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🚀 How I grew my generative AI startup to 100 users in < 1 month with no funding

In January, I started working on Silatus - which generates product requirements documents from short text prompts. The generative AI explosion had just begun and was becoming increasingly saturated and competitive.

Nonetheless, I was able to grow my little upstart to over 100 users in less than one month with no funding, spending, or formal marketing experience. In fact, I consider myself terrible at marketing. How? Let's take a quick look.

Scoping the Project

First, I had to figure out what to build. Having built many bad products before, I knew that I needed to build a true MVP - whatever that means. I also knew that the MVP needed to be scoped to a very specific, niched persona. IndieHackers constantly espouse this. Focus on a narrow market that you can help to solve a very specific pain point. After conversations with some great mentors, advisors, and brainiacs, I decided to build a very simple landing page - silatus.com. The app would do only one thing: generate a product requirements document from short text prompts.

Along the way, there were many other ideas raised and that I tried to pursue (and probably still will). The biggest idea of them all was... well... really big - to generate app mockups from short text prompts. I got a little distracted from the original goal and started to make progress on the mockups front. It would require training a foundational model, which I had experience doing with text-to-speech models. However, I quickly learned that it would take much more effort, and money, than I was willing to put into an MVP to get the model ready. So... back to product requirements document generation.

Building the Project

As I mentioned, part of the trick to getting my MVP out so quickly was reusing code that I had used many times before. I had to work smarter, not harder. So...
I reused everything I could from the logo to the domain name to the code. I knew that there was no point in changing anything, despite suggestions by some to pick up a new name or build a new user interface.

It took me just a couple (partial) weekends of low-stress work to get the MVP built. It was a single page relying on the same database and framework components as a previous project I created under the same name. I reused so much code that I didn't even have to replace any hard-coded content within my app. I created some new database tables to create an appropriate data model for the scenario, wrote a few lines of business logic to connect to OpenAI's APIs and process requests, and tidied up old Kubernetes deployment scripts to get the web server, SSL certificates, Redis cache, and queues up and running (database is AWS RDS managed).

Launching the Project

Like I said, I consider myself to be a terrible marketer (if you're a good one and want to be a co-founder, please reach out to me at [email protected]). Marketing is also something that takes energy away from me, while coding is something that gives me energy. I knew that building a generative AI project in the midst of a generative AI boom would help my marketing, enabling me to leverage my strengths to compensate for my weaknesses.

I decided to launch Silatus under a waitlist. Why?

I put the app together very, very quickly and I didn't have confidence that it would work well. In fact, the very first iteration that I onboarded users to didn't work. I also decided to launch the project for free, so a waitlist allowed me to control the flow of users and keep my costs down. To this day, I still have users in the queue as I grow to make sure I can handle the growth.

Growing the Waitlist

Now for the secret sauce: how I grew Silatus so easily with no cost.

I sent emails.

That simple. I sent product managers emails telling them that I built something for them and that they should check it out. I made sure that my emails were focused and relevant. Nobody wants a random spam email that doesn't pertain to them.

Within a couple weeks of sending a few emails every day, my waitlist hit 100 users!

Now, I'm focused full-time on iterating Silatus based on feedback, acquiring new users, raising funding, and repeating - in that order. If you're interested in joining me or learning more, don't hesitate to reach out - [email protected].

Cheers! 😄

  1. 2

    I don't understand how did you reach product owner to ask them to see your product ? with Linkedin DM cold ? 🧐

  2. 2

    AI is hot right now. 100 signups is great but it's so hot you can take any explodingideas.co or trends.co idea, put a AI edge on it and get a ton of signups.

    i did it with readermax.com, got 100 downloads in 3 days. retention of the AI startup i think is the most important thing rn.

  3. 2

    Very interesting, some more details would be welcome. What I am curious to know is; how did you get all the e-mails and information of product managers? Is this something you already had based on earlier opportunities or did you have to go out and gather it. In case of the latter, how did you achieve this?

    1. 1

      Great question! There are a ton of tools out there that will help you find PMs. LinkedIn is a great resource too.

      I happened to know quite a few having been in the industry, so it was a mix of both.

      1. 1

        Interesting can you perhaps inform a little bit more around those type of tools. I am now trying to find my target audience for a managed kubernetes SaaS solution...and looking for ways in approaching my target audience/potential customers.

        1. 2

          There are a bunch. Outreach, ZoomInfo, Apollo, Clearbit, UpLead to name a few.

          1. 1

            Thanks. Much appreciated!

  4. 2

    Congrats! How did you keep your emails from getting placed into spam filters?

    1. 1

      I tried to be smart about how many I sent each day and how personalized they were.

  5. 1

    Wow, congratulations on your incredible growth in such a short time! It's truly inspiring to see how you managed to build and launch Silatus by reusing resources and focusing on a niche market. Your dedication to working smarter and leveraging the generative AI boom shows just how much potential there is for motivated indie hackers like you.

    As you continue to grow, consider exploring LeadGraph - the most advanced B2B search engine designed to revolutionize lead generation. With its extensive contact coverage and powerful filters, it could help you find and prioritize leads that resemble your closed won deals, making your marketing efforts even more effective.

    Keep up the fantastic work, and best of luck on your journey to success! 🚀

  6. 1

    Congrats! Sometimes, organic marketing that's free is sometimes the best. Just commenting about your product everywhere like I did with Evoke is really effective

  7. 1

    Its something amazing. I am little bit confuse that what process did you adopt to get the email and all information of the manager?

  8. 1

    Good job! However, if they are on the waiting list, I wouldn't call them users yet. Is your product free or paid?

    1. 1

      Thank you! We have both over 100 waitlist users and 100 onboarded users. All users have free access.

      1. 1

        I hope you can quickly figure out if they are getting value from the product and willing to pay.

        AI products generate a lot of interest right now and it's easy to get users to try it. I added 800 users very fast (more coming very day) but just one subscribed.

        1. 1

          I'd be curious to see the conversion results as well!

    2. 1

      Came in to say this, title is misleading but nonetheless a good writeup on how to do validation

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