$13K MRR - Engineering as Marketing Masterclass
What SiteGPT Does
SiteGPT is like giving your website its own brain. You add your website link, and it creates a chatbot trained on all your content - blogs, documentation, product pages, everything. The AI assistant then answers visitor questions 24/7, providing instant, accurate responses about your business. Over 130 businesses use SiteGPT, with an average customer paying around $100/month and a lifetime value of $1,700-$1,800.
The Problem It Solves
Website visitors have questions, but they don't want to dig through pages of content to find answers. Traditional chatbots require extensive setup and scripted responses. SiteGPT eliminates this friction - you paste your URL, and within minutes you have an AI assistant that knows everything about your business. No scripting, no training datasets, no complex integrations.
Watch: How Bhanu Built a $13K MRR SaaS with $0 Marketing
The Growth Story
Bhanu Teja P was a software engineer who quit his job after just 8 months. "This is not what I wanted to do for the rest of my life," he recalls. He moved back to his parents' house to eliminate expenses and started building. His first product, Feather (a Notion-to-blog tool), grew to $6,000 MRR before he sold it for $250,000.
In early 2023, Bhanu noticed AI tools flooding his Twitter feed. Feeling like he was missing out, he decided to spend a weekend learning. His approach: build something useful. With 100 Feather customers who all had blogs, he thought - why not build a chatbot that answers questions about their content? As he built it, he realized: why limit this to 100 people?
SiteGPT went from idea to launch in just 2 weeks. Bhanu posted on Hacker News's Show HN - it hit the front page. Two days later, he launched on Product Hunt and hit #1 Product of the Day. Within the first month, SiteGPT reached $10,000 MRR. But then reality hit: almost 50% of customers churned after the first month, dropping revenue to $5K.
Rather than panic, Bhanu saw this as a filter. The initial hype brought curiosity seekers; now real businesses with real problems started signing up. He focused on engineering as marketing - building free tools that would drive organic traffic. Today, SiteGPT gets 50,000 monthly visitors, has generated over $500,000 in total revenue, and 90% of Google traffic comes from those free tools.
From the Founder
Key Growth Tactics
The 7-Step Free Tools Playbook
Bhanu built over 50 free tools - PDF to Markdown converters, AI Chatbot Name Generators, Sitemap Validators, FAQ Generators, and more. Each tool is designed to attract potential SiteGPT customers. Here's his exact process:
- Start broad: Go to Ahrefs Keywords Explorer, leave the search blank, and click search to get all keywords.
- Apply filters: Add relevant terms like "AI" and "generator" to narrow down.
- Target low competition: Set keyword difficulty (KD) filter to less than 10.
- Ensure volume: Add a minimum search volume of 1,000.
- Document everything: List keywords in Notion with volume and KD scores.
- Plan the connection: For each tool, define a CTA that leads back to SiteGPT.
- Prioritize and build: Rank by volume, difficulty, effort to build, and relevance to your product.
AI-Accelerated Tool Creation
"If I want to create a new tool, it takes less than 5 minutes," Bhanu explains. With existing tools as templates, he uses AI coding assistants to generate new ones. "I just tell Cursor, look at these free tools, now create this new free tool for this keyword. It builds it out in less than 5 minutes."
The Conversion Funnel
SiteGPT's numbers reveal the power of this strategy: 50,000 monthly visitors convert to 200 leads, which become 60 trials, and 25-40% of trials convert to paying customers. With an average customer value of $100/month and 130 businesses on board, that's how you get to $13K MRR - all organic, all free.
Key Takeaways for Builders
- ✓Engineering as marketing: Bhanu built 50+ free tools that drive 90% of Google traffic - no marketing budget needed.
- ✓Launch fast, iterate faster: SiteGPT went from idea to launch in 2 weeks. Let user feedback guide the product direction.
- ✓Low-competition keywords win: Target keywords with KD < 10 and volume > 1,000. Use tools like Ahrefs to find them.
- ✓Each free tool needs a CTA: Every tool should connect back to your main product with a relevant call-to-action.
- ✓AI accelerates everything: With existing tools as templates, new free tools can be created in under 5 minutes using AI.