SlayerAI

We had worked hard for months on a product that optimized text for engagement (think Grammarly for Marketers), and heard a lot of encouraging things from potential users:

"This is really cool!"

"You're solving a real problem! Congratulations!"

We released a chrome extension and people thought it was cool too. Again, lots of nice comments.

We were getting tons of emotional validation... but zero financial validation.

Then we began exploring partnerships to score/improve text outputs as an integration for GPT-3 companies like Jasper, CopyAI, and Rytr... but it was going slow, we were beholden to their timetable.

We realized we didn't have a clear path to revenue anytime soon. With fundraising markets looking pretty grim, we figured it was time to go heads-down and figure something out.

We modified our AI to start generating engaging text (aka social media posts).

We don't use GPT-3 at all, so our outputs are very different from what you see from AI writers today. We tested it... and were pretty amazed with the results. We could now write original, factual social media posts about anything.

We began showing it off to our network, and got some early supporters! The value proposition was much clearer now--we were saving users hours of time writing and thinking about posts.

People began seeing the social posts we were writing... and actually offered to pay us for them! That was a huge market signal and we started doubling down.

After a bunch of DMs, and activity in my favorite discord community Furlough... we began picking up steam. We actually reached $500 MRR while our landing page was for the old product!

Billing wasn't efficient for users to set up, but we were still finding more and more paying users who resonated with our value proposition (a constant stream of original posts to keep your brand value high on social media, for just $49/month).

Our paying users began referring other paying users, and next thing I knew, we crushed that $1k threshold!

Biggest learnings:

1. EVALUATE your start-up idea... don't VALIDATE it. People will say nice things all the time. It only matters when they're opening their wallet too... it took us awhile to realize that!!

2. Don't give up on your tech stack... especially if you're working with large datasets. You never know what sorts of new advances you can apply to take your product to the next level.

NOW MY BIGGEST QUESTION::
Any tips for how to reach $2k MRR? :)