🚪How John Rush built and sold the #1 GPT directory
🚪How John Rush built and sold the #1 GPT directory
The No-Code Exit Story of John Rush and AllGPTs
Hello there,
Welcome to 58 new subscribers. 🙏
I talked with legendary serial indiehacker John Rush.
Read about:
✨ From vc startup to 30 bootstrapped products
🧰 Building the #1 GPT directory
🔥 Going viral and how to monetize that
🚪Being acquired for side project marketing
Enjoy and happy building.
PS: missed last week’s interview? Read here how Jeremy turned a no-code mvp into a $4,000,000 startup
Spotlight ✨
TaskMagic is like an automated virtual assistant. It turns your walkthrough videos into automations. If a human can do it on the web, it can be automated.
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Otto lets you use AI agents to help enrich lists, research companies, or read hundreds of documents in minutes, all through a native table interface. Here is a great tutorial.
Keak launches A/B tests and automatically makes changes to your website
NoCodeUK rebranded to CreateWith. Their mission is to empower humans to create with AI and NoCode. Don’t miss their conference, podcast (I’m a big fan!) and newsletter.
I loved these comments about how to decrease costs if your startup has a free plan.
🔥 No-Code Founder Interview
Learn every week from a real world no-code success story
Hello! What's your background?
My name is John Rush. I was born in a small village in Turkey. When I was 18 I got the chance to study computer science in Norway. During that time I created my first startup, a platform that helped with student assignments.
I was able to sell this for my first million. It gave me the determination to drop out of university and dive full-time into the world of startups.
Then, I spent 10 years building a vc-backed startup (filmgrail). It was a roller coaster with wins but also a lot of losses. I invested most of my money in the startup but also lost most of it (read the full story here) . I had to lay off all employees, niche down and drop most customers. Eventually I stabilized the company and automated and delegated things.
My next startup, I wanted to do on my own terms. I pivoted into indie making in 2022 and launched around 30 products.
My main product is MarsX. A dev platform that merges NoCode/Code/AI on top of a large gallery of micro apps so you can build very fast. I use MarsX to build all my SaaS tools. Like that I built Indexrusher and SEObot.
One of my other products is DevHunt. I experienced that launching on Product Hunt was hard. You have to battle against these huge VC-Backed companies. So I built an alternative. Today it's the top #1 launchpad for dev tools.
I also bought a no-code website builder Unicorn Platform for $0.8M. I grew it from 40,000 to 200,000 users (read the full story here).
Now I use Unicorn Platform to build directories very fast. Like AllGPTs, Osssoftware and Nextjsstarter.
Tell me more about AllGPTs?
I was watching the OpenAI demo day. Before the event there had been rumours that soon you would be able to create your own ChatGPTs. But I didn't know yet how it would be called. From the moment they said “Custom GPT” I went to GoDaddy and bought the domain. It took me 2 hours to build and launch a directory of all the custom GPTs I could find. Overnight it went viral, becoming the most popular GPT directory. The key factor was the sorting. There were so many GPTs to choose from, but my directory sorted it based on backlinks on the internet (similar to google ranking). It helped visitors see the best GPTs on the top.
Which No-Code platforms did you use?
As with all my products, I used my own tools to go fast:
Unicorn Platform: To create the directory fast
Google Sheets: As database for all data of the GPTs
AI scraper: to scrape google search results and fill the database
What is the business model?
Thanks to it going viral, it had over a million users visiting the website so it was easy to sell ads. There were many AI founders reaching out to me, offering their sponsorship in exchange for a banner on the home page. I charged between between $199 and $499.
How have you attracted users and grown your product?
Since the domain name was AllGPTs, organic traffic from Google exploded from day 1. People would search for "All GPTs” and my directory would pop up on top.
Social media mentions were big too as it was such a hot topic. Big AI influencers mentioned my directory in their social media posts and newsletters.
In total I had over 2 million people visiting the website, 5,000 discord members, 10,000 newsletter subscribers and in a short time it made $10,000 in revenue.
How did the acquisition happen?
A few months ago, I realized that the GPT hype was over. It's not the "next big thing" as most thought so the traffic dropped (but still pretty good). The directory and community required time. And I prefer running directories on auto-pilot.
I decided to sell it to someone who can invest time in it. I posted on X that I wanted to sell it for $15,000. I had a 3 DMs in about 5 min, I sold it to the first one.
Tell us more about the seller?
AllGPTs was acquired by Chipp, a startup that lets you build your own AI assistants. They have an overlapping audience with my directory. This was a perfect match, as they could use it as side project marketing to drive traffic to their main product.
Some words from Scott, the founder of Chipp.
We focus on asymmetric upside in acquisitions and engineering. What is a small bet with a potential big upside. We also prioritize ease. John was easy to work with and happy to help with handoff.
We bought AllGPTs for 3 reasons: awareness (it helps become Chipp more known), traffic (it drives traffic to Chipp and our customers their GPTs) and data (it will provide us interesting insights in what the most popular GPTs are).
We will keep AllGPTs as the best directory of custom GPTs. We will provide workshops for AllGPTs users to learn how to build powerful agents. We will also give AllGPTs users tools to sell their GPTs so they can start and grow businesses with their tools.
What's your advice for people just getting started?
Spend less time building and more time marketing. The design and features aren't as important as you think. Marketing is king.
Thanks for sharing your story John! You can follow John building in public on X and check out all his products on his website.
🍿 Katt builds in public
My actions, fails and wins on the road to ramen profitability with no-code
I have been creating pages (example) around relevant long-tail keywords to get organic traffic for Build The Keyword. They are not getting a lot of impressions so I asked for advice on Twitter on how I could improve these pages. In the comments, I received an amazing detailed video from Vukasin Ilis (thank you!). Main takeaway: check out the first results in google for the keyword and see what kind of content Google favours and ranks on top. I did that and it were all very long listicle blog posts.
So that is what I started working on too. But it went so slow and it wasn’t even ready after a week (yes, I procrastinated it a lot). My plan was to create a lot of articles like that but that was not going to work.
So Monday I finally took some time to make use of my Claude subscription.
I set up a Claude project
I gave it simple custom instructions (target audience, my product concept, what kind of content it should return)
I added 10 newsletter issues as knowledge to understand tone of voice and product concept
Now I prompt it every time for a new ‘chapter’
Writing goes so much faster because it helps me out of the ‘what should I write’ paralysis. I still rewrite and add intro/cta/images myself. Like that, I was able to publish 4 blog articles in 1 day and I see myself writing 50 more of these.
🙌 When you’re ready, here’s how I can help
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