Pretty Prompt

How we stayed alive, and replaced our pre-seed with actual sales.

Two months ago, we ran a lifetime deal on AppSumo.

The outcome?

• $336,356 in gross sales (not counting our recurring revenue)

• That’s an average of $5k+ per day, consecutively, for 60 days

• Over 5,200 new customers

• 150+ reviews with a 4.88/5 ⭐ rating (“tacos,” in AppSumo language 🌮)

• Dozens of calls with users

• ~300 support tickets

• Hundreds of comments on our deal page that basically turned into our product roadmap

Lifetime deals feel scary.
How can you know what will happen to your startup when you don’t even know what you’ll have for breakfast tomorrow?

But if the definition of a founder is “staying alive,”
we did what we had to do to stay alive.

And I’m so fricking proud of what we’ve built so far.

No VCs.
No “Harvard.”
No pitch decks.

Just us, a Chrome Extension, and our customers.
People are loving Pretty Prompt. You can read the full article here: https://prettypromptai.substack.com/p/from-startup-pivot-to-300k-in-60 (it's a bit too long for IndieHackers 😅)

Now we can step back, and see the full growth of new users through AppSumo, over the two-month run:

It’s incredible to see how committed AppSumo users are. They are not just buying tools; they are buying into the vision, story, and the founders of those tools.

They are almost like your “early investors”. But instead of trading equity, you trade lifetime access. We replaced our “pre-seed round” with an AppSumo campaign.

And we’re truly thankful for all AppSumo customers (“Sumolings”). We not only got a boost in sales, but also motivated customers who are aligned with us to improve the product long-term. And we’re not going to let them down.

Why it worked

1. A simple product

You don’t need a demo. You don’t need a sales call. You install it and immediately get it. (You can even try it without logging in.)

2. A plan for everyone

We had four tiers. With meaningful gaps between them.

Those gaps helped with upgrades without negatively impacting lighter users. We made sure every user received more value than they expected for their chosen tier.

3. The value was real

We kept seeing reviews saying the product “paid for itself” within the first few days, or “The best tool I have purchased on AppSumo over the years”.

That’s the kind of user love you can’t buy with marketing.

4. Timing

We hit Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and New Year.

That really helped. Every time there was a site-wide discount, we benefited from it, plus because the product was so popular, we were featured in the AppSumo newsletter multiple times, boosting sales over and over again.

5. We showed up → The most important one

We answered every single comment. We fixed bugs fast. Sometimes we shipped features the same day someone asked for them. (And we keep doing this!)

We ran webinars with other AppSumo founders.

We added updates every week.

We took care of support and answered personally.

People noticed that. It made it clear that we care. And we’re here for the long-term.

On a personal level

This campaign not only validated that the product works, but also validated that people love it.

And on a personal level, it validated that we can deliver.

We can build. We can sell.

And most importantly, we can learn, adapt fast, and not die.

To all our users, this one’s for you. 💛

Here’s to the next 12 months, fully backed by our customers 💪

Pretty Prompt just hit 7.94% week-over-week growth, doubling our usual of 3–4% per week.

Good news: we pulled off something really hard.
Bad news: now we have to beat it 😅.

Let me give you some context:

Consistently growing 7–10% weekly is one of the most powerful things you can do in tech.

The math:

• Say you start with $1,000 MRR

• Grow 7% weekly

• You’ll hit $400k+ ARR by year one, $13M ARR by year two 🤯

The challenge? Sustaining it.

If you haven’t already, go read Do Things That Don’t Scale by Paul Graham.
Aim for 5–10% weekly growth, and do whatever it takes to keep it alive.

That’s why I’m sharing this graph: no polish, no vanity metrics.
Just how we track weekly growth in a simple spreadsheet.
If it’s useful, I can open-source the template.

A few extra thoughts from the trenches:

1️⃣ A hockey stick looks more like a staircase when you zoom in. Don't be discouraged by the "big guys".

2️⃣ North Star is Customer Love. Right after that: MRR. Cash is king. (Customer love drives revenue).

3️⃣ Short-term campaigns drive insane growth: Two months ago, we launched a limited AppSumo campaign.

In 60 days, we sold more than in the previous seven months combined. Happy to share a full breakdown.

4️⃣ When you're a startup, don't try to act like a big company. Hold on to the advantages you've got by being small: Speed, Personal touch, Quality.

5️⃣ Consistency > Perfection. No post is perfect (At least not mine). No feature is perfect. But consistency makes it closer to perfection over time. (Even though there's no such thing as a perfect post of product).

Here's to the next milestone 🚀

Feels surreal. In just 6 months, Pretty Prompt has helped improve over 200,000 prompts.

That’s not just a number. It’s 200,000 better answers, smoother workflows, and small productivity wins for real people.

And behind the number: 423.5 million AI tokens processed and 22.8 months of time given back to our users.

How it all started

We didn’t think much of this little tool when we launched on Product Hunt. Actually, it went live on my co-founder's birthday 😅. The MVP was tiny, simple, and built to solve a single problem: making prompts better in the AI tools people were already using.

We didn’t push it hard. No fancy launch plan. Just kept it simple: easy to understand, easy to use, fast time-to-value. People loved it, and made it real!

Like Brian Chesky, Co-Founder of Airbnb said: “It’s better to have 100 people love you than 1M people that just sort of like you. Do things that don’t scale."

Growth

The milestone of 200,000 improved prompts came from so many small tweaks and hundreds of calls with users. Talking to people, seeing how they use Pretty Prompt, and learning what they love about it has shaped almost every update.

It’s wild how small, consistent improvements compound over time. I wish I knew this sooner!

694 days of time saved (or 22.8 months!) isn’t just a stat, it’s real people getting hours back to focus on what matters. Building more, doing more, enjoying their work more, getting better results.

Like Uri Levine, Co-Founder of Waze said: "Focus on value creation. The simplest way to create value is to solve a problem!"

Some Lessons

1. Size doesn’t always matter. A tiny tool can have massive impact if it meets users where they already are and solves a real pain.

2. Consistency compounds. Every small improvement adds up. For us it's been more impactful to do smaller constant updates, than packaging up all into big releases.

3. Listen obsessively. Users can become the driver of your growth.

Startups are wild

This journey has been messy, humbling, and exciting all at once. What started as a “little tool” has grown into something that genuinely helps people in their daily AI workflows. And it’s far from over!

There's so much more to build for this Extension, and I'd love to hear your thoughts if you have any ideas or feedback!

It's always up and down, but we keep pushing, keep building and keep making Pretty Prompt 1% better every day.

We did an interview for Stripe's channel (500k subs!) and shared stories we’ve never talked about before:

• Behind the scenes Techstack of Pretty Prompt 🛠️
• Sometimes the “aha moment” isn’t a dashboard… it’s TikTok videos 🎥
• Growth can literally get you kicked out of Slack 🙃

Basically, we hit Slack's rate limit because too many users were signing up!
Hint: switch off notifications and come back in 24 hours.

Pretty Prompt has now improved over 90,000 prompts. Seeing how people use it has been wild and I learn something new every single day.

Check out the Stripe youtube channel, is pretty cool!

My favourite part? Seeing how different, yet complementary, Charlie and I are. I’ve got the best co-founder 💪.

Interview Link here.

10k users and growing! 🚀

Still feels unreal. Last week, we crossed 10,000 people using Pretty Prompt.

Just 3 months after launch 🤯.

How did we get here? That’s a good question, and I don’t have a clear answer. But I can share our journey, so that others in this community can benefit from it and celebrate their own milestones as well.

10k is not the end goal. Goals are like moving targets. They never settle. They’re always moving further… 🎯

Why did we build Pretty Prompt?

We built Pretty Prompt as an internal tool to help us while working on our past product, Dolphin AI. We eventually pivoted from Dolphin to Pretty Prompt 🔄.

We were constantly running into issues with Prompt and Context Engineering. It was like fighting with AI to get the AI to do what we needed to do. So we did what any founder would do: build a tool to solve our own problem.

The MVP was very tight. We built it over a weekend. My Co-Founder, Charlie, locked himself in a room, and by Sunday night, we had a very simple version ready to launch.

The launch

The launch felt like it never happened. We did not push it. We actually forgot it was happening 😅.

We launched on Product Hunt on May 31st. I remember the date because it was Charlie’s birthday. That morning, I thought of canceling the launch because we had not put any effort into promoting it. But there was one advantage:

The product was really, really simple.

The language was simple. The demo was simple.

The time to value was fast. And new users were able to just get it.

There was no paywall, no analytics.

Just a simple MVP. But this MVP solved a real pain. Most importantly, it was a Chrome Extension, embedded in the users’ workflow.

Basically, it was 0 to value in ~20 seconds:

Install the extension → Type something in ChatGPT → Hit Improve Prompt → Magic!

That same flow is what makes Pretty Prompt magical today. You don’t need to know how to use Pretty Prompt to get value out of it.

Pretty Prompt became 2nd Product of the Day. Emails started to pile up, users organically sharing it with more users… and the flywheel began.

We quickly integrated with Stripe, allowing users who wanted more to upgrade.

The biggest difference from Pretty Prompt and Dolphin AI (our past product) was the shift from Pull to Push.

I had to push people to buy Dolphin AI. Whereas people started to pull Pretty Prompt out of our hands. We had to do no pushing.

And the numbers kept growing week over week:

First 2,000 users, then 5k, then 8k. The last 2 weeks, growth accelerated. Took just 3 days to get to 9,000, and a few days after to 10,000.

The number of users is not our North Star. But growing this number helps with every other metric we care about.

Tactical takeaway: Keep an eye open for that pull. If you feel it, follow it. And do things that don't scale. They are your biggest tool to unlock scale.

A few learnings

I never thought this small tool, which feels almost like a toy rather than a product, would be loved by so many people around the world.

But that’s the biggest learning of all:

• Small = Advantage.

• Niche = Higher chances to succeed.

For Pretty Prompt, we are building a tool that helps improve prompts as a Chrome Extension.

• Small = Improve Prompts

• Niche = Chrome Extension

You don’t need big products. What you need is difficult problems to solve.

That’s why so many great startups started as a small side project, intended to solve just a problem for the founders in the first place.

For example, Airbnb didn’t start as a “billion-dollar idea.” Airbnb started as a way for Brian, Joe, and Nathan to make some extra cash by renting airbeds in their SF apartment. (Airbnb = Air Bed and Breakfast…)

If you want to dive deeper into their story, read this letter from Joe, Airbnb's Co-founder.

Bad advice

Most people give bad advice when it comes to startups. They tell you to build complex tools to have defensibility. They tell you to think big. They ask you about your LTV:CAC ratio, and what your roadmap will look like.

The truth is that in the very beginning, the roadmap is kind of irrelevant. What you will build tomorrow is too. Your sole objective is to find 1 person who loves what you’ve built. Then 10. Then 100.

Don’t follow my advice either, but here’s what Brian from Airbnb always says to other founders and people building new businesses:

“It’s better to have 100 people who love you than 1M people that just sort of like you.”

Thinking big is important. But to get started, you just need a small thing that you really want, and solves a real problem for you or someone you know.

And if it solves your own problem, at least you will have found your first user: You 🎉.

Tactical takeaway: Start with a small problem. Build something you personally really want.

Your first job as a founder

Your first job as a founder is to not die. To make sure you build something people want and are happy to pay for, so that you eventually make more than you spend to run the company.

To build something people want, you need to cut features.

Adding features is easy. The real learnings come from building something so good, and so simple, that people want it as it is. Even if it’s not perfect.

If people love your product, they will ask you for new stuff. Let those requests come from your users.

Note: Something simple from a user perspective does not mean it is simple from a technical perspective.

My top 3 learnings so far

1. Keep it small.

2. Answer every user personally, and do it manually.

3. Chrome Extensions are underestimated.

4. Bonus: Don’t be afraid of sharing what you’re building in public.

1. Keep it small

Starting small is an advantage rather than a disadvantage.

2. Answer to every user personally, and do it manually

I spend a lot of my time obsessing over what users say about Pretty Prompt.

A big chunk of my week revolves around talking with users to learn more about their experience.

By doing things manually, you get so close to your customers that you start to learn their names by heart and can almost predict what a specific user will do or say before they’ve done it. The other half of my week is spend in Content, Product, and Analytics.

Tactical takeaway: Manual work in the early days is the fastest way to deeply understand your users.

3. Chrome Extensions are underestimated

Chrome Extensions are underestimated in both power and complexity.

What makes them powerful is that they meet users where they already are. No extra learning curve. That flow is incredibly powerful.

They are also very hard to build. And a lot of the “obvious” things from Web and Mobile apps don’t apply to Chrome Extensions in the same way.

4. Bonus: Don’t be afraid of sharing what you’re building in public

Don’t be afraid of saying what you think and what you’re working on with the world.

Share constantly and think long term. It’s not a linear path. Growth is a 360 concept, and every piece of content adds another step toward the finish line.

Every small nugget of information you throw online is another opportunity to add value and get another user.

Writing helps you structure your thoughts. Sharing helps your audience learn. Content helps your startup create more luck.

Think of it as:

• Content = Product.

• Building = Writing.

I’m a technical founder, but I’m no developer. From the get-go, I’ve been pushing code into Production. My Co-Founder is technical, and from the get-go, he’s been writing content.

It’s amazing what you can achieve in a short amount of time.

You can do more, and you can achieve more.

You don’t need anything else to get started.

You’re the owner of your luck, and tomorrow is too late. It starts today.

100 Days in, closing thoughts

100 days. 10,000 users.

To each one of you, you’ll always be our first 10,000 🙏.

While most startups focus on raising funds, we’ve decided to focus (for the second time) on customers. You are our sole focus.

Every Monday morning, we start the week with two bullet points:

• Product → What we need to build/fix.

• Customers → What we need to do to grow and retain.

If you’re enjoying Pretty Prompt, share it with a friend.

If you have feedback, or there’s something you’d like to see that is not there yet, let me know. I hope you can see how obsessed I am with our customers 🥹.

To close, here are 3 testimonials about Pretty Prompt:

“It doesn't just make your prompts better, it also makes you a better prompter.”
– Ben Wallman, Curvo.ai.

“If you aren't using Pretty Prompt, you're missing out! It’s the ultimate growth hack in your AI capabilities.” – Paul Tucker, ChiroCat.

“That tool you didn't know you needed has become a daily favorite. I'm falling more in love with it every day.” – Henrique Girardi dos Santos, Circle.

—

Reading reviews like these makes all those late nights worth it.
(I wrote this at 10:43 pm).

We’re just getting started 🚀

Ilai.

Something I heard a lot:

“I want Pretty Prompt, but I can’t install Chrome extensions at work.”

"Is there an option to use it on a website instead of a Chrome Extension?"

Until now, Pretty Prompt was tied to the Chrome Extension.

The Web App fixes this. 🧑‍💻

Now, Pretty Prompt works on the web in addition to the Extension. And it’s fully synced between the two.

That means:

• You get the same prompt improvements as the Chrome Extension.

• Your Prompt History stays connected across devices.

• You can switch between personal and work computers without missing a beat.

• You can use both, whenever you want: Chrome Extension or Web App.

The Web App is live today, and I need your feedback!

Try it out, tell me what’s working, and what could be even better.

(And if you missed our other updates, check them out on Substack!)

This week, I’ve been sharing our latest updates to Pretty Prompt. Today, I'm closing the week with what might be the most powerful feature so far...

We think computers just "get it". We're wrong. Everything that "just works", has been built by someone.

And that someone, has the context because we're humans. We're used to using our own experiences as context for what it "should or shouldn't be".

When prompting AI, that context needs to be provided so that you can get the desired output you want, fast, and with as little work as possible.

This is the issue we encountered with Pretty Prompt over and over again. I kept hearing from users: “Once you’re deep into a chat, follow-ups shouldn’t feel like starting from scratch.”

True. Until now, Pretty Prompt treated every prompt as brand new.

That worked fine for a fresh chat.

But if you were mid-conversation, trying to refine your ideas with follow-up prompts, it broke the flow.

Not Anymore... Enter Conversational Memory!

Now, Pretty Prompt remembers what you’ve already said in a chat and uses that context when you hit “Improve Prompt” to create in-context follow up prompts.

That means your follow-ups:

• Stay relevant to your conversation

• Stay connected to your flow of thought

• Build on what you’ve already written, instead of starting over

💡 Think of it like RAM for your prompts: temporary, smart, and working only when you need it. And I'm blown away by how magical it is. Genuinely better than expected!

Try Pretty Prompt for free here.

(And join 7,000 users improving their prompts with Pretty!)

Three months ago, we launched Pretty Prompt on Product Hunt. Nearly 8,000 users later, our goal is still the same: helping people write better prompts, faster, to get better AI results.

But there was one question we kept hearing over and over again:

"How does a better prompt actually look like?"

In other words, Pretty Prompt was doing a great job, but it still felt like a black box.

We changed that! Introducing Prompt Blocks

Why this matters?

• 🧩 Sections → Prompts are broken into clear parts to understand their structure.

• ✏️ Edit inline → Click a block, edit, it auto-saves (like Notion or Granola).

• 💡 Tooltip → Hover to see exactly what’s been improved and why.

Instead of staring at one giant wall of text, you can see each part of your prompt and how it helps in generating better results. Give it a go and let me know any feedback!

This is feature 1/3 this week! Would love to hear your thoughts, this community has always been super supportive of us and we love it!

3 quick updates:

• Last week, we passed 100 paying customers on Pretty Prompt 🎉.

• We now have over 50 reviews on the Chrome Web Store, a total of 4.9 /5 stars!

• Just launched a new feature that was highly requested: Prompt History.

Now, every prompt you run through Pretty Prompt — both the original and the improved version — is automatically saved and logged in your own Prompt History for your easy access.

Why it’s great:

• Accidentally deleted a prompt? You can grab it back in seconds.

• You wrote something in ChatGPT but want to test it in Claude (or somewhere else)? Now you can.

✨ It’s like a Clipboard History, but made for prompts.

Enjoy and happy prompting! (If you haven't tried it yet, it's free to get started!)