🚪How Alex built and grew an AI startup with no-code to $18,000 MRR in 6 months
The No-Code Succes Story of Alex Rainey and My Ask AI
Hi, Katt here.
Welcome to the 206 new subscribers this week. 👯
Just got back from a workout session. Everyone is in bed, the house is quiet. I love these moments for a final proofread and a spam score test.
This week’s interview is one with impressive numbers. Alex Rainey breaks down in 3 minutes and 25 seconds:
🕺 Going from big corp to indie
🧪 Unchartered territory with AI products
💰 The business model behind $18K MRR
🏎️ A dev building with No-Code
💥 Growing organically to 37K users
Before we begin, a short spotlight on:
🍬 Gummy Search
A powerful audience research tool for Reddit that helps you finding real problems to solve for that perfect business idea or valuable content ideas.
🎈 4 Cool Finds
Notcode Ideas is a weekly newsletter that shares market-research profitable app ideas that can be built using no-code tools.
NoCode MBA show is the no-code podcast we all have been waiting for.
Create stunning one-page websites with Limey - a new no-code tool to build dream one-page websites.
Raindrop has been my favourite bookmark manager for years. I recently discovered you can take page screenshots so I’m using it for a swipe files too.
BrowseAI helps you to extract data from any website and display it in a clean Airtable base.
*This section is a mix of paid partnerships (in bold) and cool things I use, discovered or made.
🔥 Maker Story
Hey Alex, what is your background?
I started as a tech consultant at Accenture Digital. During those 7 years I learnt a lot but got bored and felt the desperate need to do my own thing. I just had to find that right idea…
Eventually I found the courage to quit and started a travel startup called Pluto. Due to the pandemic and struggling with funding and product-market fit the business wound down in 2022.
During the pandemic I became a father. I decided that I still wanted to work for myself. This time more simple, with no team and no investors.
I started building different small successful (note from Katt: those stories are for another interview 😅) side projects with No-Code. And this was the moment I really got hooked on No-Code and building my own products. I met Mike, my now co-founder, and we decided to team up so we could go faster.
And then OpenAI released an update of their API…
And this gave you the idea for your product?
Suddenly things were possible that had never been possible before. We decided we wanted to help companies to have their own private ChatGPT. So we started My Ask AI.
My AskAI is the easiest way to create an AI assistant for your team (or yourself). You can choose to add content or to connect with Notion or Google Drive. Within minutes, you can start asking any question about all your data. And you get answers to your specific questions in just a few seconds.
What went into building the first version?
Before we even started to build a real product, we started with a pre-sale. This generated around $5k in pre-sales. We knew we were onto something…
So while I focused on building the product, Mike was speaking to countless businesses and understanding their use cases in more detail.
The biggest challenge is keeping up with all the new releases and the competition. There are a lot of hungry and competent teams building in the same space. It feels like you're in a constant sprint race and you get distracted by all kind of different releases. It's non-stop.
What is your No-Code stack?
However I have some coding experience, I’m much quicker with No-Code so we went for:
Bubble to run the entire website and the backend. We chose it because it's a sophisticated web app builder. Very powerful but also very easy to use. There are some situations where code might be quicker or easier. But Bubble allows us to move at such speed, launching large new features within days. Nothing has ever taken us more than a week.
Crisp for customer service
Stripe for payments
Amplitude for usage analytics
Customer IO for email
How are you making money?
All the users start as free users, completely self-serving themselves and upgrading once they see the value after using MyAsk AI for the first time. So we offer 4 plans:
One free plan with some limits on content uploaded and questions per month.
A hobby plan for individuals at $19.99/mo
A pro plan for businesses and startups at $99/mo
An enterprise plan at $499/mo for large businesses
Since launching in February 2023 we were able to grow My Ask AI to 37,000 users, 420 paying subscribers, $18K MRR and 50K visitors per month.
Tell me your marketing secrets?
95% of the growth and user base has come from organic growth channels.
Building in public on social media
Product Hunt Launch
Submitting to tool directories
Getting newsletter mentions
The product is now regularly being recommended to others on social media and we see referrals increase. Next to these organic growth channels we started to experiment with some paid marketing, like paid newsletters and paid ads.
Can you share some of these directories?
What are the biggest challenges you've faced
The biggest challenge is the answer quality in our app. It's the hardest thing to affect and because it’s so new it’s uncharted territory how you solve this problem at scale. It's the area we spend most of our time within the product.
The other biggest challenge is distribution. Neither me or Mike are marketers by trade, so this type of work doesn’t come naturally to us. We are learning, putting in the hours and trying all kinds of channels.
Can you share some final wise words?
Just start and get something out sooner rather than later. Cliche, but so many builders taking 3-6 months before releasing something. Nothing should take that long.
Don't just build in public thinking you'll get more traffic/marketing. It will only really bring in new traffic if you're writing content about a topic your target audience is interested in.
Be ruthless with prioritising your time and what you work. Make sure you're working on the things that will actually move the needle with your business. Unfortunately it's easier and more satisfying in the short run to focus on little things, polishing the product, perfecting copy, etc. You need to focus on the big things.
Thanks for sharing your amazing story Alex.
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"Be ruthless with prioritising your time and what you work." - Just what I needed to hear.