Hitting $10k MRR in six weeks with an AI design tool

Mattia Pomelli found the intersection of what he loves and what makes money, and he started building. Then, he found an underserved and exploding market and built Sleek in three weeks.

Within two months, hit hit $10k MRR.

Here's Mattia on how he did it. 👇

The intersection of what he loves

I've been coding for about 8 years and have always had a passion for design. Eventually, I realized that building design tools is the perfect intersection of what I love doing.

In the past year, I've built four design tools with two friends. The last one we launched — and our main focus right now — is Sleek.design, an AI tool for designing mobile apps.

More and more people are getting into building mobile apps and good design is really important, but there are fewer coding/design tools in this space compared to the web. So we saw a great opportunity to take the knowledge we had from building design tools and create a product specific to mobile.

It's used by app founders or developers who don't have design skills or the time/resources to hire someone to do it. With Sleek, you can move fast and "vibe design" a beautiful app just by chatting with AI.

Within a month of launch, we reached $10k MRR without spending a single dollar on marketing. We're super excited to scale up from here!

Reusing code

Luckily, we were not starting from zero — we had built other design tools before. So, it only took us about three weeks to repurpose one of our previous products for mobile design and launch v1.0.

We're using Next.js as the main framework, Supabase for the database/backend, Vercel for hosting, Posthog for analytics (freaking love Posthog), Stripe for payments, and Resend for emails.

Organic growth

We launched Sleek about a month and a half ago. We made a post on X with a strong hook, a nice demo, and asked people to comment for early access. We planned this on purpose because the X algo loves comments. Valuable content + strong engagement = high chance of going viral.

The post blew up. A lot of people resonated with the problem and wanted to try Sleek.

The launch gave us a great initial boost, but it was just the beginning. We kept riding the momentum, putting content out there consistently on platforms like X and Reddit.

I post content about mobile app design daily. The key is not promoting your product directly, but rather, making content that is genuinely valuable/interesting for people and indirectly links to your product. For example, I made a post where I asked people to comment on their mobile app idea, and I designed it for them using Sleek. They get an initial design for free, and if they want to make edits and iterate on it, they can use Sleek. Or I just share cool designs made with AI (without even mentioning Sleek), and people will get curious and ask what tool I used to make them.

Some Instagram creators made videos about Sleek for free too, just because they thought it was valuable to their audience. Some of those videos went pretty well.

Find your ICP

We struggled for a while to find the ideal customer profile for our other tools. We made the classic mistake of building a product without thinking from the very beginning about who exactly would benefit the most from it. We ended up with different kinds of people using our product: indie hackers, small startups, designers, agencies, product managers... The product was okay for a bunch of them, but not specifically tailored to any.

This makes it hard to know which features to prioritize, how to talk about your product, where and how to market, etc.

With Sleek, we did things differently. Whose a much more specific use case and ICP from the beginning. This helped us to tailor the messaging, features, and marketing to match our target customers.

Limit your free tiers

We charge a monthly/yearly subscription and have different plans that come with different amounts of AI credits to spend.

We kept the free tier super limited since we have significant AI costs — being bootstrapped, you can't afford to have a high cost for free users. On Sleek, users can run one generation for free and then they'll be asked to upgrade to make edits or create more designs.

This might be a dealbreaker for some users, but I think it helps to raise the quality of our customers. People who have truly experienced the problem and understand the value will happily pay $25 to give the product a try for one month and see if it's a good fit. Because it can save them hundreds or thousands of dollars.

That said, we had some viral videos from Indonesian and African creators and had a lot of traffic from these countries. Since the purchasing power is different, we experimented with a cheaper and more limited tier for these countries, and that helped us get some extra revenue that otherwise would probably have been lost.

The drivers that motivate people to buy

Here's my advice: Focus on strong problems in growing markets.

I see too many people building "nice-to-have" products and, unfortunately, those are really hard to sell. Ideally, you want to save people a lot of money or a lot of time. Or even better, help them make more money. These are the drivers that motivate people to buy.

Market and timing are super important, too. We focused on mobile apps because the market is exploding. In the past year, a ton of people have been getting into building mobile apps — even people with zero coding knowledge. When you realize there is a trend, you can either ride it or help others ride it.

We chose the latter with Sleek.

What's next?

So far, we've been growing mainly through organic content and without spending a dollar. Now, the goal is to reinvest our revenue into marketing. We plan to test a bunch of different channels (e.g., SEO, creators, organic short form, etc.) to find what works best for us.

We're also working on improving our product. We shipped super early, so there is obviously a lot that can be better. Luckily, we had a ton of feedback from customers and know exactly where we need to put our effort.

You can check out Sleek or follow me on X to stay up to date!