this feature in Rowan’s tutorial:

Even though hype is crucial for attracting customers, it’s not the best long-term strategy. Yasser utilized other methods to gain traction on his launch:

Launching on Product Hunt
Posting to relevant subreddits (a story works better than "here is a tool I made")
Being active on Indie Hackers
Submitting Chatbase to AI directories

> btw check our partners - gptacademy.co

With this strategy, the traffic hasn’t dipped and continues to grow.

A story Yasser posted on Reddit promoting his release:

Share this post with friends, especially those interested in AI success stories!

# Marketing

Yasser openly shared his launch strategy that got him over 220,000 sign ups. Here are tips he shared on Twitter:

1. Build hype:

This is easier said than done. Easiest way to do this if you don't have an audience is to ride an existing hype wave.

In my case that was AI and LLMs. Riding the wave means building a product thats completely free to use and the sole purpose of the product is to WOW people.

It doesn't have to be super useful or have the perfect business model. It just needs to make people think "wow, never thought that was possible".

Some examples of this was roomgpt by @nutlope, Headshot pro by @dannypostmaa, all the PDF AI apps, Jenni AI by @Davidjpark96, Tab by @AviSchiffmann, AI generated Drake song, AI generated voice over tools, etc..

Many of these tools have changed after their target audience, offerings, business model after launch. The goal of the first launch was to create hype around the product.

Of course creating the same tools mentioned here will not generate much hype now since people now know about these tools.

AI is still advancing super fast and there is a lot of opportunities like this.

Some opportunities in AI that can generate a lot of hype: AI agents, OpenAI function calling, ChatGPT with image inputs, hardware/wearable AI.

Here’s our tutorial on No-Code Custom GPTs and Assistants:

Make sure to also check out tutorial on Assistants API:

2. Launch free product:

Once you have the product that can wow people, launch if for free at first. If many people use it and it becomes unsustainable for free, that's an amazing problem to have.

First launch on twitter and reddit. If your product is good, you can go viral on twitter since people on twitter are very interested in new products.

Reddit is much harder. Redditors always attack self promotion posts. The best way to tackle this is to make sure there is no pricing tab, or anything that makes them think this is a paid product.

I used to add a tag 'ref=reddit' to the URLs I post on reddit and would hide the pricing tab if this ref exists.

Also make sure that they don't need to sign up to try, it would be ideal if they just click on the link and try it immediately.

3. Add payments and relaunch

Now is the time for your real launch. Post on the same platforms announcing pro features. Announce that you will be launching on product hunt.

Try to create as much hype around your ProductHunt launch as you can. @TakoTreba

is a master at this. Keep talking about your product hunt launch and tell people about your launch plan. Let them know the date a week in advance and keep talking about the launch for the whole week.

Here is a list of platforms where you can launch your product: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1f-lbmq6Z57amcAvyr7jaRs6JvMtWnqWEbxJParLRgUA/edit#gid=0

4. If you decide to launch on hackernews, don't read the comments.

5. Know how to followup with your users.

Find an email automation tool to send customers emails depending on how they interacted with your website. For example, send an email after 3 days to people who visited the pricing page and didn't convert.

Talk to them and learn what they like and what they want to see next.

Here’s a blueprint of email automation for any product

6. You might do everything here perfectly and it might not work. That's life.

Yasser analyzed and hacked Reddit. He shared his insights, and here are the highlights:

Avoid “Here is a tool I build”. These posts get lots of negativity and get downvoted very fast.
People love stories. Tell a story and mention a product in it. It can be a personal story, a problem that you faced or anything else.
Ignore negative comments. Engaging in a debate on Reddit is a useless waste of time.
People are more likely to upvote a free product.

Here’s a very cool trick you can do! Add a '?ref=reddit' in the link to your product, then remove the pricing page if that ref exists

Add value. Share some insights, and details, or give some advice.

And here’s our tutorial on tools forAI startups and guide on launching a startup including Reddit insights:

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# Competition

Chatbase is a very obvious idea given the hype around vector embeddings and LLMs. A new tool doing the same thing is launching every day. You can look at competition as a bad thing, or as a good thing because it means that there’s a demand for what you’re building. At the end of the day, if you’re doing something no one else is doing, you’re either a genius or just wasting your time.

A great solution to this problem is to either stay small and find a niche to dominate, or to raise as much money as possible and grow. But there’s another solution in between - build a small team of 3-4 people and aim for a $10M ARR business.

Now main competitors of Chatbase are Chatfuel, which partners with Meta :

And Fini AI, made by Deepak Singla.

Here’s what Yasser thinks about competition :

# Summary

Yasser, through his own example, demonstrates how one can achieve great success as an ordinary student with fresh ideas, effective marketing, and hard work. Yasser is now a rising star in startups with his incredible tool. He teaches us how to sell effectively, embrace competition, and set ambitious goals. Follow him on Twitter to stay tuned for new insights.

What are your thoughts on Yasser’s journey?