How I grew my AI start-up to 5k MRR within 4 months of launching

Four months ago I launched Coursebox with my co-founder, an AI-powered course creator. We're now generating over $5,000 in MRR since the launch. So what helped us get here?

1. Start a waitlist on your website
   We had over 1,000 sign ups to our waitlist before our product was even ready. This made it a lot easier to launch as we had interested people to market to. It also meant that we could start marketing the platform and build up our digital marketing such as our website ranking before we were ready to sell. I can't guarantee that you will get any waitlist sign ups but you may as well try if you can. It really gave us a big push and motivation to launch the product and we started to realise how much demand there was.

2. Prioritise SEO
   We're ranked #1 in the world for relevant search terms with good search volume like 'AI course creator'. This has been one of the biggest growth enablers for us. Software start-ups, particularly ones in AI should make SEO a focus of their marketing. It's not always easy but the result of when you get a win with SEO is literally free leads. AI search terms have really gone up a lot in volume since ChatGPT went viral and they're still not that competitive either so it's a big marketing opportunity. Generating backlinks to your site, matching your site (particularly your header of your home page) to target keywords, improving page speed, and improving accessibility are important parts of this process. Blogging to target keywords is important too. I use tools like Google Search Console, Pagespeed insights, SemRush, and Ahrefs for helping on the SEO analytics side. A great starting point is to just spend 1-2 days listing your site on every AI and SaaS directory you can to improve your domain authority. A lot of them charge a fee for this but it will improve your ranking and be there forever. Make sure you research what keywords you should target. Our website marketed Coursebox as an AI course builder for a while. Then I looked at the numbers and saw that the volume was WAY higher for AI course creator. A week after I updated the language of our home page to align with this we started seeing a huge jump in organic traffic.

3. Get Influencers
   About a month after launching, I had still barely thought of influencers to help with marketing. We suddenly went viral in Middle Eastern countries like Saudi Arabia and Egypt. All these courses were being made in Arabic and we couldn't figure out why. After digging around for hours I finally found a 25 minute Youtube video that was a comprehensive tutorial on Coursebox, posted by a Saudi Arabian professor with over 1 million social media followers! I've since paid some people on TikTok and instagram to post videos to their followers - they were micro influencers and I paid them around $150-$300 each. I've mostly had good results from it but some haven't been worth it if I'm being honest. The cool part about these influencers is some of them made some great videos that we can repost on our social media. So it wasn't just to reach their audience, it also gave some cool content to push out without having to spend so much time making it ourselves. I'm under the impression that it actually inspired some other AI influencers to make their own content on us with the payment involved. Affiliate programs are also worth setting up. Just be aware that most people who sign up for affiliate programs might not get you any results. We've certainly seen a few sales and sign ups generated by affiliates after we got this going though.

4. Market to your existing leads through email
   There's basically two types of email marketing: bulk email campaigns and automated emails. Automated emails are seriously important for onboarding, building a relationship with your leads and pushing them through the funnel - think about converting a free user to a paid customer. With bulk email campaigns, these can be really beneficial too. While the audience is going to be way smaller than the millions of people on search and social media, these are the people that have actually shown some form of commitment or interest. Therefore, they're arguably the most likely to purchase from you. Get as many of these people into your database by offering things for free like a free version, free trial, free content etc. Then just continue trying to get them to buy and build a relationship with them with more free stuff. Most people won't buy from you straight away and email is a great way to nurture existing leads.

5. Speak to your customers and watch them use your product
   Businesses are about solving problems. AI businesses are no different. AI is not going to solve every problem so also don't get carried away with the appeal and magic of it. That's why speaking to real people who are interested in your product is really useful. Understand the use case, the pain your product can help them with and the why. Watch them use your product - sometimes it will be painful watching them not knowing where to click but it will highlight things you need to improve. They may even ask for specific features that give you ideas.

While all these things are important in growing an early stage AI start-up, what lies at the core of any business is its people. I'm a digital marketing manager with experience in marketing software so that made it so much easier for me to make this progress. I also have a talented co-founder who has amazing domain knowledge and had been working on building our product for a while.

Think I'm missing something or have a question? Post it in the comments below. Check out my start-up here if you're interested in trying out the product: https://www.coursebox.ai/