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You you you you you you you you you you you you You You Hey. Hello everyone. I could see that some people have been having trouble hearing me. If you can hear my voice, give me a thumbs up. Let me know that the audio is coming through for you.

All right, I see it from John. Good to see you in here, John. So, you're hearing from me too. Blaine, my man, glad that you're here and can hear me. Can somebody just go into our private chat for speakers and let Ido know, yes, we can hear, everything's coming in.

And if you can't hear us at some point in the session, Twitter has been super buggy as you know lately, and it just means that what we need to do is either restart your system or sometimes you just need to pause. If you see that I cannot hear something it is because there's probably a Twitter issue that's affecting me and I've got Salil here he is our co-host he will be just jumping in and taking over. I'm gonna invite you Celil to be a speaker And co-host a session with us fantastic. Thank you all for being here If you can hit that bottom right chat button and just retweet this session let people know that we're live letting them know we're live brings in more people into the conversation and allows them to frankly sometimes add some insight privately to us via direct messages, sometimes connect with us, and sometimes just bring in their followers which allows us to broaden out this conversation. My name is Andrew Warner.

Some of you know me as the person who's been doing interviews on Mixergy for years, over 2200 of them on the site. And I regret that I did not do enough interviews about AI because man, I've been following Bhanu. Bhanu, do I am I pronouncing your name right? Bhanu Keha? You can unmute yourself and just do it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Bhanu created SiteGPT and I've just been watching him over the years be an indie developer, cranking things out by himself. And because he's doing this all in public, we're all getting to watch it. And I think he gets some company and gets some customers from it. And it's been wonderful. And I've been watching this guy take this idea for SiteGPT from 0 to just an incredible number of users, incredible revenue over a short period of time.

I think February is when he first started talking about it.

And I was amazed by it. And then I talked to Blaine because I love this tool called Cast Magic, which basically takes my whole podcast, transcribes it better than any other system I've ever used before, and then gives me 10 suggestions for headlines, gives me suggestions for tweets. I'll be honest with all of you, it's not magical. It doesn't end up being like the perfect writing, but sometimes I feel like, hey, that's good. I could tweak it.

And sometimes I feel like that's terrible. What he should have said is, and then I come

up with something better. And then

I could write my own prompts for it and then come up with my own ways of extracting information from my podcast. So I talked to Blaine about Cast Magic. And in private, so

I won't reveal it, he told me the numbers behind it, how many people are using it for not just podcasting, but for meeting notes to be able to extract information for meetings. He told me what the revenue was. I go, I'm totally missing this. I should be more like my buddy, Brian. Brian has been running Heights Platform for years, enabling creators to create content that people actually pay for and participate with.

And he's messing around with it and adding functionality, not to a brand new tool that's just allowed because of AI, but adding functionality to a tool that's worked well, that now has even bigger super power because of this. I wanna know about what I've been missing. What is it that's going on in this space? And so I put together this Twitter space to understand what you all are doing, especially the indie side. I get pitched so many times by entrepreneurs who wanna do, who have raised 100 plus million dollars and now they're making a million dollars a month.

And that seems not exciting. I wanna know about the indie guys, the indie people who are building companies. And so that's what this space is about. That's what we're gonna be finding out about. And I thought for the first introductions, what we could do is just kind of go around and have each 1 of you who's a speaker, first of all, ask for speaking.

And second, just unmute yourselves and in a sentence or 2, don't go too long. Tell us what what your tool is and what it does. And then we'll keep coming up with more questions and ways of engaging everyone. But Bonnie, since I brought you up, if you feel comfortable unmuting, tell us what your tool is and what it does and then everyone else just take from there.

Yeah, so what I built it's called SiteGPT. It's a way to create a chart box based on your website content right like all the all my customers are use it mainly for customer support. This replaces, this will act as a first step for providing customer support. You just give it your website link and it automatically gets trained on all the links in your website. So that's basically what it does.

Do you mind giving us the revenue numbers? And if anyone wants to give us a sense of how many users you have or anything about growth, that'd be helpful too.

Should I go now?

Kevin, we'll let you go next, but Bhanu, do you mind just giving the revenue also?

So I'm Kevin, the founder of the Creator Kit. We do AI generated photos and videos for e-commerce marketing. And we specialize in doing basically media for marketing and e-commerce specifically. Happy to chat more then I'll let you everyone introduce themselves.

John, do you want to go next?

Yeah, my name is John Hainstock. We are working on ChatterDocs, which is an advanced custom chatbot builder built on OpenAI like a lot of these other folks. We allow you to ingest sources from not only like your website, but things like Notion, YouTube, MP3, RSS, all that kind of stuff. And so lots of different ways to get your data in. And then on the other side, there's a lot of different ways to get it out via the API, Slack, embedding it on your website.

And we also have like custom landing pages that you could create as well. So lots of different options.

I think the biggest difference that we bring to

the table right now is really just this, the ability to customize the workflow. So you get the ability to kind of say, pick a direction when somebody's clicking around or interacting with the bot and be able to schedule appointments and collect lead data and stuff like that.

Thanks. How about Brian next and then Blaine after that?

Hey guys, I'm Brian McAnulty, the founder of Heights Platform. We've been around for a little bit. We're an online course creation software and community building software. And When it comes to AI, we added some features called Heights AI, which allows our creators to be able to ask things like support questions about how to use the software, be able to ask questions about how to grow their business. Which is all based on like our, our knowledge, our content that our teams created over the years.

And more recently, the Heights AI can act as kind of like a co-pilot feature where you can actually ask it to make changes to your product, say like publish my guitar course, make the launch date 30 days from now, and then set the price to

$200.

So what I think is really exciting is now people don't even have to learn how to use the interface.

Oh, that's fantastic. Sorry, Blaine, go ahead.

Hey guys, Blaine Bolas here. I'm 1 of the founders of Cast Magic and we are an AI voice to content platform. So basically we allow for customized generative content and workflows for any sort of conversational audio. We started the platform as a podcast AI copywriting tool, basically before seeing a more horizontal opportunity for any sort of audio. So kind of as Andrew alluded to, you can use it for anything from podcasts to meetings, to voice memos, to pretty much anything.

So that's a little bit about us.

So you want to go next? And then hide now. Next after that.

Hey, I'm at all the ball. I created document q&a.com. It allows you to chat with any document of any type in any language within seconds. I mean, the biggest features we have is we immediately generate summaries, FAQs, which are very important for people, highlights of documents and we are coming out with an API soon so that you can embed all this magic within your own tool or website.

Hey everyone, Sebastian from Hey Milo here. Me and my co-founder, we built generative AI-powered voice agents to handle technical interviews for companies and vet candidates at scale more effectively. Our AI agents can actually call candidates, do an interview with them, respond to their input, and then at the end, provide a summary on their fit for the role. So we're looking to promote more inclusive hiring, more effective hiring. Yeah.

And we launched, I'd say, a week ago now. And so we're talking to a bunch of customers and looking to scale to different companies.

All right. Yeah, it sounds beautiful in the demo on your website. It's like a person, We know that it's not a real person, but it sounds like a person asking questions based on people's resume, asking follow-up questions. It's a really cool demo and a cool product. Salil, how about you?

Hey everyone, my name is Salil. I've been in the startup space for several years. Met Andrew a couple of years ago in the blockchain world. Right now I'm doing a few things. I'm actively involved with a few different projects in the AI startup space, building a tool which I like to call Postman for prompts.

So essentially how you create and refine and test APIs. You can create, refine, test, share, collaborate on prompts. So building that, it's called Zen Prompt and also working on an AI newsletter for founders and funders. So those are my 2 projects, but been in the startup space both as an entrepreneur and as an advisor for over 5 years at this point.

So I thought we could start with 1 thing that's really easy in working with AI, especially with OpenAI's API access. And then maybe we could go to something that's a little bit challenging in the space and be open about the challenges and if there's a way that you've overcome it, share that. But Atul, I know we're gonna oversimplify it, but Repl.it did a quick story about how you built your app. Do you feel comfortable sharing how much it cost you and give us the short version of

what was easy about building

it and then we can go into the more complicated stuff, but give us a short version of what worked well and easily. Sure.

So I had this clear vision of what I wanted to build and I also had the architecture laid out and I was I was knee deep in my own work at at Amazon and so I didn't have the time to go learn the coding and like do it. So I put it as a bounty on replit. I went through a couple of developers who are not actually able to take the vision and and complete it in in the way I wanted. But eventually I hit it with the developer on the replit and he was exactly able to build what I wanted and it cost me around $3, 000 in total. And then He and me have now collaborated and we are punching out features every 2 weeks.

And do you feel comfortable saying what it cost to get the whole thing built so far?

Yeah, it's around $3, 000. Okay,

so around $3, 000. That's the easy part of it. That's really impressive. Anyone else? Bhanu, is there something that worked out fairly easily because of the technology that you have access to today?

Yeah, so I think I knew nothing about AI before this, but OpenAI made it so accessible to use AI like it's just a bunch of APIs now like anyone who is a good software developer can build AI applications on top of all these APIs. So yeah, so it made many things possible OpenAI. Yeah.

How are you doing it? You are giving people the ability to add chat GPT that focuses on content other on their site can you give us just a quick overview of how you're able to do it using openai

so yeah openai has something called impedance so what it does is it gives you similarity between uh 2 pieces of text right like if you give it 2 pieces it will be able to tell whether these 2 pieces are similar or these 2 other pieces are similar it will be able to compare them so that that's what open AI does So I use that that tech to build this. I scrape the entire website, I get all the content from the website, and then I build embeddings out of it. And I use those embeddings to answer the user question.

Okay, and I did share for both of the 2 recent speakers some tweets that show how they did it and how they're doing. Lane, it feels to me like Cast Magic is incredibly effective, but maybe I'm oversimplifying my understanding of the back end. But it seems like what you're doing is you're having a transcribed and there are multiple sources where you could have a transcribed. And then you're putting it into chat GPT and having your own prompts pull in data for people. Am I oversimplifying it?

What am I missing?

Yeah, I think that's a pretty accurate way to describe it. I think what goes on in the background though, is there's so many corner cases and use cases that you have to solve for, for all the different types of audio, right? So, you know, there's like a Twitter space where there's 20 different speakers is a different scenario than a dialogue versus a monologue. And 1 of the challenges when working with longer format sort of content is the context windows that you're allowed with OpenAI. And those are starting to go up.

But that was kind of initially the reason we built the service was because you couldn't just take a, you know, 20, 30, 40 page transcript, drop it into chat GPT and start asking it questions. So there's a bunch of smart processing and stuff like that that goes on the background, being able to handle a bunch of different APIs for all the different languages and everything. So that's kind of where the software and workflows that we build come in.

How'd you do it in the beginning? Because I'm a podcaster who has his interviews transcribed regularly. I tried putting it into just a chat GPT window. Of course, that didn't work. I then started breaking it up into 4 different clips and I would say, I'm about to send you 4 different clips, just study these and then I'll ask you questions afterwards.

And the response I got was okay. And then it never really was okay. What did you do that I wasn't able to do by just using the chat interface to be able to query long form content?

Yeah, so the chat versus the API are 2 different like products so what you're able to do in chat versus what you're able to do in the API are a little bit different and then like I said before we're able to you know, basically take basically summarize and process and take all the information that's in the transcript, store it in different ways in different places, and then be able to, again, query against that to generate accurate results. So that's why when you're asking Cast Magic for specific content related to a really long thing, it's able to understand what you're looking for, go find it, identify it, and then generate content based on that.

And Salil, as my co-host here, you have a bigger, deeper understanding of the tech here, so feel free to jump in at any time. Just unmute yourself and ask follow-up questions. Brian, was there anything that worked fairly easily? Was there like an easy win for you in adding AI? And then if someone else wants to go, just give me the thumbs up so that you can go next.

Sure, I think what was surprising to me at least was the ability for us to get just all of our content in there of our support content, about how to use our software, our marketing content, and being able to have that as a tool that customers could then ask, where it's not gonna be 100% as good as actually asking somebody on our team, but the fact that it gives you information instantly means that if it's even 80 percent, that's going to be so useful to people. I guess coming from that and working in that, what was so interesting is finding that like with all of these, the AI tools now you're writing these prompts in English. And so my, my team's all helping write prompts. I have everybody helping and working on that, even if they're not a technical role, partially because I want them to be able to understand it, but also because it's really possible. If you know how to write instructions out, then you know how to kind of build with AI, even if you're not a developer.

John, how about you next? And then Kevin, I saw you come in next after that.

Yeah, so I, like Bahu, I don't have like a ton of experience working in AI, of course. I think coming into this was just about learning how to stitch together the APIs. But I thought what was really interesting is just the tooling around it has developed so quickly. Like, LangChain is probably 1 of those projects that, I mean, everybody in here is probably a little bit familiar with, but it's so powerful because it just gives you the ability to swap out different tools easily and test lots of things. Like you can just test different prompts, you can test different backend providers on the embedding side, and you can test out different ways to interact with the content itself whether you do it with the chat style or if you use the API for more of the summarization kind of things like Blaine was talking about.

So I think that's what's been really fun and exciting for me is just to see the progression of all the tools around the picks and shovels or whatever, around building. Because This gets to 1 of the difficulties too in this space, as things move so fast that it's really difficult to keep up. And so you kind of have to always just be paying attention to what's out there to a certain degree, even if you don't plan on implementing it right away, just because there's probably a better way to do things than what you're doing today, like the next week. Things are moving that quickly.

Where are you finding the tools and the resources that let you stay up to date and find out what's going to be amazing tomorrow or is worth looking at?

I mean, I pay attention to a lot of newsletters and unfortunately, this is probably another idea is just to grab all the AI newsletters and look for duplicate content and really just digest it into 1. But I follow a lot of AI newsletters, Ben's Bites, TLDR, there's a bunch of them that I follow right now. And just tracking those down, taking a look at them, trying to be good at digesting the information quickly and seeing like, is this gonna be useful for the project? And then usually just a little bit of a back and forth with my co-founder Ben, who we're chatting with, or that I work with, and we'll just chat about it a little bit and see if it's something that we might be able to use. And sometimes it's in the form of code snippets that you can find in the open source repos and other times it's just an article that helps you think about a different way to attack a certain problem.

So yeah, it's just staying close to those things. And then also paying attention on Twitter, when people are tweeting, like following all the main folks there and staying up to date with notifications from those people.

Kevin, Jim button in here, I saw that you're next. And then, hey, Milo, if you want to come in after that, that'd be a good time.

Cool. So for us, our journey with AI started quite a few years ago before, before it was, before the AI boom, we were integrating many of the AI models on, for example, for background removal and that kind of like features that we had on our AI video tour that we launched 4 years ago. So we had a lot of features that weigh AI power. So it wasn't for us kind of like when the AI boom started, we weren't piecing together many APIs, which I believe there's a huge opportunity to piece together the right APIs with the right embeddings. So for those who are not technical, we can get into what the embeddings are.

But For us, we just went very deep and technical with my co-founder into actually creating our own model of stable diffusion so that Stable diffusion is the model to create AI images and we created our own version of StableDiffusion or forking StableDiffusion so that we can optimize it for the specific use case of generating product images. So when you try StableDiffusion or any of the AI tools out there for product images for specific uses of, a specific use case of creating product images, what you'll get is that usually it will deform the product or for that, that the, that brands are trying to use for, for marketing. So that's why we decided to focus on fixing that specific use case and going deep into what's called the diffusion models. And so we went deep technical with my co-founder instead of the path of piecing together the right APIs. And it turned out, it turned out a really good outcome in the sense that we are kind of the only ones that have the this possibility of creating product images that are not deforming the product.

But-

Kevin, in the beginning, when you had Creator Kit launched, what did you do and what powered that?

So when we started, we started as a video creator, purpose-built for e-commerce, and we started 4 years ago, specifically building a video editing tool for e-commerce. When we saw that most of the e-commerce stores required product images for their videos, then that's when we saw that we wanted to integrate an API. Just like John said, we wanted to piece together the right APIs when Stable Diffusion launched and it was the boom of the AI-generated images, we just said, oh, you can just integrate this API into our platform and it will work really well to generate product images. But it turned out that there wasn't any API available because most of the available tools were deforming the product images. So that's when we went deep into creating something that's why it was very technical and required quite a lot of work.

In the end it turned out good. I don't know if I would recommend the path of going very, very technical instead of just piecing together a few of the available APIs into a very, very specific workflow that you know that customers will make sense.

Kevin, with Mid-Journey making all these updates so rapidly, right, so I think 5.2 just came out a few days ago, there was 4 or 5, it's basically in the last 6 months, the whole mid journey model has improved significantly. How do you guys think about that? Do you think at some point, I know they don't have an API right now, at some point you might want to just hook into mid journey because that's like a foundation model, right? I feel a lot of these products will be built on these industrial grade foundation models, or do you think the approach that you're following, which is bring home the data, bring home the model, build it in-house, Any thoughts on future approaches, assuming a stable diffusion like foundation model becomes publicly available via API?

Sure, so the thing is that for us, we are tackling a very, very specific use case that Midjourney is not tackling, which is product images with AI. And you cannot do product image with AI in Mid Journey because it will deform the product image because the AI model is not designed so that it's not deforming the edges. And you can use the original product image with your product and embed it into an image that is embedded in a way that it doesn't look generated. That's something that Midjourney is creating right now, the best AI generated images. But it doesn't work for the use case of uploading your product image with white background and then generating product images.

So this is a very, very specific use case that again, it's a very huge market, but a very specific use case that make journeys is not useful for it right now. So the way we see it is that you need to make the right changes. And if you want to tackle a specific use case in the diffusion model area, There's so many areas that there are many, for example, for the ones who are working on AI audio, I believe that the huge opportunity is actually on the data that they are unlocking that is not available for the open AI, for example.

Yeah, I'll actually like maybe chime in there. Like I completely agree with like getting like your own kind of custom data to fine tune the model. But I would take actually, for our use case at least, the opposite approach where generative AI has allowed us to have that foundational model where we no longer have to, from scratch, train like a custom model to do certain things. And so that's kind of allowed us to like iterate on a number of different generative AI or AI products over the last 4 months, which previously we honestly couldn't do for like 2 key reasons. Either it would cost too much or it would take too long.

And so I think that's been like a really, that's been like the thing that's allowed a lot of, I think, entrepreneurs and founders and developers to move so quickly. It's like the fact that you don't have to now collect a ton of training data, build a model, spend money on the infra for all that. And then in terms of just our journey with HeyMilo, we actually pivoted from another kind of startup or product just 3 weeks ago, and we built this in just a couple of weeks, which really could not have been done before. And we've been able to iterate and go to market really, really quickly. And I think that's something that really stood out to us.

And in terms of tech stack, we're using GVT under the hood for the model and then Microsoft Azure for the text to speech. And then yeah, we're collecting custom data to continue to fine tune the model over time and build a mode like that.

So on the mode piece, and I think that's a very interesting thing, right?

So a

lot of us, right, like indeed developers, we are able to build things like you said, because there are foundation models, right? ChatGPT is around, they spend multiple years, millions of dollars training the model and now we can spin it up. Would the mode actually be technical or would the mode be more business driven, right? Like Facebook had it, right? It's a social network, so you know, make these multiplayer games or multiplayer apps rather than single player apps.

So those are the modes and not technical modes, per se.

I think it'd be twofold, right? Like I think you can have both the technical mode as well as the business mode. Right. Like I think custom tuning a model is still going to be better than the generic model. Right.

So you're going to outperform 1 of these generic models still. Right. And then applying that and integrating into various other use cases is I guess where the business mode comes in. And that's how I think at HeyMilo, that's how we're thinking about that. Like, how do we integrate seamlessly into the recruiting stack?

Right. Which is something that like a chat GBT, 1 of these single applications won't be able to do. So I guess to answer that question, I think there still could be both. Right. And as you're collecting that fine tuned data, even when there's new versions of that kind of baseline model, you'll just continue to just fine tune on top of that model, right.

So I think those those 2 modes are going to still exist.

I want to come in,

hopefully that answer your question, though.

I think it does. And I see that 1 of our speakers, Ido, is having trouble speaking. Just hit the request to speak button and we'll bring you in. 1 of the things that I'm curious about is how are you getting users to pay attention? 1 of the things that was really exciting in the beginning of AI was everything was so new.

I wanted to try anything that had AI. If you told me there was toilet paper with AI, it would be delivered to my house by Amazon by night, even though I knew that there was no way that it could work. I had to see.

Now I think that there's this saturation. I'm wondering what are

you doing now to that's working for letting people know that you're that what that you exist and that what you have is working. What's working for all of you? Atul, is there something you wanna talk about? I know things have been going well now. And then I'm curious about Blaine for you.

Blaine, you've got a very viral product, but your name isn't attached to it. And I'm curious about what's going on with Cast Magic, but Atul, go first. What's been working?

Yeah, I think what has been working is Twitter has been working a lot. So just like a week ago, an influencer from Argentina tweeted about us, And then we went viral in Argentina. So on a single day, we got like 2000 hits from Argentina, and we are still the biggest app in Argentina. So I think that's really interesting. And the biggest traffic we see on our site is from Spanish users.

So now we are pivoting towards, hey, how do we make the site more friendly for Spanish users in addition to the English users?

What do you mean the biggest in Argentina? Biggest on what chart? And then Blaine, Sorry, I see you're coming in. Will it get to it

next?

Oh, just as in for us.

Oh, got it.

You're saying Argentina now is the biggest. And it's just someone tweeted out that this tool exists where you can go and upload your docs and basically query them.

Right, And that person kind of made an emotional attachment to it. Hey, if I had this and I was growing up when I was studying, like this would have been a game changer for me. So that that really hit a note with people.

If you can share that in our private chat and I'll share with everybody. Sorry. Go ahead, Blaine. What's working for you? Absolutely.

So I

think the biggest thing that worked for us, because we knew speed was going to be really important in this market. So actually Noah Kagan from AppSumo had started using the tool, this was like back in March, and was like, Hey, if you guys, um, you know, I love your tool. Do you guys want to come launch and we'll do a panel with you guys at South by Southwest. So we launched with them and we launched it on app sumo, which was kind of like as a business decision, like we were unclear, we literally hadn't done any sales yet. And we're kind of like, do we do this?

So these like lifetime deals and we don't know if that's a good idea. But we launched there, they've driven a ton of revenue, which is 1 time revenue. But also I think through organic word of mouth, like we've grown a ton too. So our MRR has grown a bunch as well. So I think the combination of AppSumo and Word of Mouth Organic has just been the biggest drivers for us.

We haven't done 1 ad yet. We haven't done 1 paid promotion other than the AppSumo stuff, which is like, you know, it's performance based. So sorry. So but with

AppSumo, they do lifetime deals, you have to pay per query. How can you swing that? Yeah.

I'm really interested to hear that for sure. Yeah, so basically... We are burning credits right now.

Well, I mean, the way we think about it, it's like when we sell a lifetime deal to Cast Magic, right? Like it's

117

bucks that we see from that, right? And our cost of transcription, call it 20 cents per hour worth of content transcribed plus open AI, which is negligible. So, if a user is using it every single day to their full capacity, I think the payback period would have to be, they'd have to like fully use the product for maybe like 2 years to break even or 1 year or 2 years, something like that. So that was kind of how we were able to make the call. We're like, look, speed is gonna be really important in this market and getting our brand out there.

And it actually worked because our MRR has grown to be able to support what it would cost to pay out those plans anyway. So as far as...

That is crazy to hear because for us, cost and managing cost is... We have a five-figure Amazon bill every month. And this is just because the cost of AI is just crazy insane in comparison to everything we've built and we've built a lot of stuff in the past

10

years. And the cost is something that many of the hackers and just any product builders just underestimate completely charging $40 a month or $20 a month may even not pay the bill. And that is something that it's important to just understand how, especially when there is a visual AI, maybe in the open AI definitely increases the prices, but this is something to definitely take into account when baking into a lifetime build. I think it's a great advice to put AppSumo there, but any lifetime build should be taken into account very carefully when baking the cost into that.

Oh, I 100% agree with that. And the way we were thinking about it, it was kind of like, let's take a swing here, right? So because we knew speed was important and so far it's been looking pretty good, but I totally agree. Like It wasn't easy to swallow.

Good to know that AppSumo was able to be a good lever there. For us, I'm going to chime in on what's working for us.

1 quick question, actually. Are you building a B2C product or is that a B2B product?

It's more like prosumer. So, yeah.

Got it. All right. Sorry. Go ahead, Kevin.

So, for us, something that is working is TikTok. And it's something that is very weird that technically working, of course, that partnering with the influencers help. And it's something that whenever you need a promotion, it's something that has proven to work. But something that we did a lot of work is TikTok and we have gained I think 80, 000 followers. But again, once you understand how to create content for TikTok.

Most of the marketers also spend time on TikTok, seeing what's trendy on TikTok. And for us, it's driving many sales. On a weekly basis, we have 2 or 3 TikToks going to like 1 million views. And again, you need to create a lot of content, understand how to create content. But once you nail it, it's just organic traffic that once TikTok understands that it's a good content, it's just free traffic.

And it is like, of course, it's something that it's not sustainable. But right now, if you're watching the number 1 growth level right now, it's a channel it's it's

so you're creating Tick Tock yourself. And these creators are doing how to videos for how to use creator kid to get AI generated photos and videos, am I right?

We are creating, we have a content, a content marketer doing the running TikTok too, and we also work with some influencers. But again, the influencers, it's definitely something that is not that scalable, but it's something that works.

I'm also curious. So this is 1 part, right, the customer acquisition. I'm also curious to know about the customer retention. I think Peter Levels posted a month or so ago that the dirty secret within the AI space is the retention or the churn numbers are really high, like almost 30 to 40% you know churn. So Brian, Dhanu, would love to hear your thoughts.

So I want to kind of finish up with 1 last thing about the acquisition and everything there. And First of all, Blaine, I want to say I bought Cast Magic earlier this week. My team saw it and it looks like it's going to be a useful product for us. In regards to the lifetime deals, I think that the main benefit of doing something like that, and we've done that in the past as well, is to really kickstart the word of mouth. It's not so much for the revenue early on, which can be helpful because you're not giving away equity, but the kickstarting of the word of mouth is really powerful and it's hard to do that otherwise in certain cases, depending on what you're doing for marketing.

As far as the retention, I guess it's partially connecting the acquisition into the retention here, but for us, the way people are finding us is like we found consumers are generally looking for like if there is like X tool, they're looking for X tool plus AI. And because AI is just such a big thing right now. And when it comes to retention, I think it really just depends on how your product is and like what you see that it's going to be used for. For us, I think, if anything, the retention is going to increase. We generally have customers to stay on for a few years.

But with a tool where it's like to generate 1 thing quickly, where you might have a customer who only needs to use it once, I think it's best to think of ways you can build into your product reasons why you can be useful to them going forward in the future.

I'm curious if acquisition and the channels that are working right now for folks is the same on the B2C side as B2B. I wonder if Twitter and TikTok and some of these more viral channels also help on the B2B side. I'm curious if anyone who's been able to achieve some stuff on the B2B side can share some thoughts.

John?

Yeah, so the ones that have actually been the

most successful with our product have actually come from LinkedIn. So the people that are, and they're not necessarily tapped into Twitter, they're not necessarily tapped into TikTok. It's a totally different world over there. And when I look at the customer base, it's actually the most successful right now with our product. They found us on LinkedIn or word of mouth there in just the very small reach that I've had there.

So, I mean, even Thinking about this out loud, it's probably the best platform for us to be when it comes to focusing on businesses versus B2C. Our goal is really to serve businesses and to help people generate leads, help people set appointments, and to create bots for their own internal use. That's the primary use case.

And has that been more like organic posts or more like LinkedIn, like in-mail or DM?

Yeah, no, organic posts is kind of where folks have found out about it.

Gotcha.

We also do B2B and the playbook is the playbook for any B2B startup and AI startup that's doing B2B is not any different and it requires a lot of partnerships and depending on the on the industry. It requires a lot of uh involvement and and also referrals with within the industry for us. It's the commerce industry and the shopify ecosystem that's driving a lot of uh sales to you, uh with with partnerships, but uh, again, it really depends on a 1 on a case like case on the specific industry, I believe.

By the way, I pinned to

the top of this chat, Kevin's TikTok. You guys are doing really well on TikTok. I could see you've got 84, 85, 000 followers and some really interesting stuff on your own TikTok. If you're listening to us, as things are happening, I'm trying to find TikTok to, or sorry, I'm trying to find tweets to support what people have been saying and to illustrate it. But go ahead, whoever was speaking, you can continue.

Yeah, it's fascinating to see that social seems to be a big driver, be it TikTok, be it LinkedIn, be it Twitter. Curious to see if people have seen success with all these newsletters, right? Like these 100, 000 plus sub newsletters, Rundown, Ben's Bite, Superhuman, several of them, or even Google Search. Anyone seen any success with 1 of those 2 channels?

Yeah, we did some collaborations with Adit from Mr. Prompts. I looked at, I tracked it and it actually pretty much broke even for us, which was exciting. It performed better than I thought it would.

The thing is, if it's scalable or not to. So we haven't worked with newsletters more than a test with just 1. And it's something that I don't know how sustainable will it be. And we still need to dig more into that channel. But I would love to hear if someone has actually worked on that channel.

So I actually kickstarted a lot of traffic to my site through Google Ads. And by track, like, tapping into the keywords, I was able to get like about 20 30% CTRs at least initially on.

So and this is not organic, this is paid or this is organic Google

business paid, this is paid, but that but the CTR was like the, the CAC was pretty low, like maybe $0.02 or $0.03 per customer.

Bhanu, for you, is it all Twitter, just having people ride along

with you?

So for me, it's mostly through reference, right? Like 1 business subscribes as a customer and someone they know, they refer to other people like, so I get these big businesses as customers who give like maybe a thousand 2000 things like that and they refer their friends who are also building businesses so the customers that I get are they are like a boring businesses like e-commerce websites. For them, this AI is like magic, right? So they, so instead of, so they get millions of visitors to their website. So having a chatbot to handle these generic queries like what is the refund policy, how to refund it, how to order, how to get the tracking link.

So these things they don't need human support to be there to answer these kinds of questions. And for Millie and Visitor Seventh, this is helping them a lot. So they are willing to tell their founder friends about it. And they come to my website. I give them a demo.

And then they will join. So mine is mostly through word of mouth and referrals from customers. These are not affiliates, but they are just telling the people I know.

What about this, Manu? For a while there, it was largely, if not all, Twitter. People have been following as you're building the site as you're sharing revenue and numbers right

so my

yeah my first month has been through Twitter right like uh in my first month I think I crossed uh

10, 000

MRR as soon as I launched within

the first month and then a thousand monthly recurring revenue okay

yeah so to be exact, it's 11, 100 something. Yeah, so then those customers are not the right kind of customers. Like the next month, I think I had around $5, 000 of churn. So the people who come because of the hype they eventually churn away. The people who are staying or these businesses who has actual need for it.

Like, so this month, this month, my, I got around 2000 or 3000 MRR, but these are all business customers, people who came out of curiosity, that eventually turning away people who are staying or actual businesses who are using it every day.

So what about this? 1 thing that I've been wondering with you is SiteGPT is a chat experience that gets added to a website. On the bottom of the chat, it says powered by SiteGPT. I would think that that would be your number 1 driver at this point, now that you've been established and that you're on people's sites. Isn't that number 1?

Yeah, yeah, I thought that will help, but so far I got only 7 customers through that link. Yeah, so that, I think it helps with the discovery, but yeah, I don't know like people who who visitors who are coming from that link or not.

I believe you should try that better.

I'm surprised too. Maybe you should track that better and maybe you should run more retargeting on that after that link, because anyone who's watching as what their competitors are doing and we'll definitely check out what they're using and we'll see what actually the website that are in firing for them are using and they see that they're using Chattanooga City, we'll definitely click there and probably you're not doing retargeting enough. You're not doing retargeting at all for sure.

So

if you're not doing retargeting, then probably you're not attributing to that specifically on that 1 signup case on that straight signup link. So if you run retargeting, I'm sure that and that you will be able to tie to that specific source that Andrew is saying because for sure that this should be the number 1 driver for sure now.

Yeah so I don't have any ads right now I don't even know how to place ads. Yeah yeah I have to look into it I don't even know what you mean by retargeting.

But Bhanu, how big is your team? Is it just you still working on side GPT? Do you have more people?

Yeah, so that's me right now.

And I hire a designer as a freelancer whenever I need designs.

Okay, so the entire coding, whatever customer support, acquisition, demo, it's you running the coding.

Yeah, correct.

That's awesome.

I think Kevin offered to talk to you. Yeah, Kevin, I think is offering to help you offline to look at retargeting. He's built multiple apps before Creator Kit, so he's got experience with this.

I wouldn't say I'm just an expert on doing a paid ad for sure, but I would not doing retargeting for specifically for that use case, it's probably leaving a lot of money in the table and I'll be happy

to help. Where would you suggest that

he buy retargeting ads from?

Well, specifically targeting on the, on segmenting on the audience that it's coming from there. And there's a lot of, there's a lot of, there's an audience there that is, it's crazy to think that they will convert in just this the first, the very first day of understanding what is and watching what is site GBD. So people forget about stuff. So It's just leaving money on the table, just for the sake of not doing paid ads. People forget about you.

And you would, you would run paid ads, you would run paid ads on Twitter, Facebook, or that's an experimentation. I think that's where Andrew was going.

You will, I would run paid ads for sure. Paid ads specifically targeted to those who already visited the site and who already came from link, from powered by site GPT. So for that audience specifically, if you don't want to invest more, invest a lot because that's an audience that's already very interested and who already know what you do and people forget about you. How about we close it

off with that if there are any tips anything that's worked for you that others here should know about for promotion, for building, anything that are, since we've got about 10 minutes left, let's go with the easy to explain wins. They don't have to be easy, but things like what Kevin's talking about, retargeting. John, what's been working for you? Anywhere in this space?

Yeah, so as a couple other folks have mentioned here, you know, we've experimented with TikTok a little bit, experimented with Twitter ads. I think Twitter ads can be effective if you are using the right targeting. So but for us, I'm just realizing more and more that our customers just targeting businesses are more likely to be on LinkedIn. We have some experiments kind of running or we were looking to doing more around just straight up email marketing people too. So I think for us, we're just trying to figure out where the best use cases here and to follow those versus just trying to get a viral hit.

You know, I think for, you know, we were able to make some of the metrics work with getting signups and we might do some more paid acquisition experimentation. But I think there's just even more juice to squeeze around figuring out who the ideal persona is and then narrowing in on their specific use case.

So I know that's not super specific, but we're just exploring a number of different channels right now. And I would say the ones that have been the most useful so far have been, like I said before, LinkedIn stuff has been really useful. Twitter has driven some signups, but not a ton

of conversions. And same with TikTok signups, but not a lot of conversions.

So let's hear from you about what's working for you. You're building an email newsletter in a space that does have a lot of email newsletter competition. And at the same time, deep hunger. It's the 1 topic that I'm willing to accept more email newsletters from.

What's been working for

you to grow your audience?

So a couple of things, right? So I think I started this literally 6 weeks ago. So I'm not trying to target the same newsletter audience like Superhuman or Ben's Bite, which feels, you know, they're in the space sharing what's the latest developments, what's happening in the space. My newsletter is focused on the startup audience, which includes builders, founders, creators, as well as investors. So that is the audience that I'm targeting and 2 things are working.

1 has been a lot of personal outreach and this has been on LinkedIn via DMs, Twitter DMs, reaching out to people who I recognize have had prior relationships with and you know, basically working through that a little bit. And then second has been Twitter ads, doing a bunch of Twitter ads experimenting a little bit Facebook, I haven't been very successful with that, the Facebook ad, but it's been a lot of Twitter paid acquisition. So those are the 2 goals. And if you again, visit the newsletter, see it's very different compared to others, newsletters in the AI space, right, we start off literally by seeing how much investment happens in the AI space every week. So tracking it for the last month or so, last 3 weeks, every single week, over half a billion dollar has been poured into AI startups right now.

And I've been talking to a bunch of VCs, to a bunch of founders, bringing those insights in. So I'm focused a bit more, it's an AI newsletter, but focused a bit more on the venture, the AI founding, the startup ecosystem, rather than, you know, look, here's a cool tool and let me show you a demo of that cool tool. That's not what the newsletter focus is.

Blaine, can I give yours, as a customer of yours, Can I reveal what I've seen? Sure. Okay. Cast magic is meant for podcasts. You just get your podcast transcribed and then through chat, through just AI prompts, you get the answers that you're looking for.

Freaking guys, as soon as I get on, they say, Andrew, we love your podcast. Can we help you? And I think with other people, it's can we just help you get the most out of it? Then what I noticed that you all do is you learn how people use it. You realize that Cast Magic is used beyond podcasts to ask questions of transcripts for anything.

And you start to tell me, Andrew, there's someone using it for this, someone using it for that. And I start to break out of my thought of just using it for podcasts. In fact, I'm listening to all this and I'm realizing I could throw this into Cast Magic and then start getting a transcript and ask questions. And what I've noticed, I think it's this past week, you came up with a way for people of podcast to also say, I have this other form of content, which needs different prompts and I wanna pull information out of it. And so what I'm saying is, you see what people use it for by talking to your customers, and then you expand the product to take advantage of the uses and to customize for the uses that people are already using.

Am I right about that methodology?

Yeah, I think 1 of the things that we've been thinking a lot about, and any founder in this space should be, is just like, things are moving so fast and there's so much platform risk from incumbents as well as other competitors that are competing in the space as well. So I think speed of execution, talking to your customers, but also like having very good product strategies probably very important. So for us, that's kind of where we were doubling down. We saw a bunch of competitors who are like basically doing similar things to Cast Magic in the podcasting space. We saw a bunch of customers who were using, putting in transcripts from their meetings or from other things into Cast Magic, telling us how they were using it.

So we've really doubled down on community. I know, Andrew, we've connected in our Slack community. We have like 400 or 500 of our customers in the Slack community. So that's been a big driver of growth and product strategy for us.

Brian, you want to go next?

Yeah, I would say that I completely agree with that, Andrew, and Blaine as well. I think that the product-driven growth is really going to be the best way to go for a lot of AI indie startups, especially if you're focused on the B2C or B2 prosumer kind of market. And I think what's so powerful now is it's such an amazing time that now all of these indie devs and entrepreneurs, we have all this capability that it's not hard to build things anymore. It's not like, oh, well, how many people do I have to pitch about this to get all this funding and then hire all these developers and how many developers do I need? Like you can just build it yourself.

And I think that it's a really interesting time where now the individual entrepreneur and the small team has the capability to kind of outbuild the company with a thousand engineers.

And yeah, completely. Yeah.

So I think that power, and then if, if you are in like the B2C or B2, like prosumer kind of market, I think focusing on building that, building that product, doing what Blaine said, and then creating content around it. Like that's our strategy is the content rather than the advertising. So more on the organic side.

All

right, well thank you. Thank you all for being a part of this. This is the beginning of a conversation. I did this because I wanted to know who's in the space and get to know them. I was able to meet a lot of people, including many who weren't able to speak here today who've got incredible companies that we'll speak with in the future.

I'd like to know more, so my DMs are open. Hit me up, let me know. Those of you who did agree to speak here, we've got our private chat now so you can continue to communicate with each other, exchange ideas and work together. If you start to spam it, I will boot you out of that group. If you keep connecting and helping, everyone's going to love you.

I appreciate all of you for being on here. I see so many people who I've known for a long time, including Michael Saiger, John Bischke, and so many others. Thank you all for joining and being a part of this. Keep letting me know what's going on in your world and I'll see you all on Twitter. So Leo, thanks for right.

Bye, everyone. Transcribed by https://otter.ai