I sold my AI SaaS

0:00in 2023 I built a landing page generator using gp4 and stable diffusion within a few month after launching I made $15,000 in Revenue but for some reason I couldn't grow it so I ended up sending the product for $35,000 in this video I'm going to break down how I got the IDE how I built the first version of the product and got the first customers and how and why I ended up selling it in March 2023 AI is so big and everybody is talking about AI tools chpg and all those AI services that I decide to go all in and build bu my own AI tools as well as a solo developer

0:32who's built about 20 websites in the past 2 years I thought it would be really cool if we could just input text and get a learing page or many websites generated for like something like a portfolio a yoga studio um a software learing page and so I start to build and the product was extremely simple um customers would have to fill a form uh describing the tone of the voice they want to be using uh the colors they would like to choose for the landing page uh describe their product describe their customers and choose among one of those three packages so for $19 they would get an entire Ling page generated

1:07and they will get more variation more illustrations more images uh with bigger packages here's a demo of a ling page that's been generated with my first version of the product um you can see here it's like a website uh the components are those that I built myself and they are basically empty so you would have this pressing section that I built that was empty and then when the customer would pay I would make a request to the gp4 API to fill in uh information uh by titles and descriptions based on the customer input it will also create um not always really good images uh but that would be

1:44relevant to the to the headlines um it would also try to match the colors of uh the websites based on on the image and the customer would be able to update a few things here so if they want to change the theme for instance they can go with whatever they want from the theme and if they're happy with it they can download the code HTML code or just share the code with their team members um it was really minimal the resit were not incredible but it was working and it was pretty impressive to be able to make these with just a few um inputs and so I decided to launch on

2:19product tense and the product ended up being uh ranking third of the day which I was really happy with uh back then I was building in public on Twitter so sharing my progress there and I already had um probably 15,000 followers which helped me boost the product hunt launch I also launched on Hacker News uh didn't get much traffic but little push and uh nice comments surprisingly from Hacker News so I was pretty satisfied with it as well within about 2 month the product had made about €7,000 which is roughly $8,000 I was pretty satisfied with it but then I realized the name of my startup was the same as a bigger soft

2:59software company so I had to Rebrand the entire website and so I rebranded lending AI into Mech lending I got rid of the AI wordings so that anyone who wants to make a ling page but is not familiar with artificial intelligence would still understand the product uh un likee before it would be simpler no form just people type what they want to make the site I also added this little demo on the landing page that uh was quite I catchy to still show that you can input a text and get a website generated also added some of potential landing page uh that were actually made with the product

3:34and I bumped the price a little bit from 29 to from $19 to $29 per landing page the big difference lie in the user dashboard uh unlike before where you would get the lending page generated and not be able to do much with it now users would log in and be able to edit the entire landing page so that includes um changing the headlines changing the images by using either stock photo library um uploading your picture or generating AI photos um adding removing buttons adding sections to the site changing the colors of the site just like before the themes um also the phones as well a bunch of things that

4:12could be done here um then people could preview the site and if they are happy with it they would get uh a link so that they will be able to share that with um anyone and start to bring traffic to the landing page and convert into whatever this is they wanted I also added Analytics uh per landing page so that people uh have a little clue of what's going on there the new product was more polished and I decided to launch it so I went back to my Twitter I shared uh this time a little video that explains how it works and I launched it on product tant

4:44I did not get the batch this time but I think uh people were used to what I shipped before so these got a bit less attention but I was getting really decent traffic um after the launch people started to reshare this on AI newsletter and it it got 10 to 15K visitors uh per month and I think within 3 months I had made almost 9,000 Us doll uh which was quite nice I'm living here in Bali and it would definitely pay more than the bills um although there were a little less conversions in terms of visitor to uh paid customers and I think it's because I entered the market of big

5:24landing page Builders so framer word WordPress um webflow would compete with I would compete with those uh big guys and as a solo prer with limited resources um it was really hard to commit users to pay for my uh entire website generator when they have framer as a competitor and from that moment I knew it was time to sell because I had no idea how to get it to the next level in October 2023 when I decided to sell the startup I abandoned it which means I would still do customer support but I would not add any feature or I would not do any marketing meanwhile I listed the

6:00startup on aire.com which is a uh small startup acquisition marketplace where you have a bunch of uh buyers that are willing to have a look at your product after listing the startup I got dozens of offer within one day I think and uh some of them were promising so I started to engage engage with the buyers and the process is always similar at least for micro startup like mine where you would have to sign um an agreements on which assets will be transferred um in my case it would be a domain name the code base the customer base the datab and all that and uh after a few days chatting with a

6:33buyer one of them decided to buy the startup and without even having any phone call the money lending in my bank account we agreed on $35,000 and after the cut I got 33.6k in my bank account which uh seems like crazy knowing that we never uh got each other on the phone um this is actually my third startup acquisition this year I sold two other mro startup and I wrote a little blog article about it if you want I'll leave a link in the description if that helps you um this is not a lifechanging amount of money but 35k plus 15K Revenue that's $50,000 which where I live here in valy

7:11would basically buy me two years of whatever this is I want to do so I would get two years of peacefulness retirement or two years of grinds if I want and this is exactly what I did after selling the startup I keep shipping more apps and now my small like really tiny internet businesses are making this month January 2024 50 $50,000 Us in Revenue zero employee and 90% profit and I couldn't have done it without having the clarity and the peace of mind that uh those uh startup sell gave me last year so I really recommend you to um shop daily find a product a problem that

7:48you have that you want to solve ship a very small tiny version of the the product and launch it and see where that goes cuz you might U end up getting some sales and up be able to to sell it and buy a few uh years of retirement or Grant cheers