First customer for my AI micro-SaaS after just 26 days of development

tl;dr: if you have an AI product idea you should build and launch it immediately.

Wow. This is the fastest I have ever sold something I built. Transcript Generator took me just 26 days total of part-time dev to build and launch, and soon after I turned subscriptions on I got a paying customer. 🎉 I didn't really do any marketing or sales. I just built an MVP, put it online, turned on payments, and waited.

Of course a couple of things did help. The first thing is I learned from Peter Askew that you should have a keyword friendly dot-com domain. Many visitors seem to be typing "youtubetranscriptgenerator.com" directly into their location bar. It also helps that I am using ClojureScript and Sqlite. This stack is super fast to build with and leads to far fewer bugs. Finally, this is not my first rodeo. I've built and launched multiple micro-SaaS products already (with many fails). Still, it's quite a pleasant surprise to have received a paying customer quite this quickly.

Maybe there's something to all the AI hype after all. I was a skeptic and I thought the stories of immediate AI success were overblown, but now that I've launched a simple AI micro-SaaS of my own and it has started turning a profit I am feeling a lot less skeptical! 😅

I thought of the idea for Transcript Generator because it was something I wanted myself. I record dev diary videos and put them up on YouTube. Wouldn't it be cool if I could take the transcript from those videos and turn it into a nice article or blog post? When I looked into it I realized this wouldn't take me long to build, and other people might find it useful too.

Of course it's possible to do this manually. You can get the transcript from YouTube yourself, copy it, write a prompt, and paste it all into ChatGPT. That will get you reasonable results. The problem is it's time consuming, fiddly, error prone, and you might not know how to write a good prompt to get a professional sounding article out.

So that's the idea behind Transcript Generator. You can quickly and easily generate high quality text for blog posts and articles from YouTube videos. You don't have to wrangle the transcript, write your own prompt, or copy and paste between different sites and apps. You literally just enter the YouTube URL into the front page and within moments you can have the transcript turned into an article.

Recording yourself talking into a camera, uploading to YouTube, and then pasting the URL into the website has to be one of the simplest ways to generate an interesting post. I don't think generating content can get much easier than this. Seems like at least one person agrees!

Transcript Generator is beta at the moment. Let me know if you try it out. I would love your feedback to improve the tool. 🙏 Thank you!