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Bootstrapping a SaaS that uses AI to explain code in plain English

This week I'm interviewing Vanessa, the co-founder of Denigma, an AI tool that explains code in understandable English. They're currently at $1k/mo and have had good success growing their SaaS through Reddit. Let's get started.

Hello! What's your background, and what are you working on?

I have a sales/marketing background in NYC and European startups. I actually met my co-founder during work at a tech marketing agency.

Denigma is an AI that explains code in understandable English. Understanding code is something anyone in tech would need to do, from a founder to a computer science student to a senior developer.

I would often come across this problem at the startups I worked at. It’s a real issue that plagues the growing industry of technical and non-technical people. Denigma has found the most efficient way to solve this problem with Artificial Intelligence.

I’m a non-technical person, so I get the chance to look at Denigma with no technical background. If I can understand the code explanations, then I know others can understand them too.

I’ve always admired people who are working to change the world in their own little way. Getting to build something everyone in the technology industry can benefit from is amazing!

What motivated you to get started with Denigma?

We noticed a problem that many have and few are trying to solve. Most of a developer’s time is spent reading code. This statement applies to entry level to senior developers. Senior developers benefit from using Denigma to read legacy code and do code reviews. Denigma goes beyond a literal explanation- it explains purpose, business logic, and programming concepts.

I see the problem of non technical people needing to understand code to better do their job and developers not understanding existing codebases.
Many developers and people in tech often have a hard time understanding existing codebases.

I saw the opportunity in a growing industry. More and more people are getting into tech and more and more people need code explained to them in understandable English. A founder could want to stay updated on what their technical employees are doing, and this is a great way to get it done.

Denigma is not just for developers. Those learning to code and non-technical team members in tech companies find Denigma very useful!

What went into building the initial product?

After the MVP was built, Denigma was tested with a developer community. Due to luck, a lot of kernel hackers, embedded developers, and general low-level developers used it. These people helped rigorously test Denigma on lots of complex code.

Denigma received feedback from an exceptional group of developers. Months of research, experimentation, and incremental improvements went into Denigma. For instance, we recently added support for longer sections of code. Denigma originally only worked on 10-15 lines of code, but feedback we received indicates that a lot of real world code is long functions and sometimes entire functions.

Denigma was in BETA longer than it had to be, because we wanted to be 100% certain the machine was doing what we said it could do. We would constantly get people on Reddit to test their most complex code on Denigma (very tough crowd by the way) and give us their feedback. This is what allowed us to constantly improve and fix the flaws we had.

We did extensive research to make sure we were investing our time, money, and efforts into building the product that people need.

How have you attracted users and grown Denigma?

We have not invested a penny in advertisement. All our users are organic:
They come from Google, LinkedIn, Reddit, Twitter, and our networks.

Here's one Reddit post on /r/programming that got 836 upvotes and plenty of constructive comments.

We’ve built a great and useful product, and word of mouth has been our best growth tool. We encourage our users to leave public feedback, whether it’s good or bad. Just yesterday, a user randomly tweeted about how they just ‘’discovered’’ Denigma. That was super great, because it led to new followers and buzz.

We could spend more or spam more to gain new users, but right now we’re focusing on making our current users happy and gradually engaging with people to grow.

One of the things that strikes users is how friendly and down-to-earth the explanation read.

What's your business model, and how have you grown your revenue?

Denigma is a SaaS company. Denigma costs $5/ month. All our revenue comes from subscriptions. Subscriptions come from users who have tested Denigma and realized that this is a tool that they need. Because our revenue solely comes from our users, we owe all our growth to ''word of mouth'' and media ''buzz''.

Denigma can be used free of charge for under 30 times every two weeks. We want many people to benefit from Denigma. Our goal is not just solely to grow revenue, but to make many developers' lives easier.

What are your goals for the future?

I want to support explaining third-party libraries like TensorFlow in depth. I also want to improve accuracy and fine-tune the model to the style of explanations that users like.

I hope to collaborate with organizations such as technology companies, boot camps, schools, etc. to offer group packages. I have packages with SAML, SSO, and more features available to enterprises. The next steps are to launch these packages and start the conversation with these companies.

I have charitable endeavors in the works with underrepresented communities in tech. I hope to support more underrepresented people in the industry as a path towards our mission! My mission is to allow ANYONE and EVERYONE to learn more about programming and empower them.

A Chrome extension and Emacs extension are actively being developed. We’re also listening to user feedback and developing new features.

If you had to start over, what would you do differently?

It's still early in the journey, so maybe I need this question further down the line to give a better answer.

I could have launched the VS code extension earlier. I launched that a couple of weeks before our official launch, so I wish more people would have enjoyed and tested that for free.

Have you found anything particularly helpful or advantageous?

Feedback is gold to Denigma. Once a user reports unclear wording or anything strange, my team and I get together to look into the issue and see how we can resolve it for the user. Although the team can’t get back to everyone, clarifying concerns and connecting with anyone who mentions Denigma is very helpful. From these conversations, we learn so much about our customers.

People tweeting about us or publicly praising Denigma has been helpful to our growth.

Where can we go to learn more?

The best way to learn about Denigma is by visiting our website or following us on Twitter!

There’s an amazing Slack, Matrix, and Discord community that you can find on https://denigma.app. Our team members interact with users and users interact with each other. The Denigma community is a great way to interact with other developers and learn new things!

  1. 2

    I just gave it a test with the code for an automated webscraper I built. It did a FANTASTIC job explaining. Great job guys, you should be proud. Only thing I would change is maybe a loading indicator when the explanation is generating, I could see customers getting frustrated not knowing if anything is happening or not.

    1. 2

      Great feedback! We’ll put this in the backlog.

  2. 2

    Hi there, I just read a post about github copilot labs https://github.com/github/feedback/discussions/8308 that they try to do this, I believe your work is much better, have you thought on selling this to microsoft/github?

    1. 1

      Perhaps, though right now we want to try to bootstrap and grow on our own. It’s a tough journey, but I like seeing MRR go brrrr.

      Furthermore, the privacy stance of Microsoft is not known to be the best.

    2. 1

      Oh, interesting. I didn't know Copilot could do that. It's going to be hard to compete with GH Copilot, especially since it's free, has massive distribution and is bundled with other very useful features.

      But for sure there is a place for Denigma if it focuses entirely on code to explanation and makes it even better 💪

  3. 1

    Congrats ! Never imagined this would be possible :)
    Definitively something to sell B2B to Product managers, PO,Project managers and especially Designers and agencies.

    Everything we do is based on code, and so many people take decisions without understanding the trade offs of a certain design.

    Next level ? Mixing design requirements and impact on code ?

  4. 1

    That's a great story, definitely getting my vote )

  5. 1

    What a crazy idea! I love it 😮

    If this product works well (and it will obviously get better over time), it can be a game-changer for how devs and non-technical project managers communicate. We all know devs are not the best communicators haha.

    Well done, looking forward to seeing how Denigma will continue to evolve 💪

  6. 1

    Hi, a like the idea and good implementation also quick one!
    I have only one question for you what AI provider do you use?

  7. 1

    What will be success rate of AI to explain right flow . If it gives ~99 then its good benefit for dev

  8. 1

    Hey Vanessa, are most of your users technical or non-technical founders? Curious.

    1. 1

      I'm the builder/developer behind Denigma. Most users so far seem to be technical people. The product messaging towards non-technical people seems to be harder to get right.

      1. 2

        I just tried denigma and it's mind blowing. You guys built something really amazing. Congratulations.

      2. 1

        It's definitely intimidating to non-technical people who sometimes never even look at code - they interact with the consumer facing product.

        There's some sort of education to be made with non-technical folks, like project managers, etc, before they even feel comfortable to go in a code repository, find code and start translating it.

        It feels like for now, it would actually benefit the devs more, to facilitate the explanation of code flows and edge cases. Similar to test documentation with TDD/BDD.

  9. 1

    The Reddit crowd can indeed be tough :) Hopefully you've fixed the issues they addressed in the comments. Great tool btw!

    1. 1

      I have! One of the things I based on their feedback is support for code longer than 5-10 lines. Now Denigma supports much longer code, by splitting the code into shorter sections to analyze independently.

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