How we built an AI learning community and made $225k in 6 months

This is the story of how we built a profitable school that teaches solopreneurs how to build AI agents without coding in 6 months.

Online education is hard but I think we cracked it.
Here are some of our numbers against our benchmarks.
Completion rates: 11% (industry avg: <5%)
Refund rate: <1% (industry avg: 5%)
4mo retention: 62.5% (industry avg <10%)

The (Not So Big) Idea

I had some background in ML priot to ChatGPT, having run a B2B adtech startup that was heavily using machine learning but that was in 2015. OpenAI was about to be founded back then. Since Nov 2022 I was spending all my free time hacking stuff together using GPT either via ChatGPT or the API.

Quickly I found myself teaching colleagues, friends etc and my friend Dave (same name, yes) who had a background as a teacher suggested we should focus on teaching.

We hired an ML professor from Frankfurt and built a prompt engineering course together then quickly made $30k out of it and we were happy. But then we figured we wouldn't just be "another course creator" out there, but build something that lasts so we set out to experiment for a few months with stuff that felt real and valuable and solved real problems.

Fast forward September 2023 when everything changed, because we found our business model sort of. We were lucky because one of our IG reels was picked up by a ChatGPT plugin developer who had 250k users and we did a live webinar together. That's when we actually launched our first offer.

We had over 2k people signing up for our webinar, 700 attended, we made $40k in the first month.

Outteach everyone

When I'm looking at the prompting market I see 90% snake oil salesmen 10% real competition. We figured we'd take the hard road: outteach EVERYONE. Not by content but by customer satisfaction that starts at the first time they meet us.

We started doing customer interviews while we kept doing the webinars that was bringing in leads constantly. I don't think the actual story contains a lot of useful learning points because - and I'm not afraid to admit it - a few times we just got REALLY lucky.

Which brings me to my first point: if you're just starting out, be patient. It took me almost a decade to finally get lucky. You'll get there.

So what we realized is that the market consists of the exact same user experience:
"Come buy my course so I'll teach you stuff and then I'll keep upselling more courses because you won't actually learn 1/10th of what I promised." So we can easily say the online education market is one where people feel like course creators are ripping them off.

So we decided to flip this on its head.
We decided that we'll build a business where our customers will get SO much they'll can't help but feel they're ripping us off. It's just a deal that's TOO GOOD.

Step 1: Service not sales: We started offering a Lifetime Membership for $297 one off payment. No upsells, no subscriptions. Any future course we might create, it's yours for free. (We could still make money from software, consulting, affiliate, etc sources). Our focus is on service, every day provide better service to our clients than yesterday. The product doesn't matter. The funnel doesn't matter. When I have a client in front of me with a problem, I help them solve it, period. Rinse and repeat.

Step 2: Do stuff that don't scale: This is actually easy in principle but really hard to stick to it. Most people got used to being forgotten by the course creators after they purchased. We created a community for them and we ACTIVELY help them, provide stuff like unlimited support, etc. I spend a lot of time in our community which means our students are now ZEALOTS.

Step 3: Be radically transparent: We're building not just in public but we're radically candid about hardships too. This makes the whole business human and also easy to manage. Two weeks ago I started feeling burned out so I cancelled all my calls (including paid consulting and sales calls to high ticket consulting leads coming out of our community), sent a short video message to our community and the response was overwhelmingly positive. People WANT us to succeed they WANT to give back.

So once we focused on this, we ended up generating a stable ~$30k/mo revenue but we had an issue. It's just the two of us and as we were putting all efforts into the bottom of our funnel, none were paid on the top. The plugin partner was taking care of growth but guess what, OpenAI decimated plugins so our number one lead source disappeared overnight.

Just to give you an idea, late Nov we had 8500 people on our email list. Today we have 9300. Yet, in those months we've made ~ $100k revenue which means we basically doubled the average LTV of our email subscribers.

This contrarian approach is so successful we've became:

• Official Make Partners (one of the tools we teach)
• Teaching our curriculum as accredited courses at two universities
• We got some prospects for investments although I'm much more focused on building a sustainable business that creates value out of it.

But more importantly: we have clients who are telling their friends about us and this is the bit that's the long game. It will probably take us another 3-6 months to reach escape velocity but just by sticking to maxing out on customer satisfaction.

Fail with dignity

We had a LOT of false starts. We launched service offerings, new products, screwed up our revenue generation countless times. I won't say more about this, because we share ALL our metrics, actions, everything on a monthly basis.

If you want to read them here is a link to a Notion page (no registration needed) to all the findings, numbers, metrics, all our reflections as we build the business: https://pmlink.cc/recap

Product Market Fit is a LIE

The AI space is incredibly easy to make money in because it's hyped, yet less than 4% of businesses use AI in the US alone. However it's incredibly difficult to make money in because it changes so quickly that you need to reevaluate PMF every month.

So if you want to make money in AI think about focusing on the one thing that changes slowly: the humans. Devin, the AI developer still needs human operators. Serve them.

Growing with the community.

We almost made a quarter million dollars which is really good for a first year for a bootstrapped business. We hired a bunch of people that were premature, wasted money on trying to scale too early. I made a lot of mistakes as a CEO, maybe I shouldn't have left the top of our funnel without tender loving care.

But when you focus on the customer and not the revenue it opens up new possibilities. We're about to launch a blog that will provide free resources (ready to deploy AI agents) to entrepreneurs. Currently it's just the two of us so we reached out to our customers, we have 1150 people in our community currently, 800 of them are paid members (the rest are undergrads from the academia program).

Now we have a team of 30 people who all are creating content for us because we gave them so much value "they want to pay it back somehow".

...and THAT is how you can really scale without cash investment.

So if there's only one sentence you read about this story it's this:
When in doubt, spend on making your customers more happy.

PS: Not sure if this was helpful, it's my first post on IH but I saw posts similar to this, let me know what you think in the comments.