I was stuck at $100 for 2 years until I made one change. Now my app makes $10K/month

0:00So, my name is Piotr, and I'm built an AI rendering tool. Now, it makes 10K per month. This is Piotr, a developer with a full-time job building his own projects on the side. But, he had one little problem. For two full years, his main project was stuck at about $100 a month. But, for the two first years, it was a

0:20nightmare. That was until he made one simple change just 6 months ago that skyrocketed his SaaS from over $150 to over $10,000 a month. So, I asked Piotr to come on to the channel to break all of this down. In this episode, we'll dive into the simple SaaS that he built on nights and weekends while he had a full-time job, the biggest mistake that kept him from growing for over 2 years, and how that led to the one pivot that drove him to $10,000 a month fast. All right, this

0:50one is going to be good. Let's dive in. I'm Pat Walls, and this is Starter Story. Piotr, welcome to the channel. I'm pumped to have you on here. Tell me, who are you? What app did you build, and what's your story? So, my name is Piotr, and I'm built Visualizer, an AI [clears throat] rendering tool for architects and interior designers. Now, it makes 10K per month. I launched almost 3 years ago. But, for the two first years, it was a nightmare. I was actually stuck at $100 per month. But, now, after pivot 6 months ago, the revenue exploded. I did everything solo while working full-time as a software engineer. Today, I'm

1:28excited to share what the pivot was and how I grew it. Cool. Can you explain what your app or your SaaS does? Pull up some of your revenue screenshots. Tell me what this is and who's buying this. Yeah, sure. So, Visualizer is basically for architects and interior designers. Creating realistic visualizations is time-consuming. [music] Thanks to the AI, you can now do it in seconds. So, you just upload a sketch or a model to my app, ask it to make it realistic. [music] In a matter of seconds, now you can present to your clients with the home or interior and in different designs, [music] different styles, different colors,

2:04whatever you like. I'm having a chat called the Vizi. So, it's an AI assistant that help people to understand what they want. So, you don't have to understand how the prompt engineering works and it will send it to AI image creation services and it will bring you realistic visualization to you. That's awesome. Could you pull up some of your revenue dashboards? I'm going to

2:24have some more questions for you. So, here we have our current MRR is 8.2, but the combining with one-time payments, we are close to 10,000 per month. So, as you can see, we are trying to reach to the architects and photoreal renders for your [music] next client review. So, you basically want to, you know, present the client what their new home will look like. And here we have like a simple video fully created in the app. So, you can see from sketch to the

2:49realistic car. So, then we have a sketch of a beautiful home. [music] Then, you have very realistic render. Boom, the car is there. [music] Currently, you can start trial for 7 days for free and after that you have $35 per month or $80 per month, [music] depending on how much you want to render. Currently, I have around 300 active subscribers. When it comes to daily stats, now it's over 300 daily on the landing page, around five to 10 new trials daily with 25% converting to

3:21paid. Okay, cool. Let's talk about your background. How did you get here? Well, I'm a software developer with over 20 years of experience. I'm based in Poland. And I'm currently working full-time as a tech lead at Polish software house. I spent over two decades working for others and I decided to to change something and work for myself. Nice. How did you come up with this idea and know that hey, this had potential

3:43that it could potentially make money? This idea actually came to me like three years ago, right when AI image generation first started making waves. So, I saw the potential, but I didn't want to create another generic AI toy. I just wanted to [music] find a specific niche that I can cover with. So, I decided to, you know, build it and here

4:03we are. Nice. Tell me about the build process. How long did it take you to build this to get this to launch? Tell me about that build timeline. The first version took approximately 5 months after hours, obviously. And V1, like we we probably know, was node-based system similar to comfy UI. I had a direct feedback from people, "Okay, it's too hard to understand for us." So, I decided to pivot and to simplify the product to chat-based solution with the AI prompt assistant, because I know that people have troubles with prompt engineering. So, I decided to create a layer of the AI that will help people first understand what they want, ask

4:41follow-up questions, and then build perfect prompt for them. It helped me go from $150 per month to nearly $10,000 per month. What I think is so cool about Piotr's story is that actually simplifying his product down to essentially a ChatGPT wrapper is what actually created the growth. A lot of developers watching this are wondering, "Okay, how can I add more features to my product? How can I make it more technical and more complicated?" When this story right here is an example of when keeping it simple actually creates growth. So, if this idea is interesting to you, well, I've got something for you. We've put together our free database over 50-plus

5:17AI wrapper businesses that are making money right now. These are not complex, over-complicated apps. These are just apps that are built on top of tools like ChatGPT and Claude and similar to what Piotr built today and what's clearly working. If you download this database, you're going to get real businesses with real revenue numbers, pricing, and breakdowns of how they actually grew. If you are ready to build something that can make money, just head to the first link in the description to get inspired [music] and see what is actually

5:45working. I promise you won't regret it. All right, let's get back to the episode. Okay, well, let's talk about that. This is the thing that I think is actually the most interesting thing about your business that you built and the story behind it is this idea of the product pivot. You didn't necessarily pivot the audience, you didn't necessarily pivot the idea completely, you just pivoted the way the product is

6:06presented. Can you show off this pivot? Potentially the before [music] and the after and explain what made your revenue go like this. The notes system was really complicated. First, you need to upload some image. It [music] creates one note. Then you have to connect to another note, write something down, then click generate. You have a lot of different parameters around. So, as you can see, it looks like ChatGPT, but we can just upload some image and just ask, create real estate image. Now we have floor plan, so you can select what you want. Some materials, so let's say raw concrete and blue hour, right? And let's hit

6:44generate. As you can see, it's it's done, right? Wow. That is cool. You can also produce videos. So, this is the the video. Oh my gosh. Okay, I see. So, now it's something you can send your clients and land the deal. [music] Yeah, no, that's that's amazing. Before we get to some of the results of it, what's like your big takeaway from this this pivot for anyone that's watching this who's also building products and wondering, okay, why don't I have, you

7:10know, why why am I not seeing traction? I think I stick too long that my idea was great and that was hard for me to pivot earlier. So, I used simplicity of ChatGPT and just apply to my app. That's amazing. What did things start to look [music] like once you made this change and how you knew things were

7:29actually working? I looked at the data, right? The data always said the truth. Before I had like only couple of sign-ups, but after this change, people started rendering. So, it made very easy for them. With that pivot, I also decided to test one thing. One-time payments are not bringing repeated revenue. So, we need to change to monthly recurring payments, and that

7:51worked. That's awesome. Looking back on this multi-year experience and finally figuring out the unlock, what would be your like big lessons and takeaways? Next time you go and build a product, or if you're going to give advice to another founder, what are your big lessons here? Yeah, sure. So, friction in your product is killing your conversion. For 2 years, I blamed slow growth and marketing, but when the real problem was that my product was too hard to use. The fix was removing the thing standing between a visitor and their first success. And the second lesson is charge subscriptions from day one. Subscriptions are the thing that drive the growth. You need to

8:29start charging from day one, and don't be afraid that someone will not pay. If the product is valuable, then they will pay. Absolutely. What kept you going with this idea specifically? How did you know that it might work out 2 years later? One, this is my first product ever released. So, it was really hard for me to you know, just remove it from the internet. And the second one was I was looking at the competition. [music] They've worked. So, the competition is working. Why there is a lot of

8:55solutions, they have a lot of customers. I thought to myself, it have to [music] work. Why it's not working? I have to find why it's not working for me. And [music] after 2 years and this pivot, it actually works also for me. Let's change topics slightly. What is this What's the tech stack and tools behind a solo product side project like

9:15yours that's doing $10,000 MRR? So, I'm using Cursor, and recently I also bought code. So, those are the two major ones that I actually built products. Then there is a 4 AI. It's actually the third-party service that provides GPU. There is Ahrefs to monitor my SEO. MailerLite for sending emails, email automation. Supabase for database, authentication, storage. Vercel for hosting, and obviously Stripe for payments. And I'm using Next.js and PostHog for monitor, Google Analytics,

9:48and Sentry for error tracking. All right. Well, thank you for sharing that. Last question that we ask all founders who come on Starter Story, what would be your advice to younger Piotr, or for anyone watching this that maybe is a little bit like you, developer, building stuff, maybe overthinking things a little bit? What would be your

10:04advice? Don't build the most powerful product you can. Build the simplest product your customer needs. So, that's why I would tell to my uh younger one, "Skip the complicated note system. Launch the simplest possible version with subscriptions, and hear and listen users' feedback." Great feedback. Congrats. Good luck on your journey of quitting your full-time job and going all in on this. And thanks

10:28for coming on and sharing everything. Thanks, Bot. Gus, producer, what do you think of Piotr and Vizzly? What do I think? When he showed us the tool, I thought, "Man, this is really awesome." Like, I think right now it's at 10,000 a month. You know, like you said in the interview, I could see this really growing cuz it kind of solves a real problem, and it's really easy to use. I was really impressed by the the fact that he stayed at it for multiple years. [music] I don't know why that's sticking with me right now, but I was like, "Man, 2 years at 100 bucks a month." That was something I was

11:00thinking about throughout the interview. I was like, "Man, that's crazy that he did that for so long." So, that's just one thought, but yeah. Yeah, I know. We didn't talk about this in the interview, but I think it came off very obviously that he was passionate about the idea and the problem being solved, and that's not something you can fake, but it's something that you can take away from this video is that like, yeah, nobody would stick at an idea for 2 years they didn't care about. He clearly cared about this idea. Once we saw his product, it was very obvious that he put a lot of time, [music]

11:31effort, blood, sweat, and tears into this thing. This isn't like AI slop. This is like being passionate about a space and a problem that's [music] being solved. Yeah. But yeah, I think it kind of relates to the pivot because I feel like because he kept doing it, he was able to like kind of maneuver his way to the version of the product that actually worked. Speaking from my own experience, you know, I've given up on a lot of things really early and I look back a year later [music] and thought, "Man, if I would have just kept at that, I could have maybe figured that out." Right. The

12:00lesson I'm getting is like because he sort of stayed in it, he was able to like slowly pivot his way to the right path. Right. Yeah, no, I don't think that he would have gotten to the pivot without his passion for the space because his passion for the space led to him talking to customers and empathizing with customers. That probably comes down more to like motivation and excitement about the problem rather than just pure willpower to stay, right? I don't think willpower will ever work. So, as long as you pick something that you're ex- [clears throat] a problem that you're excited about building, eventually you'll probably get to this

12:40point where you realize that, "Hey, this is about the problem being solved. Let me simplify the product. Let me just solve this one little problem for these architects or interior designers." Which led to that. So, that's something you're going to notice with this database that we've linked down to in the description right here, which is over 50 Claude wrappers that are making over $10,000 a month. Look, ChatGPT and Claude, they have billions of users. They love this chat interface. And clearly the lesson here was keep it simple. In that description down there, you're going to

13:10see 50 ideas where they kept it simple. They built a simple AI wrapper and that got them hundreds of customers and thousands of dollars in revenue. You can see those real examples right down there in the description. Download them, check them out. Maybe it will inspire you to build a product around a problem you're passionate about. Check that down there in the description. Otherwise, we'll see

13:29you guys in the next one. Peace.