After 5 Years and 5 Projects, One Finally Succeeds

I joined this form and made my first post back in 2019 as it appears on my profile history. I haven't posted in a year.

I moved out from my parents house in 2020 as a big risk but also a test for myself to see how far I can push myself without depending on my family as a safety net.

January arrives, I move into this new place that is anything but cheap but it's comfortable and has enough to keep me happy. I start off the first few months enjoying the place and myself until I decide it's time to get to work.

I've worked on 5 projects these past 5 years. I had them listed on my indiehackers profile but since I became inactive, I removed a few of them. Instead of sharing the links to the projects, I will simply describe what they are.

1. A website builder
2. A website to create digital art while improving your digital art on a canvas
3. A online platform to sell baked products. A mini store you can share from your bio.
4. A food discovery app that helps you curate and find your favorite restaurants. (I have been working on V2 of this application that is completely different and much better since I have learned a lot.)
5. An AI Bot that can learn to play most games for you.

I want to add a disclaimer that none of these projects have been killed. I just choose what to work on. They have all brought in revenue of some sort.

I've spent over 10,000 hours building out these projects. Working 10 - 20 hour days. I've poured everything into them and sacrificed a lot of my social life. Fortunately, I fixed that in 2023.

Let's focus on #5 as that is the project that really took off and has been growing faster than I had expected.

The AI Bot:
This bot analyzes your game by watching you play and it assigns unique data to the tasks that you are currently doing. This is a very brief explanation but the way I made it work for the end-user is simple. They play an online game and they start the bot. If the bot is compatible with that game; it will track all sorts of user behaviour and that data is then converted into readable information for the bot to learn from over time.

Afterwards, the user can start the bot and it will perform a variety of tasks based on what it learned depending on several variables.

Going Viral:
One day I released a Youtube Video demoing the bot in action and went to sleep. After waking up, I checked my phone and went to my Youtube channel. After visiting my video manager just to check how many people it reached; I was shocked. I started off in disbelief because I did not understand how it suddenly went viral while I only had 10 subscribers.

Acquiring Users:
I was still confused on where the traffic was coming from. I don't have notifications on for Discord so I have to manually check it myself. Upon opening discord, I was shown a load of messages in the main channel telling me a new user has joined. I was excited but I was confused where they came from so I reached out and someone wrote back to me explaining that my video was recommended to them from the homepage.

Monetization:
At that point in time, I was not ready to release the bot so I was panicking because I did not want to lose users. I explained to the users that I am working on a release and it will be worth the wait.

I am currently charging $59/month for access to my bot and I was surprised to see people were actually willing to pay for it. At that time, I knew I had created something special. It was at this moment that I realized I finally got my break.

Why it succeeded:
Ethics aside, In the gaming market; there is apparently a big "want" for AI technology instead of raw manually scripted bots. I can't put my finger on the exact reasoning but I believe it falls down into the category of "unique" and "cool".

People are simply fascinated by the thought of a robot being capable of playing the game for you through techniques such as object detection and reinforced learning. It is definitly cool stuff which is why I started this project in the first place.

Timing is also extremely important. We are currently in the age of AI and Robots. This buzz and trend has directly helped bring more attention to my project and it will continue to do so going forward.

Take-away:
The most important thing I learned from this whole ordeal and after building numerous projects is that you truly need to understand the market before you decide to build a project. It will save you time, frustration, and money.

Everyday my discord server is increasing and so is my client base. I expect to have another 50 paying users within the next two months at the current rate.