AI student tool made $150K in MRR last month

Statistics:

• Website: Jenni.ai
• Launched On: 14th of August, 2019
• Revenue Last Month (August, 2023): $150,000
• Profit Last Month (August, 2023): $72,700
• Monthly Website Traffic: 1,011,000

Description:

Founded by David in 2019, Jenni AI is a leading AI software that helps students and researchers write papers and journals. It writes content, provides in-text citations, paraphrases text, and makes sure the content is plagiarism free. Jenni AI has been pretty dormant till July of 2022 after which it generated an impressive total of $1.2 million in total revenue in one year.

Business Model:

Jenni AI runs on a combination of a freemium model and paid subscription at $20 per month. The free version allows for a maximum of 200 AI generated words per day, whilst the paid version allows for unlimited generations. In the last 15 months, they have been able to amass a total of 1.6 million users and cross $150,000 in monthly recurring revenue.

Growth Strategy:

Jenni AI’s growth strategy revolves mainly around two key components: pivoting and viral short-form content. But first let’s dive into their initial growth strategy. David mentioned that he got the first 10 subscribers for Jenni AI via cold email, the first 100 subscribers via Facebook groups and then the first 1000 subscribers via twitter.

He also attributes the foundation block of their success today to pivoting their target market. To put this into perspective, for 3 years they were stuck at $2,000 MRR being positioned as an SEO writing tool. Then in the last 15 months since pivoting to targeting academic researchers instead, Jenni AI was able to grow by 1.6 million %. This is because business owners would rather have a tool that will write their articles for them, meanwhile researchers prefer a tool that improves their writing while enhancing their knowledge as they write.

Now, the most effective marketing strategy that helped Jenni AI grow to 1 million users has been short-form content on TikTok, Instagram (Reels), and Youtube (Shorts). Most of their organic efforts and paid marketing budget has been allocated to this particular channel. For example, this TikTok video promoting Jenni AI on their company profile got 1.8 million views with 380k likes and 50k saves, and was only posted less than a month ago. An other example is their partnership with a YouTuber which got 94k views on the promotional video and converted 185 users generating $14,800 in revenue. According to David, they have about 50 million views on all of their socials combined. This is power of viral short-form content.

Here is the breakdown of Jenni AI’s short-form content strategy:

1. They created various short-form content pieces and reposted them on each platform (TikTok, Instagram, YouTube) once a day to validate content-audience fit.

2. David then partnered with paid influencers to post validated viral concepts and promote their software. Instead of looking for already big expensive influencers, he used the algorithm of the platforms to push new influencers. He found such new/micro influencers that got a lot of view through hashtags, and then negotiated bundle deals.

3. They then contracted the top performing micro influencers on a monthly retainer to post for their company account. For example, MengMengCareer got 7 million impressions on the Jenni AI TikTok account in the first month.

4. David then repeated the process of partnering up with new influencers to promote validated viral videos.

Jenni AI also started an influencer program on their website for students to promote their software in exchange for a $15 commission for every new subscriber or $5 for each user that remained subscribed. This snowball strategy also helped to make a portion of the 1.6 million Jenni AI users further promote their software.

Lastly, an interesting long-term play growth strategy has been the buying of the misspelling domain “jenny.ai”. David mentions that this led to 52K visitors, 20K new users and 271 paid subscribers over 10 months. With an average life time value of $80 this led to $21,680 in total revenue.

Tech Stack:

• React, MobX, Node.js, TypeScript, Google Cloud Platform, OpenAI, Copysmith

Key Takeaways:

Make use of short-form content to promote your product/service and partner with micro influencers. If ever stagnant consider pivoting your target audience as this may result in a stronger product-market fit

Thanks for reading. I hope you enjoyed it. In my Newsletter/Database, I write twice per month a case study like this and share on a weekly basis 5 lucrative online businesses with their respective metrics:

• How much profit and revenue they make per month
• How many monthly website visitors they get
• When they launched etc.

Would love to see you in there!

With much love,