The recent collapse of Builder.ai was one of the most spectacular failures in tech history, but what exactly went wrong? The answer unveils a tale of lies and deceptive marketing that fooled some of the largest investors out of billions of dollars.
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90% AI companies are wrappers that add nothing of value, just making API calls to ChatGPT
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Nothing of value indeed, that regular non-techies wouldn’t want to pay for just a little bit of convenience.
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Lol, bonoboism.
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This is impressive. What service do you offer? What’s the profit margin after server expenses and OpenAI calls?
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It’s a small Tauri app that acts as your “Jarvis”, if you may. Cost next to nothing to build and deploy, save for time. Open source and “free” with release done via GitHub so I don’t have to worry about egress costs. And it’s bring-your-own-api key so no LLM costs for me. Makes money through a premium tier. Monthly maintenance only unless sth breaks, but I did invest a good 6 months last year.
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What was your marketing strategy like?
None at first really. I’m a dev first and a marketer second. But I initially built and shared a bit of my progress on Twitter communities like Build in Public and Web Developers. Quickly learnt I was wasting time trying to sell to other devs.
Pivoted to Reddit and posted on subs like r/startups, r/Reactjs, (almost got booted) r/Entrepreneur and r/Microsaas.
Also posted on H News, BHW, Indie Hackers, Product Hunt, Uneed and the usual directories. Got some traffic but nothing too crazy.
Facebook groups ended up being my goldmine. A niche I never even considered during my PMF analysis is where it all changed. And I go semi-viral on Twitter and TikiToko (targeteted US, Cnd, AUS, UK, US, Spain, Mexico with a very tedious posting process but it works really well) occasionally but that unexpected niche is my biggest source.
Now I just do SEO and SM (mostly publishing posts, no ad campaigns and such) and shamelessly plug wherever it makes sense (except here for obvious reasons) and my email list is slowly growing.
Also raised prices twice, not by much but testing what people will pay and surprised that people just buy. I have no subscriptions but I use a credits system and that’s my only source of MRR, and it’s little at this point but I should see it stabilize at a not-so-bad figure with time. The conversion rate from free OS to premium is pretty bad though as most guys are devs who’ll just fork the repo and spin their own build. Most revenue is from lifetime purchases ($199!). Next, I think a free CRX will be a good addition to the funnel.
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You never thought of injecting a sizeable budget for sponsored posts on saas launch sites like producthunt? Or botting interactions and paying for social media promos?
Anyway, thanks for the in-depth response. This is all really interesting.
I’d have thought reddit would be the big one for a product like yours.
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@cortedivoire Hauna contribution hapa?
Siwezi waste 26 minutes of my life watching chieth
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Yep, one would think so but these things have a way of surprising you, pleasantly or otherwise. As for ads, I’ll go big when I’ll be looking to sell and that will be once I’ve ran the gamut of scaling solo till there isn’t much I can squeeze out organically. ROI on my time is still pretty good so no point burning cash on ads.
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Good luck to you on that bro
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