Bootstrapping a $20k/mo AI portfolio after his VC-backed company failed

Alexander Van Le built a VC-backed company and failed. Then, after a stint in gainful employment, he went viral, quit his job, and bootstrapped AI Chat Flow and Starpop. Now, he's bringing in a total MRR of $20k.

Here's Alex on how he did it. 👇

The long path to indie hacking

I have a degree in ComSci and Finance, and ever since high school, I knew I wanted to build my own business.

I cofounded a FinTech company that got VC backing and everything, but it didn't work out.

We had four cofounders, zero revenue, and poor go-to-market execution at the time of our pre-seed. We were just an overall bad company. I was surprised by how "hot" VCs considered us. We had many real offers.

I've become a bit biased against the VC mindset since then. I realized a disconnect exists between what investors seek and what founders should focus on to improve their businesses. We spent too much time discussing terms, strategy, storytelling, creating slides, and too little time marketing and understanding our customers.

But it gave me more blood on my teeth to prove myself. And learned from it.

I now know to take a marketing-first approach to product building. And I prefer to use capital for scaling rather than survival, if possible.

A life-changing tweet

After that, I worked for a few years as a management consultant and then as a software engineer, building projects at night. Most of them flopped.

I became more active on X. I posted every day for months. No one really cared about my tweets. I hovered around 100 followers with maybe 10-20 impressions per post. But then, one tweet changed everything for me. I went viral on Twitter. 3M views on one post. If you get over a million views on anything, I believe you have a business. So I quit my job to pursue entrepreneurship full-time.

And that tweet became AI Flow Chat.

Expanding the portfolio

Now, I'm focused on two companies:

• Starpop is a platform for creating AI videos and images. We focus on helping e-commerce brands and agencies make ads.

• AI Flow Chat is a visual AI canvas for working with text and image models. You can feed various data, such as PDFs, websites, social media links, videos, and images, to teach the AI whatever topic you want it to help you with. AI Flow Chat customers are typically influencers or marketers who use AI to help with their scriptwriting and copywriting in a visually organized manner.

I'm currently at about $20k MRR across both Starpop and AI Flow Chat.

Building the products

After my tweet went viral, I knew I needed to build what people saw in the tweet. So, I built AI Flow Chat. The hard part was figuring out how to market it and what problem it solved.

For Starpop, we drew inspiration from existing software. The problem and solution were already clear.

It's important to consider as few things as possible when developing the initial MVP. Keep it as simple as possible and get it out as fast as possible. It took me two weeks to build and launch AI Flow Chat, and one week to build and launch Starpop. And for the latter, we sold our first subscription within that first week.

Keeping the stack simple

Currently, we are using PostgreSQL on Supabase, NextJS on Vercel, and Render for a long-running server.

In addition, we are using all major AI providers such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Fal, etc.

Keeping the infrastructure simple for as long as possible helps you add features and fix bugs fast. But simplicity is subjective; it depends on the technologies and providers you've used before.

I chose the tech stack I had the most experience with, which allowed me to anticipate future problems. In hindsight, choosing a React-based framework was a brilliant choice for AI and web development in general. The ecosystem is large and rapidly developing, so if I need help with something, I can easily find an open-source repo or a blog post describing the process. AI's knowledge of React frameworks also helps.

What happens after a viral post

My biggest challenge was figuring out how to get noticed.

My initial virality helped immensely by giving me credibility, but it wears off. I then had to figure out how to consistently engineer virality across all my marketing channels, rather than relying on luck.

I wish I had spent even more time marketing up front — and learning to market. I still feel I lack many marketing skills.

What I've learned is to focus on the funnel in this order:

1. Impressions

2. Conversions

3. Retention

This order is important to avoid over-engineering a part that won't move the needle. If no one knows you or your product, a good high-converting offer won't matter. If you have no users, a good product that keeps users also won't matter.

Community infiltration

For both Starpop and AI Flow Chat, our initial GTM strategy was cold DMing people directly.

My cofounder, David, has a saying: "Do the unscalable," which makes sense initially when you only have time. Trading your time for fast impressions allows you to sell quickly and rapidly iterate on your marketing story.

One of our most successful moves was "community infiltration". We joined Discord and Reddit subreddits and posted valuable content. This could be a guide or video — content that barely mentions our product but demonstrates genuine thought. People then reached out to us. Those who DM'ed us from these posts had a high conversion rate, probably around 50%. These customers also provided valuable feedback, as they are the type of people who readily reach out if something is wrong or if they believe the product can be improved.

Reddit is an interesting channel because everything is transparent. You can figure out what your competitors are doing and replicate them. A good Reddit post's effect is long-lasting, bringing in traffic for months. I plan to double down on Reddit for both my businesses since I've found a style that gets results there.

Beyond that, we are starting to see success with paid ads. We're also beginning to experiment with LinkedIn, YouTube, and short-form videos. I haven't found any huge successes yet, but I'm learning.

The anatomy of a good post

I primarily apply marketing fundamentals when creating posts. This approach allows for experimentation and continuous improvement.

For every post, I try to include and optimize for the following:

• A scroll-stopping hook

• An engaging statement that prompts comments or likes

• Valuable content that encourages saves or likes for later

• A call to action that encourages follows or business inquiries

Some specific strategies that helped me:

• Trend jacking: For example, if a new technology is blowing up, create an article or tweet about it, as people are generally interested in learning more.

• Brand jacking: For example, use well-known larger brands as scroll-stoppers.

• Controversial or polarizing statements: This is challenging to execute effectively, but aim to write content that people will strongly agree or disagree with. This generates comments from both sides.

Founder-distribution fit

Founder-distribution fit is the most important concept for indie hackers without VC funding. Without deep pockets to pay for distribution, you must master it yourself. Some excel at X, others at Reddit, TikTok, YouTube, Reels, SEO, etc.

While it's tempting to build first and market later, you must prioritize learning how to get impressions. Learn copywriting. Create engaging visualizations. And perhaps, learn video editing.

Identify which marketing channel fits you best. Find a sustainable and fun channel, because you will do a lot of it.

Copy the right people

Following people who are one or two steps ahead of you will accelerate your learning. Start by copying them.

People in your niche are excellent resources because you can more easily apply their methods to your own work.

That applies to competitors, too — if you're just starting out, having competitors in your space is a blessing. Their marketing is inherently visible, so you can identify everything they did, analyze their strategies, and apply them to your own businesses.

What's next?

For now, I want to grow my businesses to $100K MRR, which will allow me to take much bigger bets, both business-wise and personally.

Beyond this financial goal, I love the game of entrepreneurship, so I hope to continue doing this on a larger scale.

To keep in touch and follow my story, connect with me on X or LinkedIn. And check out Starpop and AI Flow Chat!