Making $30k/mo from an AI product with a perpetual license

Daniel Nguyen is a solopreneur with multiple products. His biggest success, BoltAI, brings in up to $30k/mo through a perpetual license with limited updates — in other words, his revenue is not recurring.

Here's Daniel on how he's doing it. 👇

A 15-year journey

I love building things on the internet. The first dollar I earned online was roughly 15 years ago when I was selling a plugin for an open-source forum software called Invision Power Board.

Then, I dropped out of college to start an internet business providing WordPress consulting services. It reached $100K in revenue, but I shut it down to work at various tech companies as a product engineer.

In 2022, I got on Twitter and found the indie hacking community there. I’ve launched five products since then and I'm currently a solopreneur based in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

Here's what I'm working on now:

• BoltAI: An all-in-one AI client for Mac. Revenue: $15k-$30k/mo

• PDF Pals: Chat with PDFs on Mac. Revenue: $1k-$2k/mo

• KTool: Send web articles to Kindle.$1.5K MRR

The first taste of success

My first product was KTool, a tool that sends articles and newsletters to Kindle. I'm half blind, so it started as a way for me to offload reading to the Kindle as much as possible.

I spent most of my time building KTool in public, but it didn’t really gain much traction until I launched KTool on Hacker News. That was a huge success for me - KTool reached the front page and stayed #2 for almost two days.

I worked on it for another year, but I couldn't find a good way to grow it to ramen profitability, so I decided to learn more about generative AI and the OpenAI API with the hope of finding a good freelance gig.

I did land a couple of interesting gigs, but then I found a new product idea: BoltAI. It's a better way to use OpenAI and other AI services on macOS.

I started it mostly to learn more about SwiftUI development and OpenAI app development, but it’s now my top revenue-generating product.

While building BoltAI, one customer asked about the ability to chat with PDFs natively on Macs. I found it interesting and decided to build PDF Pals.

Be ruthless with ideas

I think persistence is overrated. It doesn’t make sense to keep working on the wrong thing. It’s true that many give up too soon, but you also need to kill ideas ruthlessly.

If I was to start again, I would definitely spend more time finding a better business idea. KTool wasn’t a bad idea, per se, but as a B2C SaaS, it’s extremely hard for someone without a marketing background like me. Plus, it's technically challenging, requiring a custom parser for each website/newsletter. And it has a small and declining market.

Building a proof of concept

When I started building BoltAI, I didn’t know anything about Swift development. I started using ChatGPT to learn. I also used ChatGPT to build the proof of concept (PoC). Half of the PoC code was generated by GPT-4. I finished it in just a couple of days.

The first version was ugly and it didn’t even have an auto-update mechanism. I was manually sending zip files to early adopters.

It was super simple: You type your prompt on any text input, press a keyboard shortcut, and get the AI response back in the same editor.

The only problem it solved was to avoid switching back and forth between a mac app and the ChatGPT web page — my pet peeve. Back then, there wasn’t a ChatGPT desktop app.

Turns out, others had the same pet peeve and I was able to get a few sales on launch day.

The first version of BoltAI didn't give me product-market fit, so the current version is very different. But my tech stack is largely the same. The only difference is that I recently adopted Supabase, as it has great support for mobile development:

• Front-end: NextJS, TailwindCSS, Cloudflare Pages

• Back-end: PostgreSQL, NodeJS, Supabase, Cloudflare Workers

• Mac app: Swift, SwiftUI, AppKit, Sparkle, SQLite

• Mobile app: React Native, Expo, Swift

Finding the right model

After KTool, I realized consumers hate subscriptions. So for BoltAI, I went with a perpetual license with 1 year of updates.

A perpetual license is traditional for desktop apps. But the problem is it’s not sustainable, especially for an indie developer. So I eventually adopted the "1 year of updates" model, similarly to Proxyman, TablePlus, Jetbrain, etc. I believe it’s a fair model where the user is in control.

Unlike KTool, I charge for BoltAI from day 1 — no more freemium. It was just $9 for the first version. Then I gradually increased the price to $19, $29… And now the premium license is at $100.

An interesting thing I’ve learned about pricing is it’s not always elastic. Raising the price from $9 to $79 didn't cause any pushback. Sales just went up. But raising it from $79 to $110 was different. The total revenue was still the same, but the number of sales decreased. I ended up at a sweet spot of $100.

I guess the advice of “charge more” is still useful — but only to a point.

BoltAI generates about $25k per month on average. Since it’s an AI client and I don’t offer AI credits, the profit margin is pretty high, always close to 90%.

More than building in public

Thanks to building in public, I’ve grown my X account to 50k followers. While this doesn’t directly translate to sales, it’s still a huge advantage. I receive support and valuable advice from many seasoned founders on X.

I was super lucky with BoltAI. I launched the MVP on Twitter during the AI hype and it went viral. I took advantage of the momentum by exploring other channels: AI directories, paid PPC, communities, free tools, and SEO.

AI directories

After getting some traction from Twitter, I submitted BoltAI to every AI directory. There weren’t many AI products at that time, so any new product gained a lot of attention.

Ads

Since some of these directories got a lot of traffic, I bought PPC ads on them. It was quite effective in the beginning. But it became clear that targeting AI enthusiasts alone wouldn't be sustainable in the long run.

Communities

I started talking to the most active customers and building more features specifically for them. I then shared my progress with the indie hacking and Mac app communities, and growth picked up again.

Here are a few places where you can promote your mac app for free:

1. MacApps subreddit (/r/macapps): Be careful with the promotion rule, but generally, the subreddit is very friendly. In the beginning, I mostly shared about my journey of an indie dev, and product updates. Some of my early customers were from the subreddit.
Tip: Redditors love discounts. You can offer a small discount code on each post.

2. Indie Apps Sales: Indie Apps Sales gets mentioned in many tech sites like MacStories, 9to5Mac, and LifeHacker. It’s a good opportunity to get free PR for your app. Tip: If you can, offer a higher discount rate on Black Friday to gain maximum exposure. If you’re selling to other developers, consider sponsoring Indie Apps Sales too.

3. Black Friday Deal Directories: This only applies for Black Friday week, but you can always offer a discount on these occasions. People who are looking for deals are not always your ideal customers, but some of them are. It’s a good opportunity to expand your customer base.

Free tools

My most successful experiment so far has been building free tools — engineering as marketing. While growing BoltAI, I came up with quite a few small app ideas. It could be a simple one-page AI tool, a useful Mac utility, or one feature of BoltAI that I could package into a single app.

Any useful app that I feel will be hard to monetize can become a lead magnet. A few free tools I’ve built:

• ShotSolve: AI Screenshot Analysis for mac

• Oh One Pro: A simple tool to analyze PDFs with OpenAI’s o1 pro model

• The Orb: Real time AI voice conversation

These tools bring consistent, qualified leads to BoltAI with minimal effort.

SEO

And lastly, SEO. I recently started working with an SEO agency and I’ve seen some success — mostly from help articles and free tools. It’s still early to tell, but it looks promising so far.

Setapp

Another milestone was when BoltAI joined Setapp, unlocking a new source of revenue and giving us a significant amount of promotion on their platform. A side effect of this was that many customers purchased software licenses outside of Setapp. So, it was a huge win for me.

Follow the basics

I think most new indie hackers make the same mistakes, like spending too much time on product and not enough marketing. Or not talking to their customers.

Just follow the basics and you can go far.

But I’m terrible at giving advice. Here are some resources that can help:

• Jason Cohen’s blog

• The Startups for the Rest of Us podcast by Rob Walling

• The SaaS Playbook by Rob Walling

• Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth by Gabriel Weinberg

• The 1-page Marketing Plan by Allan Dib

• Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It by April Dunford

• The Science-based Playbook of Pricing & Promotions by Thomas McKinlay

What's next?

My goal is to reach $100k/mo revenue. And to reach this goal, I need a team.

My plan this year is to build a small team in Vietnam. And I want to expand my customer base from individual power users to include teams and non-savvy users too.

It'll require a lot of work. So I figure it’s time to find help from people smarter than me.

You can follow along on X, but I make a lot of startup memes, so be warned! I also occasionally write on my blog. And you can check out BoltAI.