🚪How Milly built and sold an AI teaching assistent
The No-Code Exit Story of Milly and Tabitha.ai
Hello, Katt here.
I’m back from 2 months of travelling through the USA in an RV 🚐 with my husband and my 2 little kiddo’s 🐥🐥. It is kind of amazing how I could travel and focus 100% on my family + adventures while my (scheduled) newsletters still went out. Very thankful that you all kept reading and even more amazing, the number of subscribers kept growing (+ 600). How cool is that! 🙏
The Exit story this week is with Milly, she is a serial venture builder and it is not her first exit. Every interview, I enjoy her amazing wisdom (read the previous interview here). Learn this time:
🌝 how she solved a problem for her partner
⚒️ the full No-Code stack she used
🪤 what a businesses in a box is
🚪 why it was acquired
Enjoy it and happy building!
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🔥 Maker Interview
Hello Milly, good to talk to you again
Hey everyone, it's great to be back!
My name is Milly Barker-DeStefano and I'm originally from England, but currently living in Connecticut, USA.
I'm an international lawyer turned all-things-entrepreneurship nerd and alongside my work as Chief Growth Officer at a fintech startup, I also run my own digital venture studio where I launch and validate new project ideas in rapid succession and either keep them as part of a portfolio or sell them to other entrepreneurs/investors.
For me, no-code was a natural transition from building WordPress websites. I wanted to learn how to build my own apps and started playing around with products like Softr, Bubble, Webflow, Zapier, and countless other builders and tools. The rest is history, as they say!
Tell us about your product that you made?
My most recent project was tabitha.ai - a powerful AI teaching assistant that lives in your browser tab.
My partner is a teacher and she had mentioned her concern about students using ChatGPT and other AI tools to cheat on essays and the like, so I built her an AI detection tool.
From there, it made sense to develop the tool further with generative AI tools that could help teachers speed up their preparation work. Through the app, you could plan lessons, create assessments, research topics, draft feedback, and much more, easily saving hours of work every week. I created the app as a SaaS and users paid $19 per month.
Which No-Code tools did you use?
Bubble, for the application itself
Stripe, for payments
PriceWell, for managing Stripe-Bubble interactions
MailerLite, for welcome and marketing emails
Postmark, for transactional emails (e.g. password resets)
FreshDesk, for support articles
Reflio, for affiliate marketing
Apollo, for cold email marketing
What went into building the initial version?
I built the MVP (just the AI detection tool) without announcing the project to anyone or trying to get early validation simply because I wanted to know whether I could actually build what I envisioned.
This was the first time I built an application by myself in Bubble, and there were so many unknowns about whether I would be able to successfully integrate AI detection and generative AI APIs the way I wanted, so I didn't really want to tell anyone about the product until I knew I could follow through with it. This went against my usual approach to validating products, but because there were so many unknowns as to whether or not I could actually build this by myself, I felt this was the best approach.
It took me about two weeks of part time work, working a couple of hours every day, to build the MVP of the AI detection app in Bubble. That included everything that you would expect in an app, e.g. sign up/log in authentication, payments, etc. as well as some ‘nice-to-have’ features, such as the ability to save and print reports about the AI that you have detected, etc. I surprised myself, actually, how quickly I was able to build this considering that I didn't have any skills in Bubble before I started (the last Bubble app I sold was built by someone else with minimal development input from me).
What's your business model and how have you grown your revenue?
I adopted a SaaS business model. Because this project was sold at such an early stage, it doesn't really make sense to talk about how I grew the revenue. If I had continued, though, I think I would have focused on increasing the number of free sign ups (it only cost $0.25 to service a free trial user) and then I would have focused on conversion, looking deeply at how the website converted users and what else I could have done in terms of onboarding and helpful nurturing emails etc.
I also would have spoken to users and got their feedback before continuing to develop more tools.
How have you attracted users and grown your product?
I didn't want to spend a crazy amount of time trying to build a community around this particular product. There's nothing wrong with that approach, and I actually think it would be pretty good for an app like this, but I just didn't decide to take that path.
Instead, I wanted something that I could automate and use AI for as much as possible. I decided that I would create social media accounts and create six weeks worth of content in one sitting and schedule it out, and then I would periodically make YouTube videos of the use cases for this product.
The only marketing I did in addition to this was cold email marketing, where I found the email addresses of teachers on Apollo and sent them an email series about what the app could do and how it could help them.
I sold this product at such an early stage that we can't really talk about “growth”... but the initial traction was pretty encouraging. It's a niche product but I still managed to get about 40-50 users signed up before I actually sold the product. Only two of them were paid, though. The rest of them were free trial users (that I had, at the time of sale, done little to try to convert).
Can you tell us more about the acquisition?
I sold this app because, when it comes to my side projects, I recognise that my interest is in the very early stages of the project. I love finding problems, building solutions, and getting the initial customers or users to prove that there is a need in the market. After that point, I don't really have that much interest in growing them in the long run. (I spend most of my day building and growing a fintech startup with the long-term in mind, so for my side projects, I want something different.) If I were to have continued with this app, I would've needed somebody to help me with marketing and, given a few other things that were going on in my life at the time, I decided it wasn't the right time to try to build a team.
With my venture studio, I like to think of what I do as creating “businesses in a box” that other entrepreneurs and investors can pick up and run with. Someone gets to buy a pre-built app with early traction, and I get paid to improve my skills. It’s a win-win.
I listed this app for sale on tinyacquisitions.com and as soon as I listed, the listing got a lot of interest. That's probably because it is a no-code product that uses AI for a very specific problem. It was a great thing to acquire. Within a day, I was contacted by somebody who ultimately bought the product. I sold it for $4,250, and Tiny Acquisitions takes a cut (9.5% platform) from that.
Why did the buyer decide to buy it?
The buyer was interested in learning Bubble, and wanted an application that was already up and running with some initial proof of concept/product market fit, so that he could apply his expertise in growth to take it to the next level. He also had some great contacts in the teaching industry, so I felt that he would be able to get the right kind of feedback and direction on product.
Can you share some numbers/stats?
Revenue - $38 per month
Free users - around 100
Paid users - 2
Visitors - around 600 per month
What's your advice for No-Code Makers who are just starting out?
My advice to no code makers is always the same: If you are going to build a product and you have commercial intentions - i.e. you want to turn it into a business - make sure that you have some meaningful validation first.
In my view, it's no good just asking people if they would sign up for your product. It is also no good opening a waitlist where all people have to do is add their email address. An email address nowadays is very low commitment. It's much better to get some kind of paid validation, whether that is, for example, paying $1 to get a place on a waitlist, or putting credit card details into a pre-payment page so that when your product goes live, you can automatically charge the card.
Whatever it is, make sure that you get some kind of payment intention from your initial user group because otherwise you could be building something that people aren't truly interested in.
Where can we go to learn more about you and your project?
I post about what I'm building on Twitter, so that's probably the best place to find me (@barkerdestefano).
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