Our AI personal assistant SaaS just hit $6k MRR with almost 0 paid marketing. Here's how we did it!

First off, here are our numbers as of Feb 9, 2024:

• MRR: $6K
• Subscribers: 141
• LTV: $343 (+48.1%)
• Churn: 12% (-26.4%)

Beta Launch

Our bootstrapping journey started in May 2023, when we created an MVP of our AI personal assistant product for solopreneurs and small startups, Olympia. We soft-launched our beta with a waiting list and started collecting emails from those interested in trying our product: https://olympia.chat.

My co-founder and I did that through our social media networks and online communities.

Meanwhile, we started involving friends and family and asking them to test our MVP and give feedback. As soon as we got some feedback (around 30-40 people) and implemented some changes to our software, we started sending private invites to our waitlist subscribers. Interacting closely with our early adopters allowed us to refine the product and gain our first fans. Word of mouth started its work.

Product-Market Fit

Adding Olympia to AI directories was a hit. After adding a listing to There Is an AI for That, our waiting list skyrocketed by five to ten pages of new email subscribers a day. At this point, we were actively sending private invites, and the number of customers was growing fast. We found our product-market fit pretty fast.

Besides constantly improving the product with the help of our first customers and adding new features, we began posting on socials and sending the newsletter out with our updates and plans. People loved it.

We continued adding Olympia to numerous AI directories and posting about it in online communities. Also, we bought ads in a couple of newsletters. Some of them gave us good traffic, but we were pretty disappointed with how overhyped they were. We didn't get too many signups from the newsletter ads.

Hard Launch

In September we rolled out of beta and raised our prices. As a token of appreciation for their help, we left the initial prices untouched for our early adopters.

At this point, we hired a customer support rep, improved our website, and focused on refining the product, implementing our marketing plan, and adding new features. Futurepedia and There Is an AI for That gave us good results, so we bought ads on these platforms (once). We were invited to a couple of Twitter Spaces to talk about AI and business, sponsored drinks and snacks at two events, and spoke/networked at a couple of others actively promoting Olympia.

Both my co-founder and I are writers. So we wrote articles on Medium, Indie Hackers, Entrepreneur, Hacker News, and HackerNoon. You can see some of them on my profile here. Previously, I ran my own PR agency, so I launched a PR campaign working on brand awareness in media. We also asked our clients to send us reviews and added them to our website.

Our Product Hunt launch was pretty successful and gave us a significant boost in traffic and sales.

By the end of the year, we had more speaking gigs at events and closed a cool partnership with a company well-known in the startup world. Networking and speaking at the events have proven to be very beneficial for us.

We tried target ads, but it was a failure. I think we found not a very professional specialist, or did something wrong.

2024

Since the start of the new year, we began implementing our content marketing plan, expanding our blog and newsletter.

One of the articles with a comprehensive comparison of Olympia to ChatGPT is the most engaging so far. I believe that adding real use cases of our product soon will as well add more credibility and trust for Olympia.

Velocity is very important. We improved our product significantly since the launch date. Besides having long-term memory remembering previous conversations and our clients' business goals, our humanized AI assistants now autonomously send emails, analyze and summarize uploaded data, create downloadable long-form copy, and collaborate with each other and our users in one conversation. We created a demo that customers asked for and added it to our YouTube channel and website.

Launching our affiliate and referral programs helped us get some help from our raving fans. One trick was to include referral links in the emails our AI professionals send on behalf of the users.

We do our sales calls as founders by ourselves, and it works pretty well. As a CEO, I contact all customers scheduled to churn, and see if there is something we can immediately fix to meet their needs for them to stay with us. This way I had a chance to recover some of the churned revenue.

We started working on third-party integrations to make our AI team do more stuff and ran some tests receiving good feedback from users. Our team of three humans and fourteen AI assistants is pretty creative :) We came up with a banger idea on how to increase our revenue and boost sales. I will definitely share all about it as soon as we go past the testing phase and launch beta. We will also have a PR campaign for the world to know.

There is a significant drop in the churn rate, and our customers' LTV increased a lot within the past few weeks. We will continue shipping new features and add third-party integrations, create partnerships with relevant businesses, speak and network at events, write articles, and treat our customers like family.

We also plan to launch an online community and our monthly virtual and offline events with a podcast and Twitter (X) Spaces on the way. If you happen to be in Mexico City, comment below, and I'll send you a free invite to our next offline event here ;) Thanks for reading till the end!