$250K in 1 year as a solo founder

How Bhanu Teja made $250K revenue in 1 year as a solo founder

$250K in 1 year as a solo founder
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SiteGPT is an AI customer service chatbot tool.
  • Bootstrapped
  • Solo Founder
  • No marketing team
Last week, it crossed $250K revenue in just 1 year
notion image

Building and Failing Multiple Times

SiteGPT was not the first product that Bhanu built. Before this, he had already founded Feather.so - a Notion to Blog platform.
And even before that, he had been shipping multiple products (often in parallel) for more than 3 years.
Most of his early products didn’t get success, but they all trained him for the kind of success he’s getting now.
They’ve all added to his story.

Scratching Your Own Itch

Bhanu comes up with product ideas to scratch his own itch.
He came up with the idea of Feather because he himself used to blog as a developer, and loved to write in Notion. But there was no simple way to publish blog posts directly from Notion.
That’s how Feather was born.
And then when AI came along, he created a chatbot trained on Feather’s documentation to answer support queries.
He realized he could create a new product out of it.
That’s how SiteGPT was born.

How to Build New Features

I asked Bhanu, how does he come up with new features to build, and how does he prioritize features to build when he has many customer requests piling up.
He only builds features that his enterprise customers request, and already pay for.
Once they are stable, then he brings those features to the rest of the customer base and includes them in his regular offering.
So he only builds features which already validated demand.
This is the answer he gave in a discussion in our community -
notion image

Building In Public

Bhanu’s best marketing strategy is - “build things, and share what he’s building on Twitter”
He is open about his challenges, his wins, losses and learnings on Twitter. Over the years he’s built up a decent following on Twitter that helps him whenever he launches a new product.
1 year ago he launched SiteGPT on Product Hunt and ended up being Product of the Day with almost 900 upvotes.
In January 2024, he launched Feather on Product Hunt and it ended up being Product of the Day with almost 1200 upvotes
This is the power of building in public and having an audience.
Today he makes $20K+ MRR combined with his 2 projects as an indie founder.

In Summary -

  • Build things, fail at most of them.
  • Share your lessons publicly
  • Scratch your own itch - solve your own pains
  • Validate early and monetize from day 1
  • Build an audience, leverage it to spread word about your product

Further Reading


From the vault -

3 random post from the Superframeworks archives -

Useful links you don't want to miss -

🤗 How can I help?

Whenever you’re ready, here’s how I can help you -
  • Join the tiny community for your big dreams - We support, inform, educate and inspire each other every day. We are a tight knit group of indie hackers and solopreneurs working on our projects. We would love to have you. Entrepreneurship is hard, don’t do it alone. Come join us!
Thanks,
Ayush 🙏
 
 

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Ayush

Written by

Ayush

Eternally Curious. Writing, Learning, Building in Public. Writing about Ideas + Inspiration + Insights for creators, solopreneurs and indie hackers | Simple tips and frameworks to help you build a sustainable solo business

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